Francois,
Well constructed and crafted letter.
But will it make it past this person's secretary ......?
Even if it does, will he make it past the first paragraph? I don't think I would.
I'm really sorry but at the likelihood of causing great offence, I just don't see the point of sending letters like this. It has all the aggressive 'it's not fair' tone of an angry teenager who has had his Gameboy confiscated. It would in no way make me reconsider my decision. Quite the opposite.
And where is the evidence that hundreds of thousands of simmers are 'hurt'? How many people have signed your petition Francois? 2000? Seriously - 2000!!! That's just embarassing. How is that going to persuade Microsoft to think again. If I was a Microsoft executive that would be all the evidence I need that canning the whole program was justified.
In all the general and developer FS forums on the web you see the same 30 or 40 people posting every day. The same people have been posting in these dwindling forums for years and years day after day. Half of them have a vested interest in the continuing success of Flight Simulator and have something to sell, some of them are sad frustrated fighter pilots who think they can now fly an F-16 because using FS has 'taught them how' and of course some, myself included just want to keep an occasional eye on new developments and addons. But it's the same people, the same few people. Very rarely somebody new turns up, rarer still they become a regular. In general I think the interest is much much smaller than you think. They might sell a lot of copies initially, relatively speaking but most people who buy Flight Simulator treat it like any other game (sorry, Simulator game), they load it up, play it for a few weeks, get bored and move on to something else. Or they play with it for ten or fifteen minutes a couple of times a week while waiting for the dinner to cook. Very very few get as obsessed with it or take it as seriously or will be as emotionally damaged as a result of the desicion by Microsoft as your letter implies.
The ultimate insult to a simmer is Get a Life but the twaddle that has been written since the Aces announcement is making me come as close to using it as I ever have before. I am truly not bothered that there will not be an FSXI for five years, ten years or ever at all. FSX will continue to be an occasional diversion for me and now and again I will be blown away by an occasion addon but my god, and ban me forever for saying this if you like, there are more important things to write letters about these days than the demise of a simulator game!
