The Passing of an Era

What do *****, *****, *******, *** and ***** all have in common? Along with a few others?

They're all reasons why I have fallen by they wayside of flight simulation, Just who or what is hidden behind those asterisks shall remain my secret - or else I risk accusation of being biased and bigoted.

But there is one Big Name in the marketplace I can mention safely. Microsoft. Sadly they have discontinued further development on Microsoft Flight. Not that I, as a beta tester, nor hundreds of other beta testers, told them...

Microsoft were trying to lure in more users (er, perhaps the word should be gamers?) and they were hoping to get a bigger ROI. They have always had an "evil eye" open on the flightsim community because so many third party developers were making money out of the franchise.  Microsoft saw that market as a lost opportunity and decided to lock those 3PDs out of Flight in the hope that they would make "the buck".

Unfortunately Microsoft's marketing equates to Atari's when the C64 was the best selling home PC... Like Atari, Microsoft had the better product, but their marketing sucks - they just couldn't attract enough new meat to enjoy their new semi-flight-simulation. They were targeting Flight at the gamer market, but hey, let's be serious... what gamer wants to fly planes around pretty pretty scenery and have no action (apart from possibly the risk of being rammed out of the sky by some numty who thinks mid air collisions are fun)?

There was absolutely NOTHING in Flight that attracted gamers.

More to the point, Flight didn't even do much to attract the hard core simmers.

A lose-lose situation from day one. Without third party access to the software, the only people creating content was that small team of 30 odd programmers in Vancouver. They were hampered by MS' policy too... copies of realworld aircraft and liveries are limited by MS' legal department and those 3PDs who were able to model real world aircraft were not being given access to the game. So all the user was getting were some very basic airplanes.

As for all those who said the game was so incredible... all I can say is "Emperor's New Clothes". Much as they had improved the terrain modelling, aircraft dynamics (not that I really saw that much over FSX ) and graphic artwork for the 3D models, they stripped the core of the game down so far that even terrain autogen tiling was really bad. Worse than FS8 I dare say, even though the tiles were indeed prettier. There was no real improvement in landclass tech - they different LC were still brutally sharp edged.

Yes, there wore some wow features. Micro-scratched canopies are amazing! Some of the "missions" were even fun. But then again, others were so unrealistic as to be game killing. 400 ducks in a Maule? Not even a few illegal smuggling runs could counter the boredom and repetitiveness of the Flight "Jobs".

If you were to have visited one of the German Flight Simulator conferences in the past few years, you'll have noticed that grey haired and/or balding heads were in the majority. As I said before - kids don't want the tameness of Flight. They want to "Crush, kill, destroy". And as for the real simulation fan... well, the vast majority were simply not attracted by kiddygames...

Microsoft totally ruined a profit making Franchise when they stopped work on the Flight Simulator series. All in the name of Mammon and the Shareholders. They cut off their noses to spite their faeces. Flightsim was never a big winner, but at least it turned a profit and kept the ACES team in work. So what if it wasn't a big profit?

Ah well... I am well out of the simulation game. For now. I have a new venture that I can work on, so we shall see what we shall see.

And finally I must also condemm the "community". There were so many trolls foul mouthing each other and everyone else, that the whole Flight affair degenerated into a "Big Dick" contest. It has been just such a crying shame to see the community get ripped apart by conflicting feelings.

So in the end, we may even have a case of Microsoft saying "well if we can't have it, then nobody shalll"

Good night.