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Microsoft Lays Off Entire Flight Sim Team
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?"
Microsoft's "strategy" moves have not seemed to make any sense for years now.
Hopefully they'll spend their spare time contributing to X-Plane -- a much better simulator if actual flight simulation is important to you. I was very disappointed to learn that the helis in MS Flight Sim are actually just fixed-wing aircraft with unrealistically large flaps and other such hacks. X-Plane uses a much more realistic flight physics engine. And since I fly RC helis, I have to say that MS's sim always felt strange, not like a giant RC heli at all.
They'll probably contract out the development of the next Flight Sim, if they choose to develop it. Firing the dev team helps their balance sheet in the short term and when they choose to develop it they might lease the license or hire an external company to develop the game.
I've been feeling for a while now that Microsoft should probably just drop everything and become solely a games developer (with a possible exception of MS Office, their only real successful product, put that on the Xbox or something).
Right now Google has a VERY good opportunity to hire and release a Google Earth-based flight simulator.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
MS already sold off the Train Simulator long ago, judging by the amount of shelf space stores allocate to addons for it and the flight sim there's probably a pretty big market for stuff like that.
Then again from what I heard the Train Simulator was a flop in the US...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I've got nothing but good memories of FS version 5.0, played on a 386 computer. I've seen Flight Simulator X in action recently and it looked fantastic. This is one of the things of MS that are actually good, what a shame to see it go. If they contract FS out, that's not the same...
the MS Flight Simulator was initially the product of subLOGIC, and written by Bruce Artwick. It's just that MS chose to brand and market the product. After a while, they just 'took' the source code, and started to develop it in-house. subLOGIC struggled to release its own versions, but unfortunately they failed. (For this ugly business strategy, I chose not buy MS FS ever.)
Anyway, they might just chose to outsource again.
"Altitude is 65530 feet and climbing, 65534, 65535, oh fu-!"
In a short bit, they will "decide" to re-do the team. And they will be hired in India or China with MAYBE one or two ppl from the old team. If these coders were smart, they would approach a VC person NOW, about doing another game.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I graduated from college in 1978 and moved to Silicon Valley. In a short time, I owned an Apple II, an Advent VideoBeam projection TV, and a copy of Bruce Artwick's original Flight Simulator. With a nominal 64" screen, it seemed as immersive as any commercial flight simulator of that time (even if it was low-res black-and-white wireframe). And when you bought it, you got a second floppy with the source code! I'm saddened to see the franchise end after 30+ years. Yes, I know that they'll probably farm it out, but it's lost its continuity.
Hey, you kids, get off my tarmac!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
For the first 2-3 years of PC history, the original Microsoft Flight Simulator was _the_ PC compatibility test:
If a machine could run MSFC, then it would also run retty much every other PcDos application on the market.
The first stumble came in 1984 with the PCAT, since the 6 MHz 286 cpu in this box meant that all the carefully tuned sw timing loops ran too fast and the simulator ran about twice as fast as it should.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Not for the 9/11 hijackers. They used Microsoft Flight Simulator to practice navigating by landmarks and flying the jets to their targets.
The hijackers didn't care about takeoffs or landings and instead cared only about the flying. It's what raised suspicions at The Airmen in Norman, OK and caused them to contact the FBI.
If they could have only been put in contact with the CIA who knew that bin Laden was planning an attack using airliners, 9/11 could possibly have been prevented. But that's a completely different thread... (see also the August 6 2001 PDB)
I'd settle for learning how he got it past the lameness filter.
I come here for the love