Yesterday I have read, that a loyal developer of MSFS 2020 Addons had to quit a product, that was just in the stage to be released, because Asobo has changed mdl files.
Almost all addons that were developed in the past for the sim must be updated and changed to properly work.
A sim that with a quantity of some let’s say 100 addons in the community folder needed about 8 Minutes to start from scratch, meaning from hitting the MSFS 2020 symbol button until being in the game itself. Now with an empty community folder it takes 15 minutes.
I deleted everything and set the sim up again, strongly after Asobo´s instructions. I am using a 300 Mbit/s Cable connection (download speed some 40 MB per second) and it took me almost 10 hours!
After reinstalling I hoped the sim would work better, but no.
I am not talking about visuals. On my average PC the sim works well, when it works, and the visuals are ok for me.
But why does all this had to happen? For some X-Box Users that will be frustrated after seeing what a learning curve a Flightsimulator has when you want to take it seriously. Don´t blame me, but I think X-Box is very good for other Games and has its own Enthusiasts.
Compare the amount of PC Users to X-Box Users. Will a X-Box User spend hundreds when not thousands of Dollars / Euros or whatever for Addons, when they once work?
Again, where is the Idea that Asobo had behind all this mess?
I really can´t see any economical idea behind that. The only thing that remains is a frustrated community, frustrated developers and for them also a money grave.
The issue is not with the Xbox users of course, if I understand correctly you are wondering about the product direction.
A lot of people are, and the MSFS team have indicated there will be some sort of communication issued soon. Only they can answer that.
It’s a fair question. All businesses care about revenue growth.
The hardcore PC Sim community already purchased MSFS licenses.
That’s in the past.
The existing revenue opportunity on PCs is mainly add-ons, and Game pass ultimate.
There is a definitely a significant community of hardcore simmers who will buy a lot of addons. How many? probably in the tens of thousands of returning customers for addons (planes, scenery).
By comparison Xbox should not be under-estimated IMHO:
There were 23 million game pass subscribers in April, going to 30m+ in September, most likely.
That’s 5 million more subscribers per quarter roughly, and it’s recurring monthly revenue for MS.
The sky is the limit in terms of user base, it will reach hundreds of millions at some point.
So even a small fraction of this user base is a significant revenue opportunity for MSFS.
This is were the MSFS Top Gun announcement comes in.
A Combat Jet Fighter is genuinely attractive to the gaming community.
Next it will be the F22 raptor or a flying car
Whatever makes game pass subscribers stick with MSFS and bring in revenue will be welcome.
MSFS will fight for a chunk of the Xbox SSD.
They needed it to have a lighter footprint to stay on there when Halo and other AAA titles come out.
Once installed on an Xbox it will be competing for the game pass subscriber play time mainly.
Xbox is a huge market opportunity for MSFS In terms of revenue growth.
No amount of passion for the simulation space can eclipse that.
The MSFS team have certainly crunched the numbers, and know them inside out.
Did they cancel or just suspend for the time being. Asosbo change the game engine in a big way with SU5, which of course broke alot of mods and caused issues. Why because the changed the mechanics of the game engine, now the mod authors need to go back and conform to the new standard. I think the only thing that Asobo can be blamed for at this point is not release the SDK a month earlier so that the authors had time to make the changes that needed to be changed to make it compatible.
And what does that have to do with the XBox release apart from coinciding with the same update? You have no idea why Asobo made this change, or whether Aerosoft and Asobo still might to find a way to make it work in the long run.
Also changes in the ATC system are not supported by the SDK and therefore Asobo didn’t give any consent to changing it. The fact that in MSFS in particular modding and addons are so common place and even encouraged, doesn’t mean it’s an open source project. With a lot of software, modding is almost imposdible due to encrypted files.
Fact is: Asobo and MS are in this for the money and for the long run. And with a project like this over 10 years the money does NOT come primarily from selling the sim. It comes from the marketplace and their own addons they will create. From keeping the sim alive and improving it over time. At the moment the focus is on the XBox naturally, because there it is brand new. When the XBox crowd has bought into MSFS the focus will shift again.
All that complaining and the conspiracy theories going around are just hot air and totally unproductive. The main focus will be on the PC again because the hard core simmers spend more money on addons. But at the moment it has to be made sure to hook as many XBox Players in a short time. It’s simple economics and marketing.
So don’t make yourself miserable over a short time setback that can partially remedied with a little modification on your part with a text editor. After all: You already got 4 free DLC packages and 5 comprehensive updates within 11 months. Thats more than I ever got from ANY piece of software I ever purchased.
There always has to be a certain willingness to be happy with something. But if people only look for problems and misery, they will surely find it.
First you have the PC realm (myriad hardware combinations, drivers, community folders with mods), SimConnect and all the add-ons that talk to the sim through that, and DX11.
Then you have the locked down walled garden Xbox ecosystem, all the same hardware and drivers, no mods, very limited 3rd party hardware support, and running on DX12.
The only real commonality here is the software (MSFS) and online services the sim connects to (Bing data, etc). Both platforms are reporting the same list of game-breaking / preventing issues. That leaves the software and / or online services as the culprit causing the issues, as it’s the only commonality between the 2 ecosystems.
That seems to me that the dev just doesnt want to be bothered with the changes at the moment. Maybe once they get the sim settled down and and not making any mods to the game engine, they’ll come back.
I love MSFS and I have been flying every version since the early 90s. I am also an instrument rated commercial pilot and aviation enthusiast. For FSX I had build a 2000€ PC but still had to spend more time tweaking config files and resolving CTDs then actually flying.
When MSFS2020 was announced I was initially very excited, but then decided that I am not going to spend thousands of € on new Hardware just to use the Sim. Now I am using it on the Xbox Series X and I am totally amazed by it. I connected a Thrustmaster Hotas One, Thrustmaser Rudderpedals and also Mouse and Keyboard. It is the best Flight Simulator experience that I ever had.
I am very sure that there are many serious Simmers out there that can’t or don’t want to spend huge amounts on a top notch High End PC. The release on Xbox re-opens the Sim world to many such people.
But I agree that there will be many very disappointed people out there because without deep knowledge of aviation, procedures and so on the Sim will get boring pretty fast.
Never, ever, believe in company marketing. Only believe in the facts that they provide to you. We have seen this with Cyberpunk, No man Sky, MSFS now… and probably the list could fill half the forum.
Empty promises worth nothing until materialize in something. And I’ve seen this kind of empty promises for a year now, which only materialized in bugs and downgrades.
Yes, very dissapointing for us serious PC Simmers. I’m almost getting withdrawal symptoms!! After all these months of a SUPER product, slowly getting better and then WHAM! Sim Update 5…ruined it all and now I can’t get past the FLY button as I get a CTD. So many of us have spent 100’s of hours as we love this product…but now we feel abandoned. I hope Team Asobo & Microsoft understand our plight.
You gave us a great product, and now it’s not working due to the last update. Please do something to resolve this…
Nobody could be more disappointed than the development team. Think about it: how would you like to sit through the meetings that you know have been taking place over the last five days at MS or Asobo?
Nobody likes to fail. The issues with MSFS will get resolved, and we’ll all reap the benefits of the lessons learned from this past week’s experience.
I wouldnt count on it, we have been here before… And i find it very strange after all the other times when they had isssues either with updates, or issues created by updates, they manage a year later to have the biggest foul up on record.
Even to the extent that some devs have had to scrap a product, and others that provide a free aircraft had it removed due to the issues.
Why can’t we have both? Why can’t Xbox players enjoy their experience, and why can’t PC players enjoy their experience.
Why does the PC version have to conform to the Xbox version? The simple answer is it doesn’t!! But for whatever reason (most likely because it makes life easier for them) they have chosen to go this route, rather than have separate graphic options for Xbox and PC
Try not to be so selfish and short-sighted.
FS2020 is a ten-year project, which has not yet completed its first anniversary. It’s under development and Asobo/Microsoft worked really well in those first few months. You are wrong to think that there are only ■■■■■■ using the FS2020 on the XBOX. I have a $3000 PC, but I currently prefer to fly the Xbox Series X, simply because I can do it from the comfort of my couch on an OLED TV. The last update brought a big framerate optimization and it’s normal to have bugs. Be patient and wait for correction. XBOX gamers are not to blame for the current FS 2020 PC issues.
First prize in that contest went to EA and the initial release of Sim City in 2013. Even Amazon quit selling the title one week later. That debacle effectively killed that storied franchise. Pretty sad.
Companies wanting to do money with a product isn’t exactly a new idea, or anything arcane…
Besides, they HAVE to do money with it, how else are they gonna run servers, pay for development and licensing, partnerships and such? They’re in it for the money, but just as much because they have a 30 year legacy in flightsimulation. If you JUST want to do money, you dont go and try something so technically demanding and ambitious, with such a niche audience, you don’t try integrate so many technologies and take a huge risk in doing so, you don’t develop add-on planes like a JU, you don’t try to build a huge community of simmers, you don’t integrate passionate teams like FBW and Working title, you don’t care to provide hourlong twitch tutorials with actual flight instructors, you don’t provide monthly Q&A’s for the fans. Show me one company that does so much for their product and does all of it for free, I wanna see that. The best things come at a price, and I take payware over freeware in 9.5 of 10 cases, what about you?
