What is Microsoft thinking?
Welcome to Microsoft Flight from the Microsoft Games Studio!
Ok, let me get this straight.
They close Aces Studio who developed their precious flight sim and did extremely well commercially for the genre it was in. Later they announce they are internally producing Flight which is....another flight sim with...um...social whatever in it?
I could be wrong here but Aces Studio stemmed from projects just like this back in the mid 80's. The original FS was developed cooperatively with Sublogic in Champaign, IL (long live Bruce Artwick - the true father of 3D). Later the project was moved to another team, Sublogic was purchased or pretty much digested by Microsoft, and off they went. ProPilot came out from Sierra after that which was essentially the new Sublogic and Artwick clan (IE: ATP and other series as well) but could not compete with MS and pretty much died in obscurity. Sierra dumped the series and then the reigning king was Flight Simulator. Now onto the present. Microsoft closes Aces Studio (Flight Simulator and Train Simulator devs) and thus ends the life of a long and prosperous series of flight simulator titles. But they leave a blurb that they haven't abandoned the genre. I'm assuming they are trying to charge for more detailed areas or turn Flight sim into some dumbed down micro-transaction POS with social networking and whatever else that has nothing to do with flying a plane safely from point A to B. So if Microsoft is developing a new sim called Flight (when Flight Simulator was an extremely well known title) why would they change the name, why would they devote an entire new team to it....and why would they even get back into this market when they just closed the Studio that did it all for them? I also ask what hard core simmer is asking for social networking and farmville'esque features in their flight sims? Um...none. Flight simulation is for people who like hardcore sims and realism and it is about um...flying planes which not every person in the world does or can do so the market is niche, limited, and nothing will ever change that.
I understand closing a studio due to costs, poor performance, etc but this does not make sense. So now we have some inexperience sim coders coding a sim they have only played? And how can MS say that they have an experienced team working on Flight....when they let their most experience team go back in the summer?
None of this makes any sense. So what was the real motivation for closing Aces Studio? Something smells fishy.
