It won't. I personally wish it would, but I work for Lockheed Martin, albiet in a different department. Nevertheless, I have spoken a few times with the project manager of Prepar3D, and exchanged a few email, and she explained to me that LM will never market Prepar3D for entertainment for two reasons. First, Microsoft's contract with LM is ironclad in that area. Second, entertainment simply is not a market goal of Lockheed Martin and never will be.
Very true. Especially the whole business sector that LM deals with is quite defining and some consumer business is just something out of their area completely.
The academic license was an effort to market the product to civilian flight academies.
This is incorrect. Using P3D in flight academies and pilot training requires Pro version. If you use it yourself for personal private pilot training, pro version is required.
I also know that LM is aware that this license has been -- how shall I say this -- "creatively employed" by people looking for an interim replacement to an increasingly aged FSX because they just want to have fun on their home PC. Few people desire to be killjoys. So, I don't think LM is going to become aggressive unless forced to.
I agree. They also benefit from wider user base having a big bunch of software testers. They are, as I've understood, quite small team after all.
But, what does concern me is the allure of available untapped money, and Microsoft right now has an opening to use the courts to pursue money from everyone who has provided any indications they have used Prepar3D for entertainment. It would not shock me to see a day when folks start opening their mailboxes and find unwelcome letters from some legal firm asking people to pay fines to Microsoft for unauthorized use of their proprietary software. And yes, another letter going to LM asking for payment of fines for insufficient oversight of their own EULA. Then, LM would be browbeat by a larger company (yes, Microsoft is bigger than Lockheed Martin) and forced to take action.
This is something I disagree. First, some people seem to have really strange image that this whole enthusiastic simulator market is something big. It isn't. That's why there practically aren't any companies left, that offer their hard core simulators only to consumer market, except 777 Studios with their historic Rise of Flight. Both Laminar Research and DCS have strong professional markets and those three are pretty much all the companies still producing some way serious simulators for the consumer market at all. Now, if there really would be some serious money involved, we probably would have several companies making these sims and I'll bet that MS would be there too. There is only one figure relating to FSX sales that is somewhat confirmed, and that is 280,000 copies sold for the first year. That is simply ridicilously small amount of sales for a software that took long time to make with quite big dev team. At the same time, their ESP business really didn't go that well so they were losing money. Whole focus of the company was already somewhere else and for the gaming, Xbox business was thriving. ACES needed to go. We of course saw some revival with Flight, which IMO was quite bold attempt to "casualize" simming, but after few months it too failed to bring money in and, boom, it was gone and with it the MS flight simulator business.
Second, I can't see how microsoft can sue some user by any law. You haven't bought Microsoft software, but LM software and that is just not going to happen. What is possible though, is MS suing LM based on the contract they have made when LM purchased ESP code. If that happens, LM may of course enforce the EULA some other way, like revoking the license activation, which probably would be the most likely way IMO. Then, why haven't that happened already? Why isn't MS suing LM's a** off and LM enforcing their EULA? Pretty much of that lies behind that contract MS and LM made and nobody here knows what is truly written in it. Period. Both companies have armies of lawyers and believe me, if there would be possibility to make some true money from whole affair, MS would be on their way already. On the other hand, because LM has battalion of lawyers too, wouldn't you think that they know what they are doing here instad of almost deliberately ending up in a costly corporate trial battle? So, there are practical reasons behind everything and other fact is that nobody cares: Money involved in consumer sim market is so darn low.
What I cannot understand is Microsoft's choices on this. They saw a moneypot from LM, took the money, and restricted its use to avoid creating competition.
Why not to sell the ESP code? MS have still full rights for the FSX code and to market the software and develop it if they will. They practically didn't lose anything. About possible restrictions, you know those if you've seen the contract. We don't know what is based on the contract, and what is corporate strategy.
Then, despite FS being the biggest money-maker in PC gaming that MS has ever seen, they fired the developers in the series and closed the doors.
This is just nonsense. Halo franchise and many other AAA titles published by Microsoft for their own consoles and partly ported to PC also are far more profitable than some poor flight sim, not to mention the revenue whole Xbox business is bringing in. Just first three Halos have sold over 21 million copies and Halo 2 brought $125 million just in the first day. For FSX I've seen many times that since its launch, its sales are barely a 1 million copies. That is really, really bad business and MS didn't even get a dime from 3PD sales for the whole time. That they tried to change with Flight.
They fully knew the future of PC chipsets and the reality that multi-processing was the way to go and yet refused to spend the money to develop FSX to support it. With the function of multi-processor PC's today, and the advent of modern graphics features, I have little doubt that MS could release a new FS title that would fill in the missing code to support all of flight dynamics, and we could see PC platform flight games that would actually rise to the level of scientifically accurate flight simulators.
Perhaps the problem holding this development up is one market analysis. Too few people care about aviation any more. Shocking as that is to us, especially myself since I know the joy of actually flying your own GA airplane, I'm forced to concede that general aviation is dying because people don't see the thrill of it like they used to.
Yes, of course MS could create a simulator. Every major game studio or software company could create one, if they just would want to. Truth is that there is not enough market for them to get back the expenses and make some money out of simulators. Aerosoft, for example, came to this conclusion while they couple of years ago studied the possibility to create a simulator software. If there would be some money in it, we would have simulators like we have first person shooters right now. There seems to be some sort of viable consumer market for three studios right now (perhaps four if 1C can jump back in with their co-made WW2 sim with 777 Studios), which may be a bit overestimated, because two of them is seriously in professional simulator market. Based on all this, I am not that surprised that MS, which is a corporate operating in one of the most competitive business areas in the world, decided to shut down its sim franchise.
IMO this whole EULA talk is really boring. Few guys in Avsim seem to pop this stuff up in every chance they get, but discussion really goes nowhere. Because no one here knows the contract (or if one does, probably won't tell about it) and decisions made in LM and MS based on that, all this is quite futile.
