• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

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FSX-Steam success

rhumbaflappy

rhumbaflappy

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Hi All.

Some data:

Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition

Developer: Microsoft Game Studios Publisher: Dovetail Games - Flight
Genre: Simulation
Release date: Dec 18, 2014 Price: $24.99
Score rank: 49% Userscore: 79%
Owners: 608,513 ± 23,457
Players in the last 2 weeks: 70,823 ± 8,009 (11.64%)
Players total: 516,371 ± 21,612 (84.86%)

608,513 owners is pretty good for a flight sim...

Dick
 
Regular people don't like flight sims, its been conclusively proven by popular belief on enthusiast forums. Those purchasers must all be hardcore simmers! Yup.

Also: $4.99
 
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From the repetitve, basic questions in the FSXSE forums on the Steam site, I doubt that all of the users are hardcore simmers.

More interesting is, how many of the owners also own the original release.
 
I think the Steam platform encourages casual purchases; everybody likes the idea of flight simming but few want to actually work at a game - and we see that of the 608 thousand people who have purchased the game, almost 100 thousand of them have never played it. That's an additional 15% profit margin for Dovetail that can't go unnoticed: the ability to sell the potentiality of an enjoyable gaming experience.
 
Another way to see the data Dick posted

fs7.jpg
 
Really?

35,000 people were flying > 2:35 (assume per person) and some pushed the average to 12:55 - Log-on, take off set auto pilot in 737 go from US to Europe .... go have coffee, watch Leicester City play football.

540,000 people bought the game and have not played in the last two weeks.

How do the number of owners go up and down?

And the funny part - people looked for Nudity and FSX:Steam came up? There must be some nude beach that I am missing in my low and slow VFR trips.
 
I've accumulated 900 hours in FSXSE since its release, mostly by idling in the blackground while developing.
Sometimes, I even have to reset the midday situation that I've loaded initially because the sun went under and I'm unable to spot any modeling errors.
 
I just found this article that relates to my idea that flight simming seems like a fun thing to do, as if people want to it but don't, buy it but don't use it:
http://www.avsim.com/index.php/_/reviews/aircraft/preview-flightschool-by-dovetail-games-r3563
Dovetail said:
We have learned that flight simulation appeals to an incredible amount of people, but a lot of them find it too hard to get started with. It is our aim to reclaim and attract those would-be simmers, but in order to do so, we need to present flight simulation in a way that doesn't initially overwhelm them.
Click to expand...
 
The problem also resides with our current offerings. P3D and X-plane are designed primarily for the already converted, and make few if any concessions to newcomers, which established simmers all to often look upon with barely (if at all) disguised impatience bordering sometimes on contempt.

Those sims will make little if any headway except with those relative few whose enthusiasm level exceeds their frustration with the unwelcoming presentation.

FSX is and always has been different, and was always designed to be as welcoming as possible to newcomers. (Score one for Microsoft)

It was rewarded for this by becoming the most popular civilian sim in history, but now its become old and outdated and actually borders on painful to look at for modern users. The same users who swell the ranks of War Thunder into the millions eventually drift away from circa 2006 FSX even at a $4.99 price point because to modern eyes it looks worse than some things on tablets, and at least partially because over the years the first-in community has gradually lost sight of the needs and desires of newcomers and stopped catering to them, since they are a relatively small trickle at this point.

But which of those last facts came first?

Its also slow as molasses comparatively, with convoluted installs once you begin toying with 3rd party items, and a confusing kaleidoscope community of addons of every possible type, many of which don't always play nice together and just might actively break the sim.

The barriers to entry have simply grown too high in this hobby, and DTG, I think, is absolutely right to start with a reset and then begin painstakingly restoring something resembling order.
 
HiFlyer said:
...but now its become old and outdated and actually borders on painful to look at for modern users. The same users who swell the ranks of War Thunder into the millions eventually drift away from circa 2006 FSX even at a $4.99 price point because to modern eyes it looks worse than some things on tablets
Click to expand...

Those bloody spoilt brats and VFX whores nowadays. Lock 'em away with FS1 and only let them out once they admit that any visual improvement and feature is worth of appreciation.

Heck, I even really dig FSX' often criticized terrain LOD system ("Mesh distance!", "Blurries!") when I read that FlightGear requires 4 GB of system memory for the terrain alone at similar drawing distances.

The barriers to entry have simply grown too high in this hobby, and DTG, I think, is absolutely right to start with a reset and then begin painstakingly restoring something resembling order.
Click to expand...

With a hopefully thorough documentation. Wikis were a thing hardly heard of during MSFS' heyday, so I hope that DTG creates and maintains one for their new flight simulator.
 
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Heretic said:
Those bloody spoilt brats and VFX whores nowadays. Lock 'em away with FS1 and only let them out once they admit that any visual improvement and feature is worth of appreciation.

Heck, I even really dig FSX' often criticized terrain LOD system ("Mesh distance!", "Blurries!") when I read that FlightGear requires 4 GB of system memory for similar drawing distances.
Click to expand...

You should be ecstatic then that for some unknown reason Flight School is sucking up 9+ gigs :D

And I admit to Being a VFX whore with suspiciously round heels. Probably a whole heck of a lot of us are, else who on earth is buying up all the Orbx stuff and the cloud and water stuff and the precipFx stuff and the.... (continues on for several thousand pages until I exceed world capacity and the internet shuts down)
 
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I went through four evolutions of MS Flight Simulator before I actually began to take it seriously enough to invest in the hardware needed to potentially fly "well" and began learning how. That version was FS98... :wizard:
 
HiFlyer said:
You should be ecstatic then that for some unknown reason Flight School is sucking up 9+ gigs :D
Click to expand...

Most is probably due to 64bit support and I seriously hope that DTG gets RAM (ab)use under control for DTFS.

And I admit to Being a VFX whore with suspiciously round heels. Probably a whole heck of a lot of us are, else who on earth is buying up all the Orbx stuff and the cloud and water stuff and the precipFx stuff and the.... (continues on for several thousand pages until I exceed world capacity and the internet shuts down)
Click to expand...

https://media.giphy.com/media/yHUiExmU40A4U/giphy.gif
http://replygif.net/i/492.gif
http://replygif.net/i/116.gif
...etc...
 
I saw a YouTube vid where the VAS was around 8G but peak working set was closer to 3G. The working set is the more accurate measure of how much RAM was actually used AFAIK. VAS is just bookkeeping for the most part.
 
bdf369 said:
I saw a YouTube vid where the VAS was around 8G but peak working set was closer to 3G. The working set is the more accurate measure of how much RAM was actually used AFAIK. VAS is just bookkeeping for the most part.
Click to expand...

Historically, once resources are available, programmers very quickly and gleefully expand into the newly opened territory. I expect DTG sim to start sporting ridiculous 4K-ready texture sizes sooner rather than later.

Especially with the next generation of graphics cards heading up into 8gig Vram territory...... (Good news for X-plane too, I guess)
 
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