I've seen a few people post this "opinion piece" on various sites and it's a pretty bad and misinformed take.
For starters, the Metro is a rag and you should find somewhere else to get your news. You wouldn't go to the comments section on BBC Gaming to ask a question about flight simulator, you would go to sim-outhouse or avsim or whatever. Not some anonymous guy on a website run by a shoddy newspaper.
Ignoring that, whoever wrote the actual text doesn't seem to realize that it's no longer 1987, SEGA isn't making After Burner or OutRun games anymore because nobody wants them. The SEGA that made After Burner hasn't existed for well over 20 years. The idea of Yu Suzuki making an After Burner game on the Flight Simulator engine in 2021 is honestly hilarious, like a headline you would see on The Onion.
I believe this is in large part because they’re so far behind on technology. Sonic games are actually really difficult to make (think about it, you’re running really fast and have to be a platformer at the same time) so it makes them look more incompetent than they actually are.
This bit almost reads like satire to me. It's just so wrong and misinformed it tells me all I need to know about the writer to immediately discredit their opinion. And it only goes downhill from there.
I hope you see where I’m going with this but if Microsoft provide the technology, I’d love to see Sega provide the gameplay.
That's not how videogames work. You don't just send your game off to another studio and they turn it into a completely different game. The amount of time and effort both studios would have to endure just to get the second studio up and running with tools and a game engine they are completely unfamiliar with makes the idea kind of absurd. You do what Asobo is already doing, reaching out to established third party flight simulator developers who already work with your tools and hire them to make something for you. All those POI's in the World Updates Asobo pushes out are created by GAYA Simulations. They also do most of the custom airports. Orbx also was contracted to work on game, check out the
game credits. You don't outsource entire games or DLC's, you outsource assets and assemble it in house.
As to the question of whether console players will get bored, of course they will. So will a lot of the people who try the game on PC. The idea that console gamers are somehow different from PC gamers is something I thought we had moved past but apparently not. Flight simulators have always been a niche genre and they always will be regardless of the platform they are released on.
The vast majority of people buy consoles for a 3 reasons. Affordability, accessibility and exclusivity. The first one is self explanatory and so is the third, there are some games that only come out on one console or the other. If you want to play Nintendo games, you have to buy a Nintendo console (lets pretend for the sake of this argument that emulators don't exist).
Accessibility is the important one, most people want the convenience of being able to plug their box into the tv and have everything just work. They dont want to build a PC, they don't to fuss with graphics settings or tweaking config files, they want to turn the game on and sit on their couch and everything just works. We've had home consoles since the 1970s, people have been growing up with these things for decades now, the notion that they are exclusively used by hyper 13 year olds playing Call of Duty doesn't really hold up. Kids have gaming PC's and tablets too, they were here for FSX, or did no one here play FSX online? YouTubers like
Airforceproud95 introduced a whole generation of kids to flight simulation, for better or for worse.
Microsoft is one of the largest corporations in the industry. They have
100 million active monthly users. More than
30 million monthly GamePass users. They have mountains of data on spending habits and user interest, the decision to bring Flight Simulator to consoles was likely an informed one. I have no idea whether the game is profitible for them on PC let alone how it will do on consoles, for all we know this thing has been bleeding money from the start and Microsoft pulls the plug on it like they did with FSX and Flight.
). MS and other large technology corporations are data hoarders, gathering user information which they use for their marketing and business. From MS standpoint, gathering usage data by platform may be interesting as they can for example evaluate business risks for future projects and revenue streams based on that and other data.