Olegs worst competitors (?) - Microsoft Flight have released new screens...

Originally Posted by highness

i doubt that new MS Flightsimulator will be a threat to il-2, since it is mostly based on general aviation with POOR and nearly unexisting simulation, it is aimed at general public audience and the major "luring in" effect is the beautiful environment and graphics (which is an important sell out factor for a commercial game)

This right here! Also MS really "Cherry Picks" their screenshots that they want to show off. In the past there were issues with them retouching screen caps and generally misleading buyers as to what they were really getting.

One thing that they do well are mountains. They tend to look pretty good at a medium to higher altitude and I have to give them congrats on that. Get any lower and you see where they start to fall short, especially away from well known landmarks and airports where they have not put much detail into the terrain or buildings.

As for competition? A lof of people who fly FSX and who will pick up Flight will have no interest in COD because they are interested in pretending to be an airline pilot or a pleasure-flyer, not a fighter pilot. There are also a lot of people who will fly both. I don't think someone is going to look at FSX or MS Flight and say, "Well I'm going to skip COD because I have this game!". With the exception of flying aircraft, that's about all these two products have in common.

[mazex]

Originally Posted by Katana1000S

This is very true, I'm not even sure why this thread exists RE competition between MS Flight and CoD? its like comparing Apples and Oranges.

Despite the MS FS series bad points I'll buy the new one too and CoD, just the same as I bought RoF, Black Shark, Flaming Cliffs 2 as well, most of us are more than one trick pony's

I will buy it too, like I bought RoF, BoB II and all the games released by ED - but Oleg has hinted many times that "he don't want to show all his cards" due to the competitors. It may be that he thinks of a WWII follow up to RoF but as it is now "Flight" has a release date of Q1 2011 and what other major titles in this genre has that? DCS A-10 probably, but they will never compete about selling 800.000 copies like IL2 has (?). FSX has sold a lot more, but they are the only ones in the same league. So is there really any real competitor accept "Flight" if Oleg is aiming at selling more copies of CoD than IL2? For sure CoD is a high fidelity combat simulator and "Flight" is a flight procedure or "tourist" simulator...

Most of the couple of thousand die hard simmers here buy all of the few sims that gets released these days anyway (and yes, we will buy Flight too). The competition I talk about is the fight for the 20-50 year old man on the street who had an RC-plane when he was young, maybe dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot after seeing "Top Gun" at high school but became an accountant and sees a stand of DVD:s with an aircraft on the cover while his son is looking at PS3 games at the local GameStop store... We will never see them here or on Hyperlobby though, which goes for the majority of those 800.000 buyers of IL2 too.

EDIT: Another thing, Oleg has talked a lot these days about how to open the sim for third party and modders - reaching out a bit to the industry around FSX that was left in the cold when Aces got axed. So when Ilya says there is an upcoming expansion "that will rise many eyebrows" - how about a civilian sim as Korea is expected and the Med or Eastern front would not get much money back on a bet? Maybe with initial focus on north western Europe at first? Not really serious about this myself - but it sure would rise a number of bushy eyebrows here and over in Redmond