1 hour ago, sd_flyer said:

This is a very shortsighted view! The matter of the fact - we need a fresh blood ! It gives us years of sim developing funding and free bandwidth for years.

I've been working with Microsoft for 25 years as a developer and they charge every penny for every single thing. Each year things are getting more and more expensive. Just be happy they won't charge us cloud bandwidth and processing allocation per PC.

Either you didn’t understand my post or you stopped reading after that second line. From your reply, it would appear we are both in agreement so I’m unsure how I was “short sighted” in my post?

Well I have to eat my own words as I said ages ago this would never happen! Whilst it's good to expand the user base and fill the pockets of the senior executives, it's more time & resources taken away from dealing with current Xbox & PC issues because they're having to concentrate on a whole new platform... they've still not got it "right" on their own Xbox console yet! 

With MS/Asobos track record of spaghetti development practices coupled with poor lead management this could end up being a disaster, but they might've actually learnt something from the past five years so there's a tiny bit of hope they'll improve, which is I what I want them to do. 

All in all it's good news for us in the long run, good news for developers to sell their products (both software and hardware), let's see how it all pans out.

Oh, they finally fixed AI traffic and ground operations /s

Yet another deceptive trailer from Asobo.

Guys, please don't feed the obvious troll

So much nonsense and negativity in this thread, it’s baffling. If you all hate it so much then what are you doing here? Maybe time to touch some grass or find another way to spend your free time.

Great to see this amazing sim opened up to more people, it can only be good for addon development and the future of this hobby. 
Whilst you’re all complaining away, I’ll go enjoy SU4 beta - which coincidentally is the best flight sim experience I’ve ever had (and I’ve been simming since FS98). 

47 minutes ago, filou said:

"the most realistic flight simulator"

You don't lack strategic humor.

outside of the earthly framework, can you explain to me where the realism is? Can you make me a list please so I can go and check.

How bitter are you about a desktop based flight simulator 😂 

So you’re telling me what we have now is not leaps and bounds ahead of what we had?? 
 

enjoy life mate open a bottle of red crack a cigar, it’s not that deep.

Or is a certain competitor sim greasing your realism pockets ??

Edited September 25, 2025Sep 25 by rick celik

Stop the arguing and get back on topic. If you persist the topic will be locked and miscreants given a holiday.

 

10 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

Xp12 is a great sim but still stunted by poor AA and it lacks a solid aerial imagery product as default.  While options are available all of them are pretty clunky or take a ton of storage.  Or they are payware...

It also needs a much bigger ecosystem of payware.  

The interesting thing is, iniBuilds's scenery development team went from a team of 5, to a team of 27 when they fully switched to MSFS: 

 

My understanding is, when iniBuilds  had a team of 5, they were focused on XP scenery.  But when they switched to developing scenery for MSFS, their sceneries sold so well and they made so much money from it, they were able to expand their scenery development team to 27 scenery developers.  I also know that the MSFS team will contract some of the scenery in the World Updates to various scenery developers, but I'm not sure that iniBuilds received as many contracts to do scenery for MSFS, as they have received contracts for their airplanes.  So if iniBuilds didn't receive that many contracts to do scenery for MSFS from the MSFS team, then most of their scenery add-on sales for MSFS have come organically from the MSFS market, and that allowed them to expand their team to 27 scenery developers.

Now, MSFS 2024 on PS5 might have a marketplace:

Quote

Developed by Asobo Studio in partnership with Microsoft Game Studios, the PlayStation 5 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will continue to be updated with both free World Updates and Sim Updates. The simulator also includes a robust marketplace filled with new aircraft, airports and more from a very active and talented 3rd party creator community.

Now I don't know if MSFS 2024 on PS5 will have a marketplace or not. That comment above is a little ambiguous and could mean that MSFS 2024 already has a marketplace, but doesn't necessarily mean the PS5 version of MSFS 2024 will have a marketplace.  But if MSFS 2024 on PS5 has a marketplace, that's just additional revenue for 3rd party scenery developers to make money off of.  That will strengthen the MSFS 2024 3rd party scenery developer scene even more.

For 3rd party airplane developers, especially the high fidelity planes like PMDG, I wonder if a marketplace comes to the PS5, whether the PMDG 737 and PMDG 777 will work on the PS5. I remember that the XBox team had to make changes to the XBox Operating System, just to cater to the high fidelity planes like PMDG.  I think PS5 also runs a sandbox so if MSFS 2024 on PS5 has a marketplace (which isn't a given at this point, it's not 100% clear yet), it will be interesting to see if PS5 can support the PMDG 737 and PMDG 777. 

Edited September 25, 2025Sep 25 by abrams_tank

Ahhh yes back on topic. Good job Asobo, next is Switch! Dont forget the apple store. The more the merrier.... lets get them revenue numbers up so we can keep this sim going for another 10!. I dont want to wait for FSX service pack 1 and 2 in 3 year intervals. Keep at it guys, keeping our hobby alive. 

Unlike others in the dark, as a business owner, I know what it takes to keep that backing. As far as I'm concerned, you guys are on the right path. 

Edited September 25, 2025Sep 25 by rick celik

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Stop the arguing and get back on topic. If you persist the topic will be locked and miscreants given a holiday.

With posts that blatant, I often suspect the main goal is to derail and/or get a topic locked.

1 hour ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Stop the arguing and get back on topic. If you persist the topic will be locked and miscreants given a holiday.

Ray can I ask why we're generally asked to get back on topic when a select few tend to do this behavior, repeatedly.

It's clear as day that @filou messages are downright incoherent and instigative. However, your messages never really call out the instigator directly. By saying "stop the arguing and get back on topic", you kind of absolve filou's behavior and rather kind of put the blame on everyone here as if we're all arguing. These's are just my observations though, if you feel otherwise, understandable. 

Smart move by Microsoft. They now have access to 80 million+ PS5 gamers. It only means more sales for the game as well as revenue which looks good for another followup to MSFS 2024. The move to widen the net and be what you want it to be flight sim appears to have been the right strategy.

13 hours ago, rick celik said:

As long as the focus remains to create the most realistic flight simulator, the more revenue the more backing the more features we get. 
 

As mentioned by others, flight simulator was pretty much dead, we only had p3d performing cpr on the old fsx code to keep it going. 
 

I went through some of my old fsx and p3d screenshots, what a long way we have come.

Very good post. As much as I enjoyed P3D, there is zero chance companies like Winwing would exist today without MSFS.

 

MS money grab prior to Christmas. Same as last year when they released it a year too early. MS does not care about the user experience as they throw Asobo under the bus and add a third platform to a game that still has plenty of bugs. XP12 looking better and better.

2 hours ago, rick celik said:

So you’re telling me what we have now is not leaps and bounds ahead of what we had?? 

Agreed! I have been playing MSFS since version 4 which was around 1991. I was envisioning back then what a photo-realistic MSFS might look like. Then came MSFS 5.0 and I was over the moon. Prior to its release I would pour over every leaked screenshot of MSFS 5.0 on CompuServe. The graphics continued to get better with each release and then came the news that FSX was the end of the line.

When word got out about MSFS 2020 and saw the 4K screenshots, I said NO WAY is it going to look that good. I was wrong and I was totally gobsmacked when I could fly over my beach neighborhood and view it from on high saying to myself, I walked that, WOW!

I will highlight this because it is obvious but needs to be said. People need to realize that Microsoft decided to go with a different strategy and that is  to"widen the net and make the product more inclusive". Yes, it would upset some but make others happy. MSFS 2020/24 is nothing more than a refined version of Microsoft Flight that was a free product but was later cancelled.

Microsoft understood that in order for the series to move forward, was to get anyone and everyone to play MSFS. That would include the Namco Ace Combat crowd or actual real pilots. The strategy worked though it upset some.  Then we found out that over 100,000 were logged in to play the game at launch and crushed their servers. In fact Asobo and Microsoft both said they were taken aback at the level of interest for MSFS 2024 and had NOT anticipated so many players wanting to play a general aviation game.

X-Plane is after a different audience and if that is what you prefer than it is there. I have NO doubt that the X-Plane team would love to have Microsoft's sales.