It seems to me that the right question to be asking is why Microsoft came back to the franchise after abandoning it, but outsourced development to Asobo. While I’m sure that they are delighted with the number of units that have been sold and the associated revenue stream, I very much doubt that per-unit sales revenue was the driving reason that this project got green-lighted. I would assume that there is some broader business strategy that this project fits into. Certainly it will drive X-box sales, but I also suspect that it is something of an incubation platform that they expect to generate advances in their main business, which is Microsoft Azure and the associated cloud technologies. Besides being an incubator, Microsoft Flight Simulator is also a marketing tool for said cloud technologies. Companies often “eat their own dogfood” to be able to provide a working demonstration of their technologies being used in the real world and presumably Microsoft Flight Simulator will be an effective sales tool for Microsoft’s core business products. All of this is speculation on my part (informed by a career spent at Microsoft), but whatever Microsoft’s business strategy is here, one shouldn’t necessarily assume that it has anything to do with the flight simulation market itself. Two million units sold is nothing to sneeze at, but I would imagine that it falls short by at least an order of magnitude (and possibly two) to be interesting from a revenue perspective (depending on what the net profit is per unit).
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