Quote:
Originally Posted by GF_Mastiff
I understand the DLC scene, but it's the only way these producers and small flight sim companies are going to make it. Look at Micro-Soft twice they gave it a go, and twice they lost.
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Now, hang on.
FlightSim (the original incarnation) was still a profitable product. It was bureaucratic idiocy and a stagnated, outdated developer-centric culture in the studio itself that led to its demise. Lots of people got cozy in their seats and stayed in their comfort zone doing the same thing for too long - sometimes for 10 years plus. The difference tech-wise and methodology-wise between 1999 and 2009 was massive. A good housecleaning instead of a shutdown would have fixed a lot. FS11 was looking awesome.
Flight Live, on the other hand, was deliberately and quite literally scuttled. Why, I can't say for sure. But at work here, I sit next to some folks who were part of that team (and who I worked with on FlightSim), and they described the final months of Flight Live. A new manager was forced on the studio by much higher-up MS management, and entirely scrapped years of planning and licensing partnerships and development - basically the heart of the product. The next area was going to be the Grand Canyon, and Gibbage had a Grumman Goose ready to rock that was ditched for cockpitless warbirds.
Then the new manager dragged the product kicking and screaming in a direction that was known ahead of time to be disastrous - nobody is going to buy arcade-incarnation cockpitless fighter planes for a civil sim with nothing to shoot at. The goal was to make it fail. Somebody wanted that program dead, but they wanted it to publicly crash and burn before they axed it.
I suspect somebody several floors up just flat-out hated the Flight Sim product and had a grudge. The situation has all the hallmarks of a corporate power struggle where there's been a change in the balance of power.
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