8 minutes ago, KERNEL32 said:

Thanks for your positive views and these are good assumptions that make sense. Fingers crossed! If any community managers pop in over here at Avsim, they should take some of this feedback up the chain!

Len is always the voice of reason here--not exclusively 'positive' he just looks at big pictures and draws wise conclusions to the extent that's possible.  SU4 really has been little short of fabulous in all ways for me:  completely stable, absolutely stellar performance, graphically stunning.  I am duly spoiled by MSFS 2024 now and might likely quit simming outright if MS pulls the plug.  If it ever gets to that I hope they consider offering subscription fees to keep it up and running.  I'd be curious to know how much server hardware and staff to maintain them are required to keep it up and running.  Too much work went into it and as said in the prior thread it's very largely done in terms of strong needs for further development.  The 3rd party dev community has already offered all that's needed to complete the sim in areas like ATC.  After SU5 debuts I could see them toning down further development, park the development side, and largely just maintain servers until it's time to develop another version if that will still be considered going forward.

My, my…I had no idea we had so many Chicken Littles in the community. 

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Len is always the voice of reason here--not exclusively 'positive' he just looks at big pictures and draws wise conclusions to the extent that's possible.  SU4 really has been little short of fabulous in all ways for me:  completely stable, absolutely stellar performance, graphically stunning.  I am duly spoiled by MSFS 2024 now and might likely quit simming outright if MS pulls the plug.  If it ever gets to that I hope they consider offering subscription fees to keep it up and running.  I'd be curious to know how much server hardware and staff to maintain them are required to keep it up and running.  Too much work went into it and as said in the prior thread it's very largely done in terms of strong needs for further development.  The 3rd party dev community has already offered all that's needed to complete the sim in areas like ATC.  After SU5 debuts I could see them toning down further development, park the development side, and largely just maintain servers until it's time to develop another version if that will still be considered going forward.

Good synopsis echoing alot of my thoughts.  The next FS EXPO should be fun with many reveals.

dd

Edited March 1Mar 1 by Sky_Pilot071

The real question is: will I suffer a sudden cardiac death?

And when?? And why???

And is that ONE cloud in the otherwise uninterrupted, brilliant blue sky a sign that the sky is about to fall on our heads????

And can I prevent all of this by promising to use only one question mark per question?????

So many questions—they're just pouring out of me!!!!!

Of course not.

Hopefully Asbo knows all the complaining people make at every livestream is the vast minority and most people genuinely appreciate hearing from them.

6 hours ago, lwt1971 said:

And FWIW, @SeedyL's post on this topic: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/2026-02-26-weekly-briefing-discussion/759090/17 🙂 
 

Lol. Of course they "have no plans to shut MSFS down." There are no plans, until suddenly there are plans, and poof... it's gone. That's what happend the last time they shut the franchise down. I could easily see them killing it off during the next recession or the AI bubble bursts and they start looking for head count reductions everywhere. 

2 hours ago, chapstick said:

Lol. Of course they "have no plans to shut MSFS down." There are no plans, until suddenly there are plans, and poof... it's gone. That's what happend the last time they shut the franchise down. I could easily see them killing it off during the next recession or the AI bubble bursts and they start looking for head count reductions everywhere. 

That's of course... obvious. Anything can happen, and a business can make any decision, when it wants 🤷‍♂️

The hand wringing concerns and extreme takes like MSFS being shut down soon that some seem to be doing around here however, is silly and not based on anything concrete outside of supposed intentional silence by Asobo (they're not) and recent leadership changes at MS.

Edited March 1Mar 1 by lwt1971

I kind of hope when it's over I can get back to more productive hobbies and fit into my jeans again. 

Did you see how bored and tired they looked on the last dev stream ? I am not surprised at all they've stopped it. 

Even their forums are quite dead.

As much as I liked to read some of the positive comments in this thread about leveraging Asobo/MS being at that upcoming show, I still reserve concerns about no roadmap*** (I think the missing roadmap/bug list/wish list concerns most people who pay attention), no community Q&A or Dev Update of which relates to my original post/concerns. If they did all this communicating through the years, why not just say that they are stopping the dev updates and roadmap?

And...who exactly from MS or Asobo will be at the FS show? Will it be some "fill in" MS employees we've never seen before? It will be interesting and hopefully things work out. We shall see! Nothin' we can do to change it anyway - but feel like we've been down this flight path before (those of us who have been around since early FS days or at least FSX/MS Flight era).

Just saw this article: https://msfsaddons.com/2026/02/28/microsoft-flight-simulators-sudden-silence-has-the-community-worried/

It's unlikely to happen but this is why I never got why some factions of the community are so hostile to X-Plane ... not saying it will, but it'll be interesting to see what happens if the MSFS franchise ever does get retired. The stakes are higher nowadays given the money involved compared to 20+ years ago. Will the likes of Inibuilds (who left the X-Plane community) find their way back? Would they even survive themselves given their size nowadays if their primary market just disappeared? They're highly vulnerable (as are PMDG etc) to MSFS existing as a platform. 

 

4 hours ago, St Mawgan said:

I kind of hope when it's over I can get back to more productive hobbies and fit into my jeans again. 

sit down too long not good for health ! for sure.

2 hours ago, FPVSteve said:

They're highly vulnerable (as are PMDG etc) to MSFS existing as a platform. 

Which is basically true for any 3rd party dev developing addons for a single platform. Why should Xplane be different? Or Prepar3d? Or DCS? The moment you commit yourself to a single platform only, you are extremely vulnerable to changes on this very platform with shutdown of it being the worst possible scenario. Cluster risk...

47 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Which is basically true for any 3rd party dev developing addons for a single platform. Why should Xplane be different? Or Prepar3d? Or DCS? The moment you commit yourself to a single platform only, you are extremely vulnerable to changes on this very platform with shutdown of it being the worst possible scenario. Cluster risk...

Well sure, but none of those platforms have a history of abandoning their userbase whereas Microsoft most definitely does. Let's be honest, it was never about a flight simulator anyway - Jorg himself was quoted that the goal of the team was to build a "digital twin" and what better way to fund that R+D than to release a flight simulator to the masses (twice) using the platform and honing the AI tools needed to generate "the world".

Source: https://www.polygon.com/gaming/456808/microsoft-flight-simulator-digital-twin-preview/

All I'm saying is that we should be annoyed but unsurprised if the plug does get pulled sometime ... Microsoft is a business, their goal is to make profit. They get that profit when they sell the software. Everything else, in fact every time you fly using the software, you're costing them money for hosting and distributing multiple Gbs of terrain data. That won't last forever.

Laminar doesn't really have that issue - sure, they too only profit on the sales of their software but the ongoing costs per user are very minimal. Authentication and support. "The world" data is stored on your hard drive.

Edited March 2Mar 2 by FPVSteve

7 hours ago, roi1862 said:

Did you see how bored and tired they looked on the last dev stream ? I am not surprised at all they've stopped it. 

Even their forums are quite dead.

That's what happens to devs that look at code 24/7.  Been there, done that.

It's a devs badge of honor don't you know.

If the forums are dead, it means the sim is getting real good.

dd

Edited March 2Mar 2 by Sky_Pilot071