Because they want MSFS to be the best it can be?
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It is. To quote from their blog - " So why Early Access now ? Not because X-Plane 12.0 is done â we still have over two hundred open bugs and a lot of things we want to do. X-Plane 12 is in Early Access so that the entire X-Plane community can be involved in X-Plane 12âs growth, not just a limited number of testers."
The problem there is you get a lot of people moaning about things. One popular one seems to be that the A330 has got the B737 FMC, well thatâs because they havenât finished building the Airbus one yet.
Its not to crush X-Plane. MSFS has made deals with the Museum of Air and Space. They are working on digitally capturing all of the historic planes. That includes scans, sounds, textures. Some of these crafts, it is getting harder and harder to get that information, and years from now, who know if that will be lost. But if they can capture the essence of the flight model too, think about it. Future versions of MSFS, no one is having to go to the manufacturer, do study, etc. All that information and profile of all of these grand planes will be stored and accessible digitally. It is preserving flight history.
So in the end, does this help MSFS now. Yep. Will it help MSFS 2030? Yep. Will it help MSFS 2070? Yep. I donât see them as wanting to crush the competition. Why should they. Best guess they have over 4 million active users, which is historic for a flight simulator. They are now taking this opportunity to preserve flight history.
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According to SteamDB, X-Plane 12 has peaked at 273 active users, up from 235 yesterday.
For comparison, X-Plane 11 peaked at 1,636 active users today. The number of active X-Plane users has been on a downward trend since March, where it peaked at 2,749 active users, and lately it has maintained a peak average of between 1,300 and 1,700 users.
For those who want to know the MSFS numbers, the peak concurrent users today was 8,112 users. To give you an idea, this is twice the highest peak X-Plane 11 had, which was 4,210 users in March 2020. MSFS highest peak was on release day with 61,829 users.
Speaking of the current X-Plane 12 numbers, I canât see them as being bad or being a signal that it is struggling to sell. I think itâs too early to assess that. Also these numbers are only on Steam. On X-Plane.org, there was a campaign to get people to buy the website version and reject it from Steam, because that way, LR would get all the money while on Steam, the store would get 30%. Also the Steam version took a week and a half to release after the website version, so a significant portion must have purchased from the website.
This campaign to buy on the site was pretty toxic, I would say. It was led by one of the forum community leaders, who even spread fake news to try to dissuade people from the idea of ââbuying on Steam. An hour ago, he made fun of a person reporting that the beta build on the Steam version is behind the build on the website version and said something along the lines of âSee? I told you so. Now deal with itâ.
When you see one of the forum leaders acting this way, you realize how seedy and hostile the forum is, and it makes me appreciate the mod team here even more for keeping a civil environment and setting an example.
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Did that chart come from my heart doctor ? Sure looks similar !
Answer to post: No real competition.
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I hope X-Plane does well. Competition can only help both sims. That said, MSFS runs FAR better on my PC, and since I do a majority of VFR flying, it wins in those two categories. I think MSFS has improved its flight model over time, at least in my opinion, with the caveat that I have only flown two planes that are not present in either simulator, so I canât personally attest to it.
That said, I have XP11, and I plan to buy XP12 because too many flight sims isnât a bad thing. They both have their strong points and their down sides. I enjoy both of them for their own merits. I just currently âpreferâ one over the other.
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I think itâs odd to expect that MS cares at all about XP, much less competing with them. I would imagine the devs at Asobo are aware of the technologies used in any simulator, just so they know whatâs available for them to use in theirs, but they donât care about competing with anyone. Theyâre just contractors.
And MS themselves are probably barely aware of the existence of XP, much less concerned about âcompetingâ with a little indie program. Theyâre Microsoft.
Basically, itâs fine if more than one sim exists. The only competition I see is between users who need some sort of personal validation from the belief that their chosen video game is âbetterâ.
Whatever does it for you, I guess. But I wouldnât be holding my breath for any effects on MSFS dev resulting from the launch of XPâŠ
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You can see the definition in real clouds. You can also see the definition in MSFS clouds too.
For XP clouds, its hard to see the definition because they are so blurry. XP clouds are just terrible, IMO.
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Itâs not only the blurry, but I am not talking more about this, itâs too much complexe.
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Hi, thank you very much for the active user stats! SteamDB is a pretty useful website. I donât think that campaign at XPlane.org had much of a material effect. It probably had a very small, minor effect, but not a big one. The reason I say this is because I donât see a widespread concerted effort on Reddit, Avsim, Twitch, or Youtube, to not buy XPlane from Steam. In addition, the poor Xplane 12 sales is entirely consistent with Austin forcing XP 12 pop-up advertisements for XP 11 users after the XP 11 users spawned into XP 11 which was a sign of desperation from Austin and some XP 11 users even calling the XP 12 advertisements spam.
In addition, much of the flight sim community panned XP 12, including numerous high profile streamers on Twitch and Youtube. With those active user stats from SteamDB, I think XP 12 sales is what it is, just very poor sales overall. The very poor active users numbers for XP 12 in Steam would imply XP 12 cannot support all the 3rd party developers that developed for XP 11. With those active user stats for XP 12, I am sticking to my forecast that XP 12 will be obsolete in the home PC consumer market in the next 2 years, and 3rd party developers will jump ship from XP 12 to MSFS over the next 2 years. Iâm sure right now, many 3rd party developers for XP are not feeling too secure about their future and I wouldnât be surprised if some of them are even exploring MSFS at the moment, but they havenât announced it yet.
If youâre a user of XP 12, I would really think twice about buying a lot of add-ons for XP 12. This is like the P3D users that bought a lot of add-ons for P3D in early 2021, only to see most 3rd party developers for the home consumer market in P3D leave shortly after for MSFS.
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I understand what is written in this post, but want to give a slightly different perspective.
About people moaning about spam advertisements: X-plane has always shown a message when a new version was out. I got this message when 11.40 was released and the for 11.50 as well. Itâs an invitation to upgrade. And of course LR needs all the funding now to get XP12 ready for release. A completely understandable move. The message doesnât show up in the midst of a flight, that would be spam, but when starting the app. Besides: itâs very easy to suppress this message by editing ONE value in a file. People who are moaning here are just too sensitive, is my opinion. In the end LR has to finance its business, not?
With MSFS you just have to install the updates. You donât have any choice but to yank your ethernet cable and fly offline. Completely understandable as well, given the GAAS architecture.
X-plane will always have my sympathy, because David vs Goliath. They are doing an outstanding job with the resources at hand. I think about buying XP12 just for that reason. To sponsor their development, because they deserve their place in the market.
MSFS will be my first choice for a sim, because VFR. Everything has been said about that in the posts above.
Cheers all, and happy flights!!
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No. XP 11 users are getting the advertisement pop-up about XP 12 after they spawn into the airport: https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/xdfaq0/ingame_popup_ads_for_xp12_while_im_playing_xp11/
Does that count as a âflightâ? For some people it does. Doing a cold and dark start at the ramp for many people count as part of the âflight.â And getting that pop-up about XP 12 advertisement is very intrusive, and IMO, I agree with the XP 11 user who said it was spam.
Itâs also a sign of desperation from Austin, but that desperation makes sense now, in the context of what looks like poor sales of XP 12. I am glad that MSFS doesnât do anything as intrusive like this (I donât think showing a small icon for paid add-ons when you scroll through the World Map is very intrusive).
Interesting link. A few parts of this caught my eye:
No DLSS support any time soon:
Iâm not understanding the elephant reference here? Is this a cheap shot at the weather engine being closed to 3rd parties in MSFS?
Well this reads like they are using the GPU to pick up work from the CPU - so youâll need a big GPU for this to make sense:
And this gives and insight into the scale of the operation:
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XP12 is in early access and it came out days before it appeared on Steam so I guessing the die hard XP fans bought it from LR. It will be interesting to see once itâs released, probably a little lower than XP11 because some people wonât upgrade.
XP11 is sitting at 593 at the moment with 1642 as a 24 hour peak. Interesting that XP11 all time peak was 4,173 which was 3 years after launch, in April 2020 which was most likely due to the lock downs and people having more time on there hands.
MFS peak of 61,829 shows how popular it was on launch but then settled down to around 10,000.
Of course these are all small number compared to the top games - Counter Strike: Gobal Offensive currently has 456, 619 people playing and has a peak of 1,069,274 which shows you how small a market flight sims are.
I use both MSFS and XPlane11 (will be getting 12 too) and each bring their strengths to the table. However XPlane isnât going anywhere. It has been around since 1995 and its demise has been frequently mentioned throughout its history. For sure its sales wont come anywhere close to MSFS but it will retain its loyal user Windows and Linux user base.
No doubt bout that, although the clouds feel downgraded compared to the earlier MSFS days. I get fuzzy mesh-style square edges on clouds now. But they do look good from a distance no doubt.
Wow those clouds do look fantastic!
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Both are games of the genre âFlight Simulatorâ.
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I think the original question should maybe be more like âWhat can MSFS learn from XP-12?â
From reading through this thread, a few things keep coming up:
-
Ground handling (including water handling):
Thereâs a nice video a few posts back of a plane landing on an icy/snowy runway in XP-12 that looks excellent. Iâve not tried to do similar in MSFS, but Iâm guessing itâs not as good. So this feels like an area to learn from. I include in this the effects of wind on the plane on the ground. -
Control mappings:
There are wish list topics for this in the forum already, but Xplane allows mapping per aircraft to be saved, something MSFS really should be able to do, especially as planes get more complex - possible at the moment with external software like AAO or FSUIPC and others -
Night lighting
This is mentioned a few times - personally I think the MSFS night lighting isnât that bad, and Iâve not seen a lot of chatter on this in the forums, but this one gets mentioned a bit -
Haze
The haze in xplane is reported as better than in MSFS - something for Asobo to have a look at perhaps? Been done before but was then removed - read back a few posts for more on that -
Replay system
Still lacking in MSFS, although gap filled by 3rd party tools if you are desparate
I think thatâs maybe about it? One or two people mentioned one or two other smaller things, but I think these are the main deal.
So if Asobo address these issues, MSFS will be at least as good as xplane in all areas and materially better in many more.
Iâm not including flight model here. Everything Iâve read above suggests that there is no consensus on this, which suggests that they are each as good as each other and that xplaneâs marketing on that is still trying to milk the cow of the past.
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There are a few areas where the MSFS flight model can be improved. Things like spins. In MSFS, if you enter a spin, it will automatically recover. In XP12 you can hold the spin as long as you like, though I found in some cases it was impossible for me to recover from it.
Someone on a YT video reported what they believed to be an old problem, that slips were not possible in XP. I attempted to replicate, flying the default 172 in both instances. I tried to maintain the same airspeed as best I could, entered a descent at 300fpm, and this increased, and settled to ~900fpm in a slip. In XP12 the best I could manage was from 300fpm to ~600fpm, so my mindâs not really made up on that one.
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Those Steam active user numbers for XP 12 are horrible. Also, I think there is a difference between MSFS and previous iterations of Microsoft flight simulators, including FSX. The main difference is, in past Microsoft flight simulators, Microsoft had a single release, and usually did a handful of patches after. With FSX, I think it was 2 patches, and then Microsoft gave up.
MSFS has a marketplace now to keep providing revenue to Microsoft. On top of this, I donât even think the budget for MSFS has shrunk. If anything, it appears the budget for MSFS has grown from 2 years ago. Look at the hiring of Andrey (An.Petrovich) Solomykin from IL-2 Sturmovik. Working Title is hiring more people. And of course, Microsoft likely paid iniBuilds for their A310.
I think why XP survived before was because of the half hearted attempt by Microsoft in flight simulation. And after FSX, the only other competition was P3D and that was in hindsight, much more easier competition than MSFS. Now Microsoft is taking this seriously, keeping a high budget in Asobo for MSFS, and MSFS is improving very rapidly after each SU and WU.
So before, you had a half hearted effort from Microsoft. Now you have a full concerted effort, with the budget to back it. So IMO, itâs different this time, and the Steam numbers for XP 12 are an indication of what is happening.
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