Great article by former Aces member about new MSFS

Unless Microsoft has done a marketing survey and believes it may generate enough interest, I find it hard to believe there will be enough Xbox'ers who will want to "play" a simulation of flying: Just flying.

(sans aerial combat).

Perhaps they think there will be a slew of current simmers who will forego their PC's and switch to Xbox? (In the end, Xbox may be a whole lot cheaper than the specs of a new gaming rig that is able to actually run "2020")

The new Xbox will be a great upgrade over the current generation, but it will still be behind the best PCs one can put together.

Isn't that like comparing the Ford Ecosport to their Xfinity Mustang? Not that the XBox Project Scarlett is going to be ordinary an any way, except that you can be sure it'll run Microsoft Flight Simulator in 4K HDR straight out of the box with no tweaking, upgrades or updates necessary.

As for PC gaming dying, people have been trying to claim this for 20 years and have been wrong each time.

Between us, my wife and I have 4 children from previous marriages, 7 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. NONE of them owns a PC, for gaming or anything else. In fact I'm the only one in our combined families that currently owns a PC of any kind.

Unless MS change something, all add-ons for Xbox users will need to go through their online store.

Sorry I haven't seen that announcement before. Wouldn't it mean that MS are in fact developing two separate flight sims?

Between us, my wife and I have 4 children from previous marriages, 7 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. NONE of them owns a PC, for gaming or anything else. In fact I'm the only one in our combined families that currently owns a PC of any kind.

Despite your personal experience, the overall PC gaming market appears to be quite healthy and growing.

https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-137-9-billion-in-2018-mobile-games-take-half/

As I was saying before, the overall video game market has grown to offer more options, especially with mobile gaming.

To give a little more detail, while the overall desktop market is shrinking, the gaming portion is still growing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/as-pc-sales-shrink-the-gaming-pc-market-grows-faster-than-expected/

Sorry I haven't seen that announcement before. Wouldn't it mean that MS are in fact developing two separate flight sims?

They haven't said much about the Xbox version as it isn't their focus right now (which they have stated), however, one can look at other Xbox games to get an idea of how some things will work. At the moment all current Xbox games that I'm aware of, require add-ons/DLC be purchased and downloaded through the games built in marketplace or the general Xbox Games Store. I would not expect to be allowed to download add-ons from websites like here at Flightsim.com and install them to the new sim running on the upcoming Xbox. PC users, however, will be able to acquire and install from any source as we currently can.

In general, games written for the Xbox do require changes to support different features, like the Xbox Games Store, as well optimizations unique to the Xbox hardware. Some reports indicate that the CPU in the new Xbox could be running slower than those on the desktop, which could well affect the flight modelling on the console. On the other hand, console will integrate the CPU, GPU and RAM far more tightly than a desktop, which may alleviate differences in clock speed. All of which the Asobo team has said they are still looking into.

Despite your personal experience, the overall PC gaming market appears to be quite healthy and growing.

Quite healthy yes, but not quite as healthy as the other platforms, as your newzoo.com article link to the 2019 stats points out:

"Console will be the fastest-growing segment this year, growing +13.4% year on year to $47.9 billion in 2019. This is the second year running that growth in console games will outpace mobile gaming growth. Last year’s regulatory changes in China, as well as the absence of new global blockbusters, signaled slowed growth for mobile games. What’s more, rising anticipation toward the next generation of consoles will slow down the market during the second half of the year.

Mobile gaming (smartphone and tablet), meanwhile, remains the largest segment in 2019, growing +10.2% year on year to $68.5 billion—45% of the global games market. Of this, $54.9 billion will come from smartphone games. PC gaming will be both the smallest and slowest-growing segment, increasing +4.0% year on year to $35.7 billion. Despite the segment being smaller in size, PC’s status as the bedrock of innovation in the games market remains evident to this day. Nearly all of the most popular game genres, including battle royale and MOBA, can trace their roots back to PC gaming’s modding community."

Nice of them to acknowledge the historical contribution we PC gamers and simmers have made over the years!

I sincerely hope, nay expect and if necessary, will demand that add-ons downloaded from Flightsim.com can be installed into any version of Microsoft Flight Simulator! As I understand it, freeware add-ons from independent sources will be available to PC users but not be limited to PC users.

I'll still be here on the forums and uploading the occasional panel or repaint, come what may.

Mark my words: it will be 2021 before the SDK will be available. Without it you got no developers.

They modeled the REAL wind and the REAL effect that it will have on (only) the C-172. If, and when, I can no longer make a brick fly, then and only then, will I say the 'NEW' sim is an improvement and 'as real as it gets'. I don't think that's possible with our puny PCs.

Chuck B

Napamule

It's everywhere! I went to my eye Dr yesterday and he said my vision was '2020'. (I know it's NOT). I asked my eye Dr: ''Have you, by any chance, been contacted by Microsoft lately?'' He just SMILED, said nothing, and walked out. HA!

Chuck B

Napamule

Mark my words: it will be 2021 before the SDK will be available. Without it you got no developers.

At the very least they have already been talking to third party developers and have indicated a preview of the SDK will be out this fall. Still have to wait for more details though.

Quite healthy yes, but not quite as healthy as the other platforms, as your newzoo.com article link to the 2019 stats points out:

...

That's still a far cry from being in rapid decline. Many billions of dollars in revenue and growing, even slowly, sounds plenty healthy to me. Especially after a decade or two of people predicting the imminent demise of PC gaming. [emoji4]

That's still a far cry from being in rapid decline. Many billions of dollars in revenue and growing, even slowly, sounds plenty healthy to me.

I can see that you're a "glass half-full" kinda guy and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not predicting the imminent demise of gaming PC's, after all you can still buy vinyl records, but high-end gaming PC's might become harder to find and cost a lot more after the launch of the next generation consoles.

I don't think Microsoft is trying to kill off the desktop PC, but in general they're trying to make "PCs" of all types - Laptops, All-in-Ones, Tablet/Convertibles (like Surface) and desktops - more "plug and play" than ever before. Consoles are sort of the ultimate of that. Load the software, plug in the controllers and go with a minimum of fuss other than downloading updates.

PCs of all types have come a long way from the old days of fiddling with memory allocation to make games run, and fiddling with driver settings to get games to run/play sound, or get a joystick to work. But we still deal with installing the right drivers for the peripherals attached and components inside the computer. We still deal with software that has problems with some driver versions and not others, and software and drivers that break when Microsoft releases a Windows update.

Consoles sidestep that, and Microsoft is trying to bring changes to Windows that brings some of that simplicity to the PC platform. It's still a long way off, and frustrating as heck when it doesn't work or another update breaks something. But like some of the near-forgotten pain of "plug and pray" under Windows 95 & 98 that gave way to a much better situation under Windows XP, it will eventually get there. (Also, anybody remember how much resistance there was to XP when it first came out, and then later on you could barely pry folks away from XP?)

Desktops will be around for a long time yet to come, but for a lot of computer users, console-like systems are going to become more and more popular. They might steadily eat into sales of low- and middle-range gaming desktops. But for people who want to chase the cutting edge, higher-end desktops are probably going to be around for a good long time.

I think the question that Microsoft asked themselves is, how many flight sim users really want to tend to building and keeping a PC running for the sake of the sim software, vs how many just want to fire it up and fly? Working toward a console release keeps development on a path that will hopefully avoid pain points like dealing with FSX.CFG or using Nvidia Inspector to get around limited or clunky graphics settings. Or installing add-ons that require you to run and installer and multiple post-install steps before you can launch the sim. Or add-ons that need their multiple parts copied to various folders. The console isn't just a "lowest common denominator" of hardware capability. It's also a standard for ease of use when it comes to configuration and content setup. What if we didn't have to be deeply "computer savvy" just to set up and run MSFS?