Anyone know if there is a license for renting the game in a game cafe or vr arcade when it comes out?
I contacted them three times over the past 12 months (Email to MS and Asobo, Zendesk) and never received any reply.
The EULA within MSFS does not mention anything related to the core software. Only third party agreements are listed. Microsoft´s general EULA which applies to many MS products does not mention MSFS in it´s list.
Basically it is all about the term “lend”. Is it commercial lending if legit software is installed on one single machine per license being used by a single user?
Lending could apply if the software would be bound to a user, not a machine.
Commercial means the intention to make continous profits which would be true for a game cafe.
As long as there is no published EULA we just do not know and this is a grey area.
One solution might be to install the software on your machines but make every client buy a copy of MSFS (maybe become a reseller and earn a little commission). Every client would login to their own MS account therefore using their own legit copy of MSFS. You could attract customers by offering them a discount on the first hours until the software is paid off. Anyway paying clients would only show up at your cafe if your hardware would be outstanding both for the computers and the flight controls (like a 15.000 € system). In this case MSFS would only be a very small portion of any active assets and a little entry fee would already cover the costs for every customers software license.
Be aware that ORBX and other third party developers will charge high fees for commercial usage of their products. So I would mainly stick to MSFS sceneries.