Microsoft Lays Off Entire Flight Sim Team 162
Dutch Gun writes "Microsoft has just laid off the entire Flight Simulator development team. This continues a long-running trend of terminating or severing relationships with game development studios, such as the Bungie split, FASA, or the closure of Ensemble Studios. While one would presume that core Xbox development is not currently in jeopardy after Microsoft spent up to a billion dollars to pay for Xbox 360 repairs and salvage its reputation with gamers, does this signal a reversal from Microsoft's recent focus on internal game development? And what are its plans for Flight Simulator, a twenty-seven-year product with an extremely loyal user-base and a multitude of externally developed add-ons?"
Contract it out (Score:5, Insightful)
FS isn't an ordinary "game" (Score:5, Insightful)
FS doesn't really push any game sales. Someone playing FS doesn't necessarily buy any other game, I know a few FS enthusiasts and they're anything but gamers. They're living room pilots. You have people that turned one of their rooms into a cockpit for "total immersion". They don't play any FPS or RTS games, and they certainly don't buy consoles.
MS might have decided they're not interested in this kind of market. It does not push any sales of any other products of their line. It certainly won't push sales for any consoles, since FS enthusiasts wouldn't be caught dead with a console controller in their hands. And unless they manage to publish a full scale cockpit addon for their console, they certainly won't move from the one they have already. FS might have been a seller for new OSs, when the new FS didn't work out with the earlier model anymore, but the number of dedicated FS customers isn't really a customer base for MS. FS customers also don't really need any of their office products or their server line products.
So MS might just have decided that this is a dead end, nothing that sells any other products of theirs.
Re:Google Earth (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now Google has a VERY good opportunity to hire and release a Google Earth-based flight simulator.
Flight sims take years of tweaking to get working well. Google do have a history of selling applications (sketchup comes to mind) but the things they do sell seem to be mere outlines of a mature product.
Good memories... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who frigging knows? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who frigging knows? (Score:0, Insightful)
And for some reason, all those people who apparently just make guesses still make millions of dollars and you don't. Funny how that works.
Re:I prefer X-Plane (Score:2, Insightful)
X-Plane is great, but not in all areas. The super-sonic flight model sucks, there's a lot of improvement to be brought in areas that are just a let down (I haven't played it in a while, but I'd say things like roads in the sky, no reflective textures (non-shiny matte airplanes? The 1990s just called..), a feeling that it could be all optimised a bit, have some better graphics on things like smoke (individual rounds of smoke? come on..), rain (the rain looks awful), crash effects, and so on...
My point is, X-Plane is great, but very specific interest, i.e. it's great for its subsonic flight model and modelling planes, seeing how they really handle and all that.. but the one guy who programs it has no interest in only taking a piece of his pie, but more importantly, there aren't that many good flight simulators out there, some alternatives would be welcome.
I for one would love a flight simulator that looks like what it looks like when you look out the window in an airplane, and also good combat a la Chuck Yeager's Air Combat or F/A-18 Korea..
Yes, this one does as well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who frigging knows? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you'd probably be surprised at how many people buy Flight Simulator. It's not a traditional game, so it probably doesn't sell well among those you know and game with. There are many, many non-gamers with PCs who spend a lot of money on this game, expensive peripherals, and software add-ons.
When discussing this among my co-workers today, most of us were under the impression that Flight Simulator had been a consistent money-maker for Microsoft. I couldn't find any corroborating evidence for this (although I didn't look all that hard), so I left that speculation out of the summary. To me, that's what made this so surprising. I would have thought that any product was consistently profitable would be a no-brainer to keep, especially one that had such a long history. It could be that my information is outdated and Flight Simulator is no longer profitable - it would certainly help to explain the cuts.
I have this sneaking suspicion (and a smidge of insider info from a co-worker lended credence to this theory) that MS is somewhat myopically focused on casual games at the moment, which makes a certain amount of sense given the success of the Wii, the recent ridiculousness of Xbox's mii-too "avatars", etc. Thus, their statement about continued development of Live makes sense, since Live games are more easily "monetized", a market-speak term for shoving ads down our throats. It could be that anything that doesn't currently fit that paradigm has likely gotten the axe.
Re:Who frigging knows? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I really need to run Microsoft Office, I do that using CodeWeaver's Crossover Office under Linux.
Microsoft's decision to drop Flight Simulator means that I won't have to even consider Windows 7. I'll just disconnect from my network whenever I want to fly so there is no risk to an abandoned XP partition.
I'm one of those that has bought every copy of Flight Simulator even before Microsoft bought it from Bruce Artwick and SubLogic. I flew it when it was a wire frame grid with the profile mountain range to the north. I even wrote a shareware application for it that still can be found in various software repositories on the web. It has evolved into an amazing platform and some enthusiasts have built amazing motion cockpits and even full simulations of jet airliner cockpits.
I also thought every release of Flight Simulator was profitable. For all of Microsoft's other ills, Flight Simulator has been one of the more popular offerings that people preordered, snapped up on release day, etc. there were flawed releases, but Microsoft would release updates that fixed them.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was really a flagship product for them. I don't know what they are thinking. If any of the team read this, I really appreciate all of your fantastic work over the years. You people made magic.
It really has been an amazing product and extremely useful. I know lots of real pilots that use it to stay sharp and/or used it to make their training more effective. I can count myself among the ones who had a flight instructor get frustrated that I was flying more by instruments and less by seat of the pants, doing coordinated procedure turns, holding heading and altitude first time out.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux flight simulators (X-Plane and FlightGear) pick up all the slack. The hard core people will go nuts putting in the hooks for realistic cockpits, added inputs, etc.
It's an end of an era. For me it totally cuts the cord to Redmond, Gates, and Allen.
I'll sure miss updates to Flight Simulator but in a way am kind of relieved that I will never buy another copy of Windows again.
Re:ATTENTION SHOPPERS! (Score:2, Insightful)