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Flight Sim World: Closure Announcement

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fsafranek

fsafranek

SOH-CM-2024
Not the right forum but whenever a sim closes it is newsworthy to all simmers.

Flight Sim World: Closure Announcement
APRIL 23 - DTG CRYSS
It is with great sadness that we announce the future closure of Flight Sim World.

As you know, we always had a strong ambition to bring a new experience into the
established world of flight simulation, one that deliberately overhauled both the flying
experience and the graphical fidelity, offering new ways to fly.

Unfortunately, after many detailed discussions, we regrettably don’t see a clear
direction that will allow us to keep to the development time we’d want, alongside
the player numbers we need.

So, slightly before a year since we first launched into Early Access, we have
made the intensely difficult decision to fully scale back all future development
on Flight Sim World and remove it from sale on 24th May.
Click to expand...
 
Well that’s a surprise! I had thought dovetail was being too ambitious but did not think they would give up.

they should have been more incremental but then they would still be in the shadow of P3d
 
Honestly, this is no surprise to me whatsoever. It's precisely what I said would happen about a year ago. Always sad and unfortunate because these are peoples lives and livelihood, and I hate to see people out of work. But on the sim side, I just never understood how they would compete with P3D.
 
I thought the had a chance, if the had built a sim that was 64 bit, as stable as FSX and compatible with it (as comparable as p3d is) and maybe upgraded the scenery and ATC I think they could have had a success, with steam to distribute and LM handicapped by the fiction that there software was not for entertainment purposes the had an opening. But the tried to do too much
 
I had high hopes they would make it. Competition is good for everyone...as it makes everyone else try harder and keeps prices reasonable.
Ted
 
It's sad. However, I think that the dwindling user numbers, the delay in releasing the SDK and the lack of any significant update since the introduction of trueSKY last year meant that the writing was definitely on the wall for them - trueSKY had so much potential!
 
I think, it was purely a business decision (same as MS closing down ACES). At the end of the day, there is only so much money that can be thrown at a non performing project. Shareholders come first, not us.

Anyhow, let the postmortems continue..
 
Ignore what "Mister" Randazzo says. His sour grapes come from the fact that he was denied special preferential treatment compared to other developers and the fact that he knows full well that what he's saying is untrue, but he keeps repeating it, makes his words utterly irrelevant. The fanboys will still hang on his every syllable, unfortunately.

For the record, there are a number of products available for FSW which have nothing to do with Steam either to install them or support them whatsoever. The evidence is in plain public sight that PMDG is posting the same tripe that they were before. DTG could never have given PMDG what they wanted anyway, given the way that the sim was being developed.

That said, in my opinion it is entirely DTG's management's fault that this line has reached such an abrupt end. All the way through from the time they announced it, a huge amount of the community (both developers and end users) were saying that if you release an incomplete product into this marketplace and claim that the rest is coming 'at some point', you'll just attract laughter and abuse from the people you need to buy your product. By releasing a GA-only, partially functional sim, they put themselves at a massive disadvantage from day one and apparently this has been borne out by less than anticipated financial return.

It's Flight all over again. Marketing demands/expectation and development/retail reality have a massive gap between them.

Ian P.
 
I'm sad. Never spent much time in the sim because they didn't include VR and they came out right when everyone else started supporting VR, but I want to see a strong, competitive sim market. That's best for all of us.

Still, their business model seemed to be the same one that didn't work for Microsoft Flight (payware-based vs the mix of payware/freeware/donationware that the other sims get), so I'm not shocked.

If this means the FSX code license will be up for sale again, the ideal thing would be for a consumer company to work with LM to sell a version of P3D to the consumer/enthusiast market.
 
Really Saddened by this was really looking forward to the full product was even considering it my FSX replacement. Shame as well some companies had even developed aircraft for it.
 
They had no problem at all with freeware - both Aimee and Cryss regularly stated that the sim would support freeware and 3rd party installers. With an incomplete SDK and no external tool support (e.g. Arno's packages) there was never the opportunity to get a big uptake on that, though. It wasn't the "3DS Max only" limitation that stopped me putting my sceneries into FSW except as a copy and paste port - it was the fact that the SDK wouldn't allow you to create new airports, only alter existing ones. No idea why that was.

What angers me is the oft-repeated vitriol that DTG are just money grabbing and payware DLC driven. PMDG's stupid stance comes from the word "official" - that "Official DLC" could only be distributed via DTG/Steam. How many PMDG products did Microsoft publish and sell? Zero. There was one single "Official" DLC for FSX and that was Acceleration (which was almost entirely produced by 3rd parties, but was packaged and sold by Microsoft - hence it being "official" DLC). Everything else that we use is - and always was - "unofficial" DLC.

That's the reality. There is currently zero "official" DLC for X-Plane, zero "official" DLC for P3D, but you don't see people getting hung up on the wording there, do you? The only difference is that DTG produce internally developed and publish externally developed content, through their storefronts. MS tried to do that and we, the community, trashed Flight for it (again, not entirely without good reason!)

I, personally, disagree with the DTG stance of only promoting official content and generally ignoring (in public, at least) the great swathes of freeware and 3rd party content out there for Train Sim. FSW never got the chance for people to develop for it, so we have no idea how they would have handled that, but I doubt it would have been any different. I understand why they do it, but I disagree, because it fosters exactly the kind of incorrectly targetted hostility they receive as a result.

Ian P.
 
You've got me curious, who created Acceleration? To me at least, it's pretty obvious why the SDK wouldn't allow you to create new content. But that's all irrelevant now.
 
000rick000 said:
You've got me curious, who created Acceleration? To me at least, it's pretty obvious why the SDK wouldn't allow you to create new content. But that's all irrelevant now.
Click to expand...

The SDK just wasn't finished. They weren't blocking people from creating new airports, just hadn't got to it yet.

A whole bunch of people were involved in Accel. The scenery was by the people who made the moon for FS9 (and whose name I've forgotten, whoops!) the F/A-18 and I think a couple of other models were made by Captain Sim, the VC for the F/A-18 was made by Virtuali... I can't remember on the rest, sorry.

Ian P.
 
Sad news indeed.
DTG wanted to make the simulator attractive to gamers before making it usable. They should have focused on core engine performance, features and SDK before making any kind of addons.

The general marketing direction they chose was not that bad. They just didn't do the things in the right order.
The late versions of FSW were pretty much unsuable on my computer due to crappy performance, and the lack of addons (or troubles to install them) made the sim look terrible (not to mention the silly old limitations inherited from FSX, like very small autogen radius etc...). Despite this, the had the best sky rendition out there, thanks to finally getting the sky color and sunlight colors right, and the excellent TrueSKY system giving superb clouds. They should have focused on improving that part of the sim to attract the flightsim community, instead of creating missions to try to attract people who are already too busy playing Fortnite...

Sad to see the very same errors made in Microsoft Flight repeated once again.
If somebody buys the source code from DTG, I hope they will make a bit smarter choices...
 
Unfortunately, for developers interested in FSW as a platform, one of the major issues was with the licensing rules. Unless a license was held for a particular brand, an add-on of that subject could not be supported. That made the whole thing too limiting and just too hard.
 
bazzar said:
Unfortunately, for developers interested in FSW as a platform, one of the major issues was with the licensing rules. Unless a license was held for a particular brand, an add-on of that subject could not be supported. That made the whole thing too limiting and just too hard.
Click to expand...

On that alone, many predicted today's revelation. A number of us knew the rumors about P3D going 64bit were not just rumors despite the all the nay-sayers claims it's development didn't exist. The nail was in the coffin before FSW even saw the light of day with P3D development remaining virtually unchanged from previous versions. The sim road map was pretty clear last year and now today even more so.
 
Not a surprise. But still sad to hear.

I think that no one should buy the source code. Why inherit FSX limitations.

I think LM made the most out of the source code, and I can only see a possible successful sim out of that if LM makes their version available for the entertainment sector.

But with two or three very strong flight simulators on the market (P3Dv4, X-plane and Aerofly FS2) I think it will be very hard for another contender to find it's place in this highly demanding market.
 
it will be interesting to see what DTG does next, as I see it they have a few options

1) They could sell the license to someone else like LM or the group of developers that were interested in it before. The developers did not have the cash before and probably still don't, LM passed on before, they could have gotten the whole thing when they got ESP if they were interested.
2) They could try again with a scaled down project that is more manageable and more incremental, but then they would still be behind P3D and XP instead of the grand leap forward they hoped with FSW.
3) They could partner with LM and sell a consumer version of P3D on steam, since they have the license they could probably do it but would LM bite.
4) Bankruptcy, they have spent way to much on this already.
 
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