A lot of disgruntled people here on the forum recently. I think people should keep in mind that we’ve made a lot of requests of Asobo team over the past four years. Having a new payable version rewards them for the upgrades they have made to the underlying engine if those upgrades are desired by the community. If you don’t like what they’re doing simply don’t buy the new version. This is great as it allows every user to effectively vote whether they are happy with the progress and want to therefore continue supporting the development of the sim, or they don’t think additional development is valuable enough and are therefore happy to stick with the old version. This seems perfectly fair to me. Nobody works for free, and it’s much better for us simmers that Asobo works for us than that they work for an advertiser or a third party developer. If you’ve got to pay €100 every 4 years, that is about €2 a month. Great price for what we’re getting to be honest.
Yeah, I do not really get why so many people are crying and making such a big drama…
…especially when not really knowing much details.
Especially this.
There’ll be lots of popcorn in this.
Anyway, if MS wanted to have more than one brands of MSFS to make more money, I’d rather they forked arcade vs sim characteristics (not to mention console vs PC), rather than dropping the bomb out of a sudden without any additional info.
Some people just want the sim they had been promised and heavily invested in. If 2024 turns out to be just that and retains addons compatibility (especially non-marketplace addons compatibility), then all good.
It’s the lack of details that forces the community to speculate. Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.
yeah, it sucks 
Exactly this, personally i have no reservation against a new sim, as long as it supports the old add-ons with little to no effort to ensure forward-compatibility. And some information have been shared about that, but the damage had been done by then. As a tiny freeware developer myself, I’ll be more convinced about it if they show how they are planning to ensure forward compatibility.
Also, if I’m expected to pay for a new sim, then it better be rid of all the nagging issues that plagued MSFS till this date and that’s at release, not after one or two years.
If I had to guess I would say it would be no more difficult that dealing with any changes to the SDK from one SU to the next. This may be amplified in this case by the sheer number of changes they have most likely made, if one fan theory is right about many changes/fixes being held back to justify an entirely new sim, rather than apply them to 2020.
As long as those changes are easy to digest, i am all in. On the other hand i had redo for example my entire airport ground textures, or taxiway layouts, then I’ll be a bit pi****.
Microsoft has spent years moving all their software products a user subscription based model. My guess is MS2024 will be no different.
And one more thing that concerns me is they have essentually put a release by date with the name MSFS 2024, and thats 31sr December 2024. But from observing the larger game development scene (which is much much much larger than flightsim dev scene), i have seen that things do get wrong along the way, projects do get delayed, and despite that, some of them release in appaling buggy state. I hope MSFS 2024 doesn’t suffer from that. I wish they didn’t put a release date this far out. May be announce that it’s coming, and then slowly transition the community and developers in to it. It would be a bummer if they are forced to release it in a buggy state to meet the release deadline.
Or they are very confident about it because they know its the same thing under the hood and there’s not much unknowns.
I don’t think they have any game that itself is subscription based. Gamepass is different. So I won’t jump to that conclusion yet.
My personal theory as someone who is a software developer (no longer in games) and has spent a lot of time in the sdk:
They’re putting a hard stop on things that were deprecated. There are a lot of variables and functions in the SDK that were deprecated at launch (carried over from FSX) and more have been deprecated over the last 3 years.
Developers who have avoided deprecated options will likely find themselves just magically “working” in the FS2024 era while developers who used deprecated variables or apis will have issues.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but even just the stuff WT has added this year is causing headaches for Asobo. The release of AAU1 broke a ton of add-ons and required a rapid fix because a bunch of add-ons haven’t upgraded to the new avionics. Those add-ons will probably not work in FS2024 until they upgrade to the new avionics. And that’s just one example of literally dozens over the last 3 years where they’re getting bogged down in legacy support and want out.
My theory is that the move to FS2024 is being done almost exclusively as a line in the sand with regards to the SDK.
To be a little unkind or unfair, call it the “Taking out the trash” update.
If the objective is to modernise the code, remove as much FSX era code (and please let this be better ground handling, and the transition from flying to landing), because it was all but impossible to do these things with the current iteration, then so be it. More power to them for taking that difficult, but wise decision.
Not really. It’s 100% free to update their main software product.
Let’s see this in a different format.
You buy a car new with cruise control. You’ve had this car for 3 years and the cruise control still doesn’t work properly. The car manufacturer then announces it is bringing out a brand new model of what you own. It will also have cruise control, but yet the car manufacturer hasn’t dealt with faulty cruise control that you paid for!
The same applies in the sim. MS2020 still has its faults that need to be fixed, but yet they have said to every ‘come buy our new MS2024’
That is why many are somewhat annoyed about it. Bottom line, MS2020 is a paid for product that still has issues 3 years on.
I think you are missing the most important reason why people is so upset, and it´s not the money indeed, as anyone could spend another 60$ on a new title: they have not yet finished developing current MSFS version. I would agree on the approach to support them on a new title provided that they had finished the current one and it was reasonably stable/functional. Then the evolution to a new title with more features would be natural and most likely fully supported by the community and everyone would be excited about that. However they are leaving us with a long bug list, with an ATC and traffic system which is incomplete (for instance AI helicopters are not supported nor apparently planned) and an engine which is still DX12 beta, just to mention some things. So basically you have to either stay with a partially functional game or pay for a new game that may eventually fix the current issues (although that´s not promissed either so far) to make game complete as it was supposed to be when you purchased MSFS for the first time. That´s having no choice, in plain words.
On the other hand, about the eventual overload that community requests could have produced on Asobo, which have been the real requests to include non planned features that may have created extra or non planned efforts? Just look at the community wish lists. Were helicopters, for instance, really a community request? Well, any other versions of the franchise include them, the gliders and other features that we indeed don´t have in MSFS, but not MSFS upon release. That was a feature they already planned to add later, so it was not really a community request. Anyway they included them but the flight model is terrific and AI traffic is still not supported, so that´s incomplete once more time. One of the real requests to include was the removal of the “press any key to continue”, but there are not so many of that kind indeed if you read the wish lists. Indeed most requests were asking to implement things which were missing because they skipped them on release, or requests to complete features which were incomplete, among other technical features. So there was not so much ad-hoc work requested by customers here but a lot of missing features in their original plans that customers were asking to be finished, which is a completely different history.
Many people knows from the experience with other games what moving to a new title means, as it´s basically a slow discontinuation process as logically most efforts will be put on the new title, as that´s the money maker. The main difference with Office or even Windows in MS market approach is that those were mature enough platforms to be fully functional when user stays in the old version. Even discontinued versions can be still used for years with no support, because they still work (all their features work, which is the key topic). MSFS works, sure, because it loads, you can fly and so on, but is this what they really committed to deliver? Mmmmm… feel free to draw your own conslussions but according to bug lists there´s still a lot of things to fix. And this is not meaning a lot of new features to add but just fixing what they already have in the engine core and their addons.
Cheers
But next year we’ll have a new and improved MSFS 2024, at which point no one will care about unresolved bugs in the older, obsolete version. I’ll be joining the masses in deleting it from my pc and moving on.
I think the language of a “whole new release” in the blurb has most people excited, if this had been called an upgrade or even an expansion it would have not met such fierce blow back.
I’d think of it as a subscription fee rather than a payment for a new version. But it’s a bit better than a subscription as you get to keep the old version if you don’t like the new vs a subscription model where you’d lose all access the moment you unsubscribe. They can of course keep improving MSFS2020 for free, or make a new version you’ve got to pay for. One option brings revenue for Asobo the other relies on third party devs to subsidize us. But what kind of a sim would you rather have: one where Asobo doesn’t add stuff so you can buy it from third parties and pay for the sim that way and it’s a bare bones platform? Or one where Asobo improves things because they want to sell us the next version? I know what I prefer.