The dead sim that isn’t quite dead, apparently, would like to give its users a twist in the tail of the tale. And extract some more money from them, for preference.
Some of you might be aware that following the demise of Flight as a live project, Microsoft have actually appointed someone to be a visible face of the sim and he has been posting blogs every few days on a variety of topics. Today’s post is slightly out of the norm, in that it sort of gives a final breath from the dead horse – one that could have done with being a lot earlier. It could also have done with having a cockpit as well, but what else do you expect by now?
Rather than telling you what the post says, we’ll point you at the thread posted by “Loki” over at the Steam forums.
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I thought MS FLIGHT would bomb and it did. It was a game, not a sim, that no one, including myself wanted to buy. I once posted that Microsoft blew it with this game. It looks as if I was correct. And yes, I guess I am saying, “I told you so—-“
Complete arrogance and blindness as to anything people don’t want to see.
Both the reasons MS Flight failed and the primary things shown by its detractors. A funny old world, isn’t it!
Kevin Miller (FS9/X 3d party developer and member of both Aces and the MS Flight team for a while) seems to think that it was the new manager Joshua Howard who came up with this inane (or should I say insane) idea of cockpitless airplanes. I like MS Flight for its unique ‘sense of flying’, but I do not get much sense of flying outside an airplane. Too bad if this “basic” Curtiss C-46 is the only thing Flight still had in store for us.
I was one of those detractors Ian, but at least I tried it and actually enjoyed some of the acrobatic missions/exercises.
However, there was no staying power in flying people and pigs from airport to airport over such a small area. Alaska being released seemed the chance for redemption, but I think they bit off more than they could chew and forced out a messy scenery pack without enough missions/exercises to fulfill. Add into that the absolutely insane idea of releasing cockpit-less aircraft, or “Deluxe” Aircraft with limited functionality such as no autopilot or GPS.
Had they not pushed away so many third-party developers with their greedy profit percentage, or allowed open third-party development in the first place, we would probably all be discussing how to port over our FSX addons and asking the entire third-party dev community when they were getting around to updating their products for Flight.
Will MS learn from their mistakes though? I think not. It’s up to Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research to fulfill our global simulation needs now, and who knows who else might come crawling out of the cracks of Microsoft’s earth-shattering failure?
I don’t know, Phil… Have you gone around repeatedly saying that Flight is ‘just game for X-Box kids’, ‘has no value at all’, ‘no positive features at all’, that the flight dynamics are ‘dumbed down to a child’s level’ and that Flight doesn’t have any IFR capability at all?
I agree pretty much exactly with what you say, with the exception of the fact that they didn’t only push away developers with their demands for sales percentages, they told 3rd party developers ‘we don’t want you’, for the most part. The “free to play” basepack sales model precludes any open 3rd party developer involvement, so that could never happen anyway, MS had to (try and!) make their money back from somewhere, but yes, they were too slow, too little and the wrong things, even for their stated target audience. As someone said on the Steam forums in response to another of Loki’s blogs, “Your DLC prices are cheap for FSX add-ons, mainly because they lack the features of FSX addons, but at the same time they’re grossly overpriced for the casual market you’re aiming this at, so you fail at both ends of the spectrum”.
I also agree that MS won’t learn from their mistakes – they’re making a lot of them again with Windows 8 already, which as that is an entirely different development path more than proves that the problems are at a management and institutional level, not with the developers of the product itself.
I did call it a game, but I don’t think I ever said ‘for X-Box kids’. I also don’t think it would honest to say that the flight dynamics were dumbed down either, as the Stearman was a pleasure to fly.
I hadn’t thought about the prices as a factor, but you have raised a great point. In a world filled with $.99-4.99 games on Android and Apple, $6.99 was/is pricey for a plane exterior. If I remember correctly, the planes on X-Plane 9 Mobile aren’t much more than a buck… and they at least have a simple 2D panel!