Cognita

Yea, I fly both, and tend to go through phases of flying only airliners and then only GA, but I have noticed that the GA phase has become longer and longer as the years go by. I don't enjoy airline flying as much as I used to.

That is good to know, and good for our hobby! Comparing video games across genres is not very insightful, they really are very different beasts and the development studios know this and how to approach them. The dynamics are different, as is the investment and expected return. As just one metric, people thought it was impressible that Joge would report that 100 or 300 people are working on MSFS: the current in development version of Grand Theft Auto (VI) is reported to have over 7,500 developers working on it across 11 studios on three continents. It's development budget -- not marketing -- is over 1 billion dollars.

My first thought is that it has never been so inexpensive. Gone are the days of needing a $4,000 to 5,000 PC to load up P3D and begin adjusting the affinity mask and spending a few days adjusting settings to see if you could get with sufficient frames for a rough impression of a smooth flight. I bought a middle of the road PC for 2,800 dollars and it runs MSFS very well for me. And really you can buy an x-box for far less money and be on your way! Gone are the days of spending US$200.00 on each version of P3D! Gone are the days of airports costing $35 to $50 dollars, many are now 25 to 35 for good quality pay ware. I am sure I was paying well over $100 for many of the PMDG and FSLabs planes that I purchased back in those days. Gone are the days of purchasing Global, Vector, HD Trees, HD Buildings, Landcass Regions, to try to get the world to look believable. Be thoughtful and disciplined-think through the addons you will really use and choose carefully and MSFS has made it the least expensive platform I have used. I am getting more enjoyment for less investment than ever.

Thank you sharing, nice site! As I suspected they are very different than PMDG's layout. They have beds, and couches that convert to beds.

Yea, it was better than FSX but it was nothing special and far below what could have been done. To this day I find the layout they choose very strange, is actually modeled after a BBJ or did they just make the interior layout up?

Yea, I have come to the same conclusion and when I reinstalled MSFS a while ago did not install AS. I am just kind of ok with the default weather and have stopped obsessing over it.

I think this is very, very true. And we should be grateful that Asobo has put all the work into making that possible, not only for x-box but now for PlayStation. Without this work there would be no MSFS period and we will all be on X-Plane or P3D, struggling to figure out how to set the affinity mask! Yes, visual fidelity is not as high as it could be if everything was designed for people with leading edge hardware, but it is a lot better than P3D and X-Plane, visually and functionally. If the franchise can keep going hopefully over time it will increase. For now, at least for me, it is a perfectly acceptable and reasonable compromise. Yea, so true. I just kind of leaned into fact last year when I bought my new PC and deliberately choose a less capable and much cheaper machine knowing that a 9800 and 5090 would not make such a dramatic difference. I saved in the vicinity of 2,000 dollars and am very happy with MSFS performance to quality relationship. For me this has been a benefit of MSFS, I have saved a fortune over the old P3D days when the latest hardware mattered much more.

I actually picked this up from them directly a couple of weeks ago having waited to see some reviews and it is pretty nice. I have been busy and only had time to work through the manual and do two "test" flights to start getting the flows down. So far I have been pleasantly impressed with how it flies and the increased depth of systems over the V1.

Funny, I thought the same thing to myself earlier when I saw this post. I would really appreciate some more G1000 options in the sim, as many of these aircraft are now equipped with them.

Interesting to hear someone else say this as I too have found the same, the flight model just seems bland across that entire fleet. I tend to assume I am just missing something and ignore it, but this kind of confirms what I have thought for some time, to the point that I am no longer excited for the next aircraft. The systems depth is impressible but systems do not compensate for a weak flight model, at the end of the day the systems are not so dissimilar from plane to plane and what needs to stand out to me is the action and reactions when the aircraft is moving.

I think this is also pretty standard strategy for older versions of games. 2020 is now approaching 6 years since release so reduce the price significantly and see if some people will pick it up and try it, and likely a percentage of them like it enough to buy 2024 and stay with it. I would expect to see more of these in the coming months. They don't have to reduce the price of their flagship product to try to get more users.

Yes, this is true. I don't want to end up trivializing the cost to operate MSFS, from the data licensing, to storage and replication--it must have a huge CDN footprint--compute, it must be expensive but how that is distributed within Microsoft is an unknown, but it certainly is many millions of dollars per year.

Flight, however, was a poorly conceived product that really was stillborn, so no surprise to me at all it was cancelled. In fact I never even used it. It was basically competing with FSX that had the whole whole and a lot of third-party support.

I think taking this to whether MSFS will be sun-setted is a jump too far for me. They just launched a major new version 15 months ago. They just launched on PlayStation! There is just no credible evidence for this and so we end up in, "Well, but they could, they could, they really could just end it, they have done it before, they could do it again." This said, there are real changes in Microsoft gaming. Central to this sems to be a proposed move away from being console centric, and are looking to become increasingly platform agnostic. Nadella has spoken about X-box becoming less of a console brand tied to hardware and more of a universal gaming platform built on Windows, cloud and cross-platform publishing. This has dedicated x-box console gamers worried that Microsoft may pull back from making consoles and may sunset existing consoles. As always there are also some credible roomers that they are tiring to increase the profit from their gaming division, one report I read proposed 30%, but this is less clear. But my reading of this is it is all good for MSFS as it is already cross-platform and in many ways pushing the envelope of what can be done. The deal with PlayStation was not insignificant and while many here do not value this work it is really important if MSFS is going to last a long time. It is a flagship technology showcase for Microsoft and a marketing case study for Microsoft's cloud and AI capabilities. And simulation titles are long-tail-sale titles, they sell well over many many years, making it less likely to cancel it after a single year.

This is seeming a lot like 2021! Streaming costs are negligible, particularly for an entity like Microsoft. This is not the 90s anymore. The cost to stream a GB of data is a fraction of a cent. Amazon CloudFront pricing, which we currently use at work, is about 0.085 cents per GB. We are planning a major switch to Azure and anticipate the price to fall. So, no, streaming a couple of hundred GBs of data on MSFS is not even being noticed by Microsoft. Even multiplying that across a million users it is not likely even a rounding error for a department. Azure is one of the largest cloud platforms in the world with over 400 data centers in 70 regions; removing MSFS from their servers does not mean the server is going to be decommissioned. There is really no evidence of anything here, it is idle speculation based solely on changes in patterns of communication.

As bobcatt000 mentioned MSFS is SaaS and there is no language in the EULA that commits Microsoft to keep the title operational. The Microsoft Services Agreement, which governs MSFS, explicitly states that Microsoft has the absolute right to modify or discontinue services, terminate access, and change features or functionality at its sole discretion; and we all signed up for that when we purchased the title. There is a provision that it provide notice, but not how much notice. Generally they first delist the title from sale and then announce a gradual phase out: no updates, no support and then deactivation. But it is often only a matter of months. I do not think passing this to another developer is viable, given the deep integration with Azure and the cost another entity would need to pay for the streaming infrastructure. That said this seems to fall into the category of much ado about nothing. Maybe a slow news day? There has been no indication of lessening commitment to the title, just a possible change in the pace and nature of communication. And that could be for so many legitimate and understandable reasons. As was said, if the word had come down that MSFS was ending I am not sure they would have launched an SU5 beta nor committed to be at a large European show and to be at FSExpo in June. Had Asobo layed off a good portion of their staff it almost certainly would have been reported but there is no credible evidence in any of the industry publications that this has happened, in fact, it appears their investment is continuing unabated. The very most one could surmise is that Asobo is changing its pace of communication and the way it interacts with developers, at the most.

Lots of shorts of the exterior but little focus on the avionics, the system depth, the failures modeled, etc. Looking forward to more information before I get excited.

I have not much followed PMDG for the past months but it seems something changed in their position toward external addons, notably GSX. GSX certainly has its quirks and i understand PMDG has determined from their data that only a small percentage of their uses use it and so they seem to be removing any kind of support or cooperation with it. That may all be true but as a user of GSX it is a shame because when the integration is done well it really adds to the immersion. This is one of the reasons I keep going back to the Fenix, because the way it all works together is really nice and I enjoy the workflow; it is also a reason why I did not jump at the NGs. Anyway, maybe others have a better understanding of what is happening here.4

I fell kind of similar, the pace of addons is quite impressive, have there ever been a time when this much was in development at the same time? Just look at the other thread of aircraft in development and expected this year. Blacksquare is about to release the Caravan but I have not even had near sufficient time with the Bonanza and Baron. I will likely hold off until later in the Spring as I enjoy really spending time with an aircraft and learning it well and not just hopping from aircraft to aircraft.

Yea, unfortunately PMDG seems to have decided to end any kind of support for GSX and perhaps as a consequence the do not play so well together, especially the door fault issue, which I think can be worked around but honestly they just don't play so nicely together anymore. It is not a huge deal the static PMDG ground equipment can give some ambiance and their turn around mode works well. I miss GSX sometimes but it is a great simulation and opens up some really nice missions.

X-Codr, by a wide margin. It is more up to date, and textured very well, I would say a step ahead of the old FB. Developer has also continued to update it and has been really responsive to feedback, a great one to support.

Always at the gate in turnaround mode.

Really nice of them to offer the full platform upgrade at no additional charge, from the changelog that certainly looked like a lot of work! And, yea, I agree, nice way to build sold, loyal and engaged base of customers. I am looking forward to their next project.

I think this has the staying power of a generation and will be around as long as PMDG is, maybe beyond.

I had this same thing happen to me this past weekend, unlinking and relinking was what finally fixed it -- after an hour of troubleshooting!