Discussion: Upcoming Changes to the Weekly Blog Post

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With the impending release of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on PS5, we are taking this opportunity to revamp our weekly blog post starting next week on Thursday, December 4. Based on your feedback on how the blog can serve you better, going forward we will be splitting the current blog into three different posts:

  • MSFS Weekly Briefing
  • Marketplace Update
  • Development Update

A description of each of these three posts follows.

MSFS WEEKLY BRIEFING

The MSFS Weekly Briefing will be an at-a-glance view of what YOU the community have been up to in the past week, as well as a high-level recap of whatā€™s been going on in the sim. This is where we will give an overview of any new releases from the past week, such as Sim Updates, World Updates, City Updates, new aircraft (Local Legends, Famous Flyers, Expert Series), pre-release beta test builds, new YouTube trailers, Marketplace sale notifications, special offers from flight sim peripheral makers and add-on creators, and more. If youā€™re a simmer who regularly reads the forums and already stays on top of the latest MSFS news, you may not find much new information here, but this will be an ideal short read for players who just want a quick recap of the past weekā€™s updates.

Community

The MSFS Weekly Briefing will also include the Community section from the current weekly blog:

  • Community Fly-In Friday information
  • Community Video
  • Creator Highlight
  • Screenshot Challenge

Additionally, we will use the MSFS Weekly Briefing to highlight interesting and unique group events organized by you, the simmer community. Whether itā€™s a group flight listed on our forums, a charity fundraising livestream, or a real-life simmer meet-up thatā€™s part of our Bravo Alpha Romeo program, check in here to stay on top of all the latest events happening in the MSFS community.

The MSFS Weekly Briefing will release at the same time as the current blog, approximately 4pm Pacific Time every Thursday. The idea is that this post can be your single source of news to stay up-to-date with all the latest happenings in the world of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

MARKETPLACE UPDATE

Marketplace

The Marketplace Update will be a separate blog post and will include the image grids for New and Updated MSFS 2024 and MSFS (2020) Marketplace products released that week on Monday and Thursday. For now, this will be published every Thursday concurrent with the MSFS Weekly Briefing, but the publication date/time could change in the future. This page will also include the Marketplace Backlog table and the text-only table of Marketplace releases which also shows how long a product was waiting between Last Submission to Creator Sign-Off and Creator Sign-off to Release.

You can find the new Marketplace page at https://flightsimulator.com/marketplace. This page currently holds the text-only tables, but will be refreshed with a new look come Dec. 4th.

DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

Development Update Banner

Development Updates will be focused solely about development information of the sim, not Community or Marketplace news. Publication dates are not locked in to a certain date, but the goal is for a new Development Update to be published either on an ad-hoc basis whenever the team has important new information to share OR for a new Development Update to follow each Developer Livestream (approximately every other month), giving a recap of the topics discussed by the panel for those simmers who were unable to watch the broadcast live on Twitch or prefer to read a text article rather than watch a YouTube VOD of the session.

Development Updates will include the following sections from the current weekly blog:

  • Development Roadmap
  • Feedback Snapshot
  • SDK Update
  • Third Party Update
  • Other Development News

We look forward to these changes to the weekly blog and hope you will find this breakout into three separate posts more useful for staying updated with the latest MSFS news. As always, we are listening to your feedback and are interested in hearing what you have to say about these upcoming changes in the comments below. :ga_plane: :airplane:

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There was zero mention of Career mode. This mode is a huge slice of the sim and it always barely gets a mention.
I also hope the PS5 sim is included and we get to hear all about that too.

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@Pilotfirst9999,

Any news about changes coming to Career Mode (or other modes like Challenge League, World Photographer, etc.) will be included in a ā€œDevelopment Updateā€ post.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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My feedback:
I am lazy, and I like that I so far have only had to click one link every week to stay updated on development, community and marketplace releases. My laziness feels it is very sad that I will now have to click multiple links.
At the same time I understand that it makes more sense to only have the development update when there is actual development news.
As both a developer and customer of addons, I think discoverability of new products should be as clear as possible, so having it included in the singular weekly update have made sense. I am not sure if us users (and especially me) will remember to go check the marketplace update site. To be clear, I am saying I am lazy enough that unless something is forced on me from multiple angles, it is difficult to get me to go somewhere and read it regularly, and I worry that others are too.
(Also, to be clear: I enjoy the weekly post)

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Hi @WombiiActual,

The MSFS Weekly Briefing posts will always include a link to the Marketplace Page and a reminder to check out that weekā€™s selection of new/updated product releases. The difference is that the Marketplace Update will no longer be part of the blog post itself but rather its own separate page. This change is in response to community feedback that the weekly blogs were viewed less as valuable information sources and more as Marketplace advertising, which was never the intent.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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Very good idea to change all of this Itā€™s going on the good way

There was also an update on the flight planner but Itā€™s not listed this time, will it be include in the future developpement updates ?

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Any chance we could have some sort of read only access to the bug & wish list snapshot data? It would be nice to be able to view and filter that data ourselves rather than waiting even longer for the development updates.

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Thanks so much for taking the weekly updates to a higher level. I am sure that I will read them with even more interest. Glad that I will be able to skip the third party release part. For me, I am only interested in ā€˜realā€™ MSFS development news.

:smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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Personally, I donā€™t care if the Marketplace update is included in the same post (like it has been) or not. I usually just scroll over the parts of the weekly post that Iā€™m (at that moment) not interested in.

Regarding the ā€œdev updateā€ part I would love to see more regularly updates even if it is just a s short information, like what Asobo and Working Title are currently focusing on, like a bug or feature of the week/month/whatever. In the past we got some information in the weekly update but for the last year or more itā€™s always just ā€œno information at this timeā€ which is rather sad. I really enjoy the dev streams and wonder if it isnā€™t possible to get some information in meantime between two streams without causing a huge effort on your side.

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I would love the dev stream to be 2 hours long. 1 Hour is too short to get through so much information.

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But then they are going over the same old bug list again and again. This takes precious time that could be spent better, I think.

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Looking forward to the revamped dev posts. Hopefully they will be as regular as the others.

Thanks for taking feedback to heart on this.

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So much for the week after week criticisms to the development update.

So much for the silence in this post after SeedyL asks for feedback on the changes people asked for.

Sometimes I find this community rather weirdā€¦

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Just an example of an -in my opinion- very well done development update: Fenix Simulations

Wish we could get something like that from Microsoft/Asobo/Working Title in the future.

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Itā€™s very possible those folks havenā€™t seen this thread. I for one think these changes make a lot of sense, having found the original format wanting.

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Quite a bit more formality and red tape when the developers work for a multi-trillion dollar company versus a very small team like Fenix. I would love this kind of information too, but itā€™s simply not reasonable to expect. Does any other AAA title in the world of modern gaming provide anything near that? Or even what we already get?

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It doesnā€™t matter how large the company is. I worked for decades for one of those huge global IT companies and let me say this - itā€™s possible.

But thatā€™s not even the point and neither are formality or ā€œred tapeā€. The link is an example of a development update that contains, well, actual development update information. What they are working on. I donā€™t really care about the wording. It would be fine if it read like an obituary as long as it contains ā€¦ well, development updates. Thatā€™s the whole point of it. Now look back at months if not years of the ā€œweekly development updateā€ and just count the sentences of actual development information in there - almost none. The content is

SDK UPDATE

Asobo
  • No update this week.
WORKING TITLE / MSFS AVIONICS FRAMEWORK
  • No update this week.
FLIGHT PLANNER UPDATE
  • No update this week.

Allow me to be blunt: I donā€™t need the same empty template and outdated feedback snapshots. I want actual information. Each of these teams will have to report a status internally / to Microsoft regularly anyway. I understand itā€™s extra work to compile / extract information for us. But in case of the feedback snapshot, there have to be ways to automate / support this using powerful tools. It is a ā€œmulti-trillion dollar companyā€ that has and even sells those tools, right?

Yes, we already get a lot of information from them and that is greatly appreciated. Doesnā€™t mean we canā€™t point out things that can be improved and provide positive examples from others.

With the announced changes they are effectively removing the empty template from each weekā€™s information. Thatā€™s perfectly fine in my opinion because it no longer shows me each week that we do NOT get a regular development update. I hope we still get the dev streams in the future, I love those.

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