Where is Microsoft heading ???

[Bobsk8]

Just now, flying_carpet said:

So!!! What do you prefer? "VHS tapes" which SIMPLY WORK out of the box or "4K with all the bells and whistles" which don't work well on so many systems? Serious question ...

Now that is the dumbest question I have read in weeks. What 4K systems don't work, and be specific? 

[scotchegg]

3 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Now that is the dumbest question I have read in weeks. What 4K systems don't work, and be specific? 

Trust me, Bob, he’s on your side😅

[Bobsk8]

Just now, scotchegg said:

Trust me, Bob, he’s on your side😅

 

Now  that I reread it ( BTW I am flying the 777 right now into KMIA so not paying attention when I read something ), I see his point...   

[Ianrivaldosmith]

13 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

Do you have dynamic FPS on?

Nope, turned that off. 

[Sky_Pilot071]

I can honestly say that for my kind of flying there are no bugs - nada.

30 flights so far - planes handle like real planes IMO.

I won't rant but THERE ARE NO BUGS only annoyances.

dd

[sd_flyer]

1 minute ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

I can honestly say that for my kind of flying there are no bugs - nada.

30 flights so far - planes handle like real planes IMO.

I won't rant but THERE ARE NO BUGS only annoyances.

dd

Same for me! Free flight, 3rd party plane and no bugs! 

[Cognita]

24 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Same for me! Free flight, 3rd party plane and no bugs! 

For me too, no meaningful bugs. But I fly only third party GA planes in free flight. I have no interest in Career Mode and I have not tried heavy iron yet. But I have 50 flights now with no issues, some have been 5 hour flights.

Now, there are some irritating design decisions that I cannot fathom what they were thinking. The two prominent ones for me is the feature of overwriting my registration with randomly selected ones so I have to extra pretend that I am flying the same airframe and the even more frustrating Back On Track feature, where if you crash you are reset like nothing ever happened, and you can't turn it off. So if I get up an go to the washroom, grab a coffee and come back, I will have no idea if I crashed. But these are not bugs, they are deliberate design features.

This said, since the first hotfix the sim has been very stable and quite enjoyable.

[robert young]

3 hours ago, Cognita said:

For me too, no meaningful bugs. But I fly only third party GA planes in free flight. I have no interest in Career Mode and I have not tried heavy iron yet. But I have 50 flights now with no issues, some have been 5 hour flights.

Now, there are some irritating design decisions that I cannot fathom what they were thinking. The two prominent ones for me is the feature of overwriting my registration with randomly selected ones so I have to extra pretend that I am flying the same airframe and the even more frustrating Back On Track feature, where if you crash you are reset like nothing ever happened, and you can't turn it off. So if I get up an go to the washroom, grab a coffee and come back, I will have no idea if I crashed. But these are not bugs, they are deliberate design features.

This said, since the first hotfix the sim has been very stable and quite enjoyable.

That's a good observation. I'm (also) not so concerned about bugs as deliberate design decisions which are senseless or made for the sake of change without any discernable purpose. To wit:

1) Control System: Unnecessary over-complication and unreliable, and worse still for example, sensitivities menu no longer has moving sliders for easy identification of each controller.

2) Withdrawal of quick reload/re-sync in aircraft edit mode which (whatever Asobo people say) is a disaster for modders, designers and livery makers.

3) An even worse SDK than before, festooned with very poor explanations, plus what can only be described as an act of hostility to said modders and designers by removal of de-encrypted config files after many decades of encouragement to those wishing to improve or enhance the sim, removing what was a thriving symbiotic relationship between MS and third parties.

4) Pointless UI changes which to my eyes are mostly a step backwards and having no perceivable advantage.

5) A total lack of core improvements to ATC, traffic and other BASIC attributes which would properly have improved the sim.

6) Abandonment of VR users (even though I am not one I feel their frustration).

7) An obvious lack of work checking before release and a worsening of feedback/customer communication which might have significantly squashed many bugs or flaws.

8. The pursuit of career mode at the expense of core sim improvements (like ATC etc).

9. The promised ease of porting FS2020 aircraft over to FS2024 has so far proven to be extremely unreliable.

Having said that I acknowledge that scenery wise there have been some very good improvements, though unless you have an HDR monitor and/or addon shaders the images are over-saturated and the cockpits even darker than before in relation to sky and clouds. I can't really see any reason why FS2024 needed to be a separate sim, rather than making continued improvements to FS2020. The streaming situation could have been addressed by offering options to the user. Options to me are the cornerstone of any decent sim software.

Edited January 24 by robert young
typo

[Ron Attwood]

16 minutes ago, robert young said:

I can't really see any reason why FS2024 needed to be a separate sim, rather than making continued improvements to FS2020.

Money.

[robert young]

1 hour ago, Ron Attwood said:

Money.

Of course Ron. I didn't feel inclined to state the obvious - you've done it for me!

[HiFlyer]

For some reason, I'm thinking of this..... 😁

 

[AnkH]

13 hours ago, scotchegg said:

I don’t really buy the split community...

There is nothing to "buy", the STEAM numbers clearly shows it. If just MSFS2020 or just MSFS2024 would exist, the numbers for one single Microsoft sim would be higher. Simple maths, unless you assume that 100% of those using one or the other sim are actually using both all the time...

[flyingscampi]

If you are continually developing a product, you either release a new version occasionally to generate revenue, or charge a subscription.

The alternative is an FSX scenario where you're stuck with what you've got, warts and all.

 

[Scottoest]

Your numbers aren't just excluding Xbox users, they're also excluding PC users who aren't using it through Steam (which will be a sizeable number of people, since MSFS2024 is part of Game Pass). Every time we have discussions about numbers here, people for some reason think it's trivial to leave off the Microsoft Store numbers, despite Game Pass having something like 40 million subscribers and the sim being included with it.

Flight Sims are something with an inherently niche appeal, which is why you see them making an effort to onboard more casual users with the career stuff, to give them the kind of more structured experience they might expect from a game.

In addition to that, flight simmers per head likely make Microsoft a lot more ongoing money than a lot of games because of the in-sim marketplace and the percentage they're taking off of every sale there.  And these aren't little microtransactions, but often $50+ dollar aircraft and scenery packages.

In terms of long term user engagement, Skyrim and Fallout 4 are also MASSIVE outliers to use - they have the two largest active modding communities in all of gaming, giving both a crazy amount of longevity. Skyrim mods have collectively seen 8.5 BILLION downloads on Nexus Mods, for instance. That's why thousands of people still play it.

Microsoft's goal right now just needs to be convincing people to migrate over to 2024 from 2020. Once they do that (and they will, because under the bugs 2024 is ultimately the better sim), the business side of things will be fine.

[Scottoest]

Just now, flyingscampi said:

If you are continually developing a product, you either release a new version occasionally to generate revenue, or charge a subscription.

The alternative is an FSX scenario where you're stuck with what you've got, warts and all.

 

Yeah, the "it didn't NEED to be a new product" discussion always hits me as odd.  Setting aside the technical argument for a new software release, the reality is that they've got a lot of people working on MSFS and are serving up a lot of data month after month to it's users. Those have costs that need to be justified.

If they were dipping into my wallet every two years or something I might find it objectionable, but a new release after four years is perfectly acceptable to me. Especially when you factor in the months and months of additional free content and updates they gave me over that period.