Scottoest

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.

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.

Use the FSL or the Fenix if it feels better to you. I don't know why people need to get so heated over it. They're both great simulations of the aircraft.

Sim is nowhere near perfect yet and they've got a ways to go, but I think we've hit the tipping point where the discourse about how allegedly "broken" and "a mess" the sim is has outpaced how broken and messy it ACTUALLY is. I've been using it since release. 90% of the time, it's fine for free flight. Career has some frequent jank to work out that I think is a function of how it generates "missions", but just getting in and flying has been fine for me for the aircraft I use. I recognize I can't speak for the experience of everyone, but I'm also not using it in a way that would be outside a pretty typical use scenario.

Pretty sure Seb said 64GB was only really 'needed' if you liked to have other large background programs running at the same time, like if you were a streamer for example. So I'm not surprised the sim runs fine with 32GB.

It's procedure, and it's something people asked for. Same with all of the startup procedure stuff people go through in the cockpits, despite also never finding a fault. The immersion of being a pilot, without the headaches part where you're sitting on the tarmac for hours running late while maintenance crew are assessing electronics problems and passengers are complaining in the terminal. It should be skippable like every other part of the process of getting a plane up in the air for people who don't care, but I completely understand why it was added.

Other pilots with his experience flying Airbuses can certainly have different takes, but there's no doubt that he "did the work" so to speak here in drawing his conclusions. He didn't just throw out some broad statements and leave it at that. The new flight dynamics seem like a winner. They just need to put in the work fixing all of the weird bugs and stuff that have quickly been unearthed. It'll be interesting to see what FSL plan to do, to try and out-compete Fenix.

If this was directed to me, I don't think you're trolling - I simply think any change to the ground textures for the worse would be due to either a bug or residual server issues. LOD settings changes I could see affecting many things, but the actual basic ground imagery isn't one of them. I don't doubt the reality of what you say you're seeing.

At this point I assume anyone saying the ground textures are worse is just having server issues still (or issues with cached data from when the servers were having issues). At absolute 'worst' the ground textures should be identical to 2020, because they're literally pulling from the same set of Bing data, and at best they should be properly using all of the new high-resolution crafted texturing overlaid on the sat data. Could also just be a bug, since they clearly have more than a few of those. I don't expect everywhere to have great resolution since as I said - same satellite imagery as 2020 - but I certainly wouldn't expect it to be WORSE unless there's an actual issue.

Can we not provoke the usual gaggle of derailing goofs to come in here and cape for XP, please? We can talk about the conclusions V1 reaches without needlessly baiting a response from XP users.

Possibly a memory leak somewhere?

Appreciate your unique perspective Sergio, given your focus on helicopters. They really do need to separate out the 'career' path for helicopter simmers - forcing people to use fixed wing aircraft for any amount of time to be able to engage with a new core feature is dumb. I've been impressed with the flight dynamics in the sim, but they've clearly got some early technical teething issues to work out elsewhere, which is disappointing.

I am incredibly doubtful about this. Having some kind of middle-man abstraction currency between real cash and the actual in-sim marketplace? Very unnecessary, but (sadly) pretty standard in the gaming space. Straight up selling credits? No. They don't even do that in their "game" games for the most part, let alone a sim with an older-skewing userbase where they know full well the reaction would be a thousand times worse than some teenagers playing Forza Horizon or something.

They owe everyone a massive apology once they finish ironing out the launch server problems and weird bugs, but I've never had any doubt it'd be a great platform once they did.

Good lord, so much absolute angry word not allowed being spouted on this forum right now. A "money grab"? They spent four years giving away the equivalent of hundreds of dollars of add-ons and new functionality, not to mention updating the sim roughly every month that entire time, not to mention never charging an additional dime for whatever their costs were for serving up all that data for all that time. And because people are squinting at features any declaring it "could have been added to MSFS2020", it's a money grab. Just deeply unserious stuff. MSFS has been about the least money-grabby piece of entertainment software Microsoft have released in ages.