Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition sale $4.99 now on jan 2 end

[luisdeaf]

Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition sale $4.99 now on jan 2 end

http://store.steampowered.com/app/314160/

[mav316]

what is the purpose of getting steam?

[Trev]

Well one thing if you are a person who loses disks and you have a HD failure you are stuck with no FSX again unless you buy it again, but if you have a HD failure using the Steam version and lose it you can just simply re-download it again from Steam onto your new HD. That is one purpose for having Steam. I'm sure there are other reasons.

[mav316]

Thanks for the response, but i was looking for more info interms of any performance differences. What does steam actually do to make the game run better, if any?

[kingnorris]

Thanks for the response, but i was looking for more info interms of any performance differences. What does steam actually do to make the game run better, if any?

Search these forums. There were already threads mentioning what Steam FSX is about, performance-wise.

[loki]

Thanks for the response, but i was looking for more info interms of any performance differences. What does steam actually do to make the game run better, if any?

 

Steam itself is just an online distribution system for software, primarily games. As far as FSX is concerned it allows you to download the and install the sim, including the Acceleration expansion, without any discs. It also allows you to install on as many computers as you want and to re-download in the future as often as you need to.

 

The Steam edition of FSX does have some changes over the disc based version. View the changelog here. Some have found small performance improvements from the changes, though, as always, it depends on your setup. If your current FSX install is setup the way you like it and working smoothly, there is little need to move to the Steam edition. However some people bought the Steam edition as a cheap backup in case their discs are lost or damaged (new boxed sets are becoming hard to find or quite expensive) and for the convenience in the future of a streamlined installation process.

[mav316]

thanks for the replies! Guess I was hoping for a new FLIGHT SIMULATOR version and this was not it! Sad that Microsoft can not see they have a large market out there desperately wanting a better Flight Simulator version. The main issues are frame rate and memory use! Its not going to be long until Windows 7 becomes as old as Windows 98. We all will eventually have to upgrade our PCs to a Windows 9 or 10 and at that time there will probably no more support for FSX and all the money invested into addon will be flushed down the toilet!

 

Ok done ranting, We need a new sim that will support FSX addons and move on to the future!

[JSkorna]

There is no such thing as Windows 9 and FSX and add-ons work just fine under Win 10.

 

A new sim that supports FSX add-ons is called P3D.

[pvarn]

What follow is a response to some pessimism so be warned, I've been using FS since version 1.0 nearly 30 years ago and I'm an unabashed fanboy... er fangent, fanoldie, elderfan?

 

"Sad that Microsoft can not see they have a large market out there desperately wanting a better Flight Simulator version."

 

Microsoft Flight Simulator Steam Edition *IS* Microsoft responding to the market by allowing a third party to purchase the source code and develop a new way to distribute the simulation. Microsoft's NAME is still on the product.

 

Better? Over time as they make incremental changes, it will get "Better" if it hasn't already just like P3D is. If by what you mean "better" is the Microsoft dev team is coding it... well the last time they tried that the result was Flight. If what you mean by "better" is a new product version title like "Flight Simulator XI". Well technically it does have a new product version title. "Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam" or FSX:SE for short.

 

"at that time there will probably no more support for FSX "

 

Not if Dovetail/Steam can do anything about it. Not if Lockheed can do anything about it.

Look at it this way:

MS has sold licenses to TWO companies to modify FSX source code and distribute new versions. This sounds like MS is VERY interested in furthering the future of FS, just not them doing all the work (which has not worked very well lately.)

 

I say big walloping credos to Microsoft for doing SOMETHING to keep their baby alive and I'm NOT an MS fanboy by any means. I consider my Linux Fedora my primary computer and Win7 my entertainment.

 

More... It's going on nine years now since FSX was published and you can still purchase factory sealed disks. Doesn't that say something about their intentions and the investment they made in the future of the product? That's a LOT of disks and packing they had to pay up front for! Also consider the many companies who's very existence and ability to earn a living is totally dependent on the FS product. Doesn't this say that talented business and developers also see this product has a future?

 

This web site has been flooded over the past few days with new FS pilots. This is going to accelerate rapidly like an SR-71 taking off. Pretty exciting if you ask me and this is just the beginning. More young pilots learning about aerodynamics and the history of aviation. Glory. Gotta be better than Angry Birds.

 

-Pv-

[PhantomTweak]

You just had to work in an SR-71 reference, didn't you? :pilot:

Pat☺

[mav316]

There is no such thing as Windows 9 and FSX and add-ons work just fine under Win 10.

 

A new sim that supports FSX add-ons is called P3D.

 

I have had windows 7 and new the latest version was 8, never knew that the current version of windows is 10! Never heard of it! smh

[JSkorna]

I have had windows 7 and new the latest version was 8, never knew that the current version of windows is 10! Never heard of it! smh

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+10&oq=Windows+10&aqs=chrome..69i57.3592j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8

[zswobbie1]

re: 'Not if Dovetail/Steam can do anything about it. Not if Lockheed can do anything about it.

Look at it this way:

MS has sold licenses to TWO companies to modify FSX source code and distribute new versions. This sounds like MS is VERY interested in furthering the future of FS, just not them doing all the work (which has not worked very well lately.)

 

I say big walloping credos to Microsoft for doing SOMETHING to keep their baby alive and I'm NOT an MS fanboy by any means. I consider my Linux Fedora my primary computer and Win7 my entertainment.'

 

I see it that Microsoft is getting out the the Flight Simulation market completely!!

It is actually very good business sense for them to pass the sims onto Dovetail & LM.

Firstly, they get the license fees, secondly, they save a huge amount of money from not having inventory & also global distribution costs.

 

As we all know, P3D is based on their professional version of FSX, called ESP. LM has taken it & has made huge mods etc. It has really become quite awesome.

FSX, on the other hand, has not been updated (whatever) for about 6-7 years now.

So, in my humble opinion, Microsoft's gaming division, especially the flight simming side, is such a small part of their business, it is no wonder they closed it down many years ago. So, this re-distributing & licensing that MS has done has nothing to do with being VERY interested in furthering the future of FS, or doing SOMETHING to keep their baby alive, it is actually about money. Do you REALLY think that MS, after all these years after getting rid of their gaming devs, are REALLY interested in the simmers? If they were, & the market was big enough for them, they would have carried on.

 

I cannot understand all the fuss with the re-distribution of an 7 year old game!

[pvarn]

"I cannot understand all the fuss with the re-distribution of an 7 year old game! "

 

I don't either.

 

"Do you REALLY think that MS, after all these years after getting rid of their gaming devs, are REALLY interested in the simmers"

 

Well... Technically they haven't. The Xbox division of game programmers is alive and well.

Flight simmers? Well maybe. There have been hints from MS they intend to pick up the sim again in the future. At least they've been reserving that possibility. It makes sense to pass off development of the old (but still very capable) sim off to other hands as you've said and as a result (again as you mentioned) they get income from the license, they're marketing name on the products and they can put the money down on some new simulation model. The last bunch of simmer devs working on Flight were obviously talented and skillful and had a vision, but the feature/marketing of the idea was highly flawed. I have no insight how they got steered that way but the result is not wanting to pay any sim devs for the PC market for a while. I understand that. Burns hurt and take a while to heal. Of course what they do in SECRET is anyone's guess and useless to speculate. Just because we don't know anything doesn't mean nothing's going on. Not useful to speculate.

 

One incentive MS has in keeping their toes in the water in one way or another, is while FS was being actively developed and distributed by them, it was historically the most successful piece of entertainment software they had which kept them going at it for 17+ years. I doubt that success is entirely lost on them. Not many entertainment software products could claim that kind of active development within a company. This was in spite of taking a LOT of heat form this community on every mistake they made along the way.

-Pv-

[loki]

The big issue with FS development at Microsoft is very likely how much it adds to the bottom line. While it did have a large impact at one point, can it ever really match up to the likes of the Halo series? Let alone any of the Office or server products. So for now Microsoft appears to have decided that it isn't worth their direct investment. However, they are obviously happy to let someone else put in the effort and while making money off of the licence.

 

As far as Flight was concerned, it sounds like it started off in the right direction, but then someone higher up in MS decided they needed to get into the free-to-play model and got greedy with add-on development. They then brought in a project lead with no prior flight sim experience who thought having 20,000 airports to choose from was too confusing. After that it wasn't too surprising how the sim community reacted.

[pvarn]

Office was one of MS's least profitable products due to the intense tech support and unending circular patches and fixes until they re-designed the UI completely and converted over to the XML file format. The design overhead eventually became a raging elephant. I think that was 2007 if I remember properly. A lot of Office distribution was bundled as opposed to being only available separately. FS survived without any bundling of any kind.

 

Not sure an entertainment product has to compete with Halo to be marketable as a non-shooter. The over-all history of FS sales predates Halo by a wide margin.

 

I'm hoping however it happens, flight simulation can be affordable for younger players to learn on although there are free alternatives. FSX has a lot of entertainment value and flexibility. MS could have kept the FS code locked up forever. A similar thing happened with Falcon4. Hasbro bought the source from Microprose, and has released a code base for free development and licensed for commercial sales. F4 has continued to be the benchmark air combat sim against which all others are compared and its popularity still grows after 22 years. This has created a very positive PR for Hasbro who demonstrated they cared enough to keep the product alive and people entertained. This code too could have been "mostly" locked up for legal use although a leaked source had been used to create a non-profit fix for an unstable initial release.

 

I'm just having trouble with the idea that because MS is not actively coding a new release of FS that we know of, that this has had a negative impact on the future of the Flight Simulator concept nor that releasing licenses to third party developers (obviously as a cost which allows them to accept the risk) demonstrates some kind of evidence MS has become callous or abusive to the Flight Simulation community.

 

-Pv-

 

-Pv-

[stealthbob]

Question needs to be asked....

 

Does Microsoft owe everyone perpetual support?

 

If the market will support a new upgraded Flight Sim a company will produce it, don't understand why people feel so entitled just because they dropped 50 or so bucks on a piece of software.

 

Yea it sucks but...it is what it is.

 

Steam may just consolidate the community and the payware devs to support the platform, or it may not. Truth is, its an aged and dying program that will eventually slip away be replaced if a revenue support stream is not found.

[loki]

Not sure an entertainment product has to compete with Halo to be marketable as a non-shooter. The over-all history of FS sales predates Halo by a wide margin.

 

The point is that Halo 4 had $220 million in sales in the first 24 hours. Flight Sim never did that and simply can't match this sort of scale in a company the size of Microsoft. When it comes to a publicly traded company the bottom line is what matters and products that have a large impact are generally far more valued. I bet the profit per employee for Halo was far higher than it was for FS. History matters little in the world of maximizing shareholder value.

 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/49765686

[pvarn]

"Halo 4 had $220 million in sales in the first 24 hours. Flight Sim never did that and simply can't match"

 

Agreed.

 

5.12 mil FS units at varied prices which ranged greatly since 1981 when MS obtained the license from subLogic/Amiga if averaged between the lows of $19 to a high of $85 (wide ballparks admittedly- some have paid nearly $200 for it) say... $33/unit conservatively is only a whittling $187 mil total which on a per employee basis may only be a few cents, but it provided that income for almost 35 years now. There might be a few companies who would have drooled over the 5 mil/year guaranteed return between their children being born and and their grand children entering HS. Not to mention the millions of computers sold with the requirement they run FS and the hundreds of mom and pop companies spawned to support it. There have been few products which have influenced three generations of computer users.

 

There is no requirement that FS and Halo compete with one another. They are not in the same category of entertainment software. I see the Nancy Drew games are still being sold next to Halo on the MS site with a total of 710,000 units sold. On that basis alone, MS should remove it from their site. Or... perhaps the Halo success and other games are capable of creating a cash flow which allows companies to pursue creative fantasies which some of Microsoft's employees have done with FS and got paid a little something to have fun.

 

-Pv-

[tvieno]

But how easy is it to make a Nancy Drew game versus Halo vs FS? It's not just about the cost to create the game or the revenue it generates, it is the cost of goods sold.

 

The thing is, the FS globe is largely complete. Third parties have updated coastlines and landclasses. It'd probably be far cheaper for Microsoft to acquire these third parties than to duplicate their efforts. But on the flip side of that same coin, these third parties could all team up and create a next simulator. Who said it has to be Microsoft?

[pvarn]

I suspect LM is working to create the next generation of flight simulation with P3D. No use re-inventing the wheel if you can deliver in 6 months instead of three years.

Looks like Steam thinks they can do that too.

 

-Pv-

[tvieno]

Steam is just the delivery system, Dovetail the company behind FSX:SE. But that is just semantics. Though, and I have said it before, I hope DT doesn't muck up FS the way they did Train Simulator.

[loki]

Are those Nancy Drew games actually developed by Microsoft itself or one of its game studios? Or are they merely being sold through the MS store. There are several titles sold through the MS online store that Microsoft had absolutely to do with as far as the development was concerned, like StarCraft.

 

As far as Halo vs FS, they most certainly do compete within Microsoft. They are a publicly traded company with finite resources who are beholden to its shareholders and their primary goal is to maximize the shareholder's investments. If they have one product developed by up to 350 developers over ~3 years which brought in $220 million in the first day of release (not to mention Halo 3 pulled in ~$170 million on the first day itself) and another one with 50-100 developers that took 20+ years to even get in the same ballpark, the senior management and accountants very likely would drop the second project. History and emotions only go so far in this environment. Flight Sim has also not been a major driver of hardware sales in a very long time either. The likes of Doom, Quake, Crysis, Battlefield and others have long since taken over the crown of showing off what a PC can do, and have much larger audiences.

 

In the end I do think it's better that other companies take over flight sim development. Between X-Plane, FlightGear, Prepar3d, aeroflyFS and the new sim Dovetail, not Steam by the way, is working on, I don't think flight simming is going to disappear any time soon. Not to mention DCS and the military side too.