More a ‘sit back and think’ sort of observation that doesn’t go anywhere, but really MSFS shouldn’t exist as a modern video game title. I am really glad it does though.
Here’s some reasons why:
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You can raise a bug to say your house doesn’t look right. This doesn’t happen in Gears of War.
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As a franchise it’s been killed off at least three times for good commercial reasons (*1).
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There’s an entire real-life profession (and some really vocal hobbyists) that have more expertise in the subject matter this title is based on than the developers could realistically have. Halo isn’t like this (‘My energy sword usage proves this is a bug!’). This must be really annoying. 
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It tries to model real-world things like the planetary weather, real life aircraft flights around you and everything else that’s on this planet, in multiplayer. The scope is ridiculous and will always be a series of subjective compromises. It’s like a perfect recipe for scope arguments of hard or impossible to solve problems.
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The user base varies from someone with a $299 Xbox Series S sitting under a TV to a full blown networked cockpit recreation using PCs, projectors, motion platforms and a fan that blows their scarf and requires its own mortgage. It’s a support nightmare, especially on the PC add-ons and peripheral side.
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The difference between if something is a bug and someone not knowing what they are doing is very hard to tell. It’s a support nightmare (part II of n).
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It’s a PC VR title that is alive and works pretty well. Sorry, but in 2023 that’s a genuine festivus miracle.
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It has to appeal to people that don’t know anything about aviation but just want to have fun messing around, while also being rich and deep enough to be acceptable by people playing these sims for over 30 years. If you’ve been simming for 30 years you also get really really good at complaining.
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It is a platform for at least 300 separate commercial partners providing over 3000 products in an ever-growing ecosystem. Even the niches have niches in MSFS and it’s growing all the time. Imagine testing for that…
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There are title updates very frequently. World updates, avionics updates, city updates, system updates. There’s a release cadence that isn’t often done. Most titles just patch on Day 0 and then do a patch or two and just do a sequel. Asobo’s recent A Plague Tale:Requiem got 2 patches in the time MSFS had 8 updates, and was probably a bigger team.
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It has a public roadmap and a stated long term commitment. The roadmap makes everyone unhappy in a slightly different way, but other big titles don’t even have one. Rockstar would come around your house and smash your Xbox with a baseball bat if you asked for a list of upcoming features of GTA. It’s actually really unusual, even if we all crave more details.
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It’s a one-off purchase that provides online Cloud data access for 2.7 petabytes of terrain, 38,000 airports and 2 million cities with live weather, streamed online voices and live traffic. It has 2 trillion trees and 117 million lakes. We got gliders, helicopters and a store discount effectively for free since it launched. It makes no sense in our DLC gaming world.
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The community is really engaged. A $15 plane gets released and within 24 hours there’s over 1500 (!) forum messages about it. People care, like really a lot, and that doesn’t always happen.
Anyway, hopefully MSFS is not cancelled now I’ve listed why it’s impossible, but it is amazing we have it and it’s so good. Have a good Wednesday everyone! 
(*1) To those that don’t know the history, Aces Game Studio was shut down in 2009 (with a lineage back to Sublogic from 1977) and were the makers of the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise - the last title was FSX from 2006. This provided the bones for Prepare3D and the Dovetail Flight Sim World (killed off in 2018). Then Microsoft Flight happened and is sort of a fever dream that came out in February 2012 and was killed off in July (!) 2012 - but no-one likes to talk about that. Hopefully Jorg has some sort of memorial to Microsoft Flight that he stares at whenever he’s annoyed about third party ecosystem issues.
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As soon as I saw this title, I thought, “Oh no, here we go again.” Glad I was wrong!
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What a great read!! Thank you, I really enjoyed it. Good stuff!
Even included a festivus reference 
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One big factor is that the previous versions of the Flight Simulator continued to operate without support and development. FSX and even FS2004 still has a big customer base. This is unlikely to be the case with MSFS as it relies so heavily on remote servers full of good stuff. Hopefully Asobo have designed MSFS’s cloud based content to operate with little supervision based of source Bing content. This may allow MSFS to continue to operate once support and development end.
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Ha, I missed that! I went back and searched the first post for “pole”, “grievance”, and “strength”. 
There is another thread on the long-term future of MSFS, actually. [Caveat: I’m not an employee. So, this next sentence is speculation and not based on insider information.] Since Microsoft is implementing this on their own cloud, I have to imagine that their own professional services are involved to ensure that best practices are employed.
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I do admit I went to my bag of tabloid headlines for the subject just a bit there… 
I’d pay good money to get the sub-heading of this forum changed to ‘I’ve gotta a lot of problems with you people!’ just for Dec 23rd
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Festivus for the rest of us!
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To add to this list, we have free world updates, that in the history of Flight Simming always costed hundreds of dollars (P3D, X-Plane, FSX), but are completely free of charge in MSFS, and actually meaningfully improve the terrain and add free airports.
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<snip long list of accomplishments and reasons why this should not be happening in a perfectly rational world>
This is SOOOOO what I have been trying to explain to the legions of professional whiners who are upset that they can’t see their neighbors waving to them as they fly over.
Microsoft & Co. has embarked on a bold experiment to model the entire planet and do it with a recognizable level of detail. (!!!)
Of course there are some wrinkles. Anyone who has embarked on any programming effort more complicated than “Hello World!”, knows that Murphy’s law deals marked cards from the bottom of the deck and can defeat your most brilliant play.
As the complexity of the project increases, so do the wrinkles, issues, and nightmares - and MSFS is unprecedented[1] in both scope and attempted accuracy.
I agree there are problems, some more severe than others, but I also agree that the SCALE AND GRANDEUR of what they are trying to achieve is nothing short of groundbreaking.
Is the glass half full or half empty?
As far as I am concerned, “my cup runneth over” and the sim is absolutely breathtaking, warts and all.
What say ye?
- Aside from folks like the Department Of Defense, (or top-flight research institutions), that have access to Nobel Laureate levels of genius and bottomless budgets.
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All - I think this is correct, “This game has tried to model our life on Earth”, I wonder how many servers are being used just to power all this “stuff”. For those who complain (like me a lot), it’s a notable undertaking. But for me the overhead on my 3 year old gamer laptop is hard on it, and so I do not fly as much because it has to last for several more months so I can do “life stuff”. But each time I hook up my devices, and start this game, and try to input my FP, something screws it up, and I just quit because it just should work. I then go fly the F-14 to get my joy back, that is such a cool plane.
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Ain’t that the truth. Lol
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Very nice read indeed - thanks!
The points you made put things into perspective, and they are a good reminder of the immense effort Microsoft and Asobo put into creating this really incredible sim!
Jörg Neumann and his team must have had this in mind, when they decided to embark on the MSFS journey: „When the going gets tough, the tough get going!“
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But do the developer get any better at listening ??
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This is SOOOOO what I have been trying to explain to the legions of professional whiners who are upset that they can’t see their neighbors waving to them as they fly over.
But anyone can have this with a little adventure on the nightmare called MSFS SDK.
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I think so, yes - or rather things have evolved quite a lot. We seem to have a lot more channels for communication than before. In the framing of ‘compared to other titles on the market’ it does well in comparison to how open and community minded it is. Forza, Gears, Halo all have very active communities and managers, but MSFS is a different level, probably due to the educate/share nature of flight simming.
Back in the days of FSX, it had a feedback loop to the program managers but it was more based around who you knew and if you developed 3rd party or not. There was more of a ‘council of elders’ who poked the direction, while today it’s all more public and varied I think. No twitch streams with live questions that’s for sure.
I know things aren’t perfect for sure, and I’d love Seb to personally come around and fix my graphics driver when it crashes with 3 hours into a flight, but the OP thoughts were really on poking our heads out of the sim parapet for a bit and then comparing it to other XGS big neighbors. MSFS is really unusual and it’s just nice to appreciate it doing well I guess.
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As I watched the enthusiasm on the live stream yesterday, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the team.
Perfect, no. But what an effort so far.
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I don’t necessarily hold with all you say, but as you’ve said it so eloquently, I’ll agree to differ and bow out gracefully!
Well thought out, and well done.
EDIT: In response to the topic author.
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I often wonder just how lucky we have lived/be alive in this moment of time, especially coming from “for windows 95” so many past flight simmers would have loved to be apart of this… especially those who lived through the trailers of this that unfortunately… didn’t make the release date…
I also wonder…
What will happen in Aug 2030???
Will we have to re-subscribe??
Can this thing just continue to organically grow indefinitely as is???
Now that’s the 109nzd question 
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I like to start off saying that I’m also very pleased with how the game is and it’s just amazing.
Maybe there are more bugs than expected, I can perfectly live with it.
Today for example, wanted to depart from Dallas love field airport, nothing there on the menu map🤔 started flying somewhere else, checked later, everything there. (Yes I was in the correct spot first try😇)
The game is so enormous, and they have the biggest amount of testers flying around 24/7 trying to see more than the regular JFK, you will run into small bugs…… big deal, for me not……
~Bram
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