Dovetail Group Discontinues FSW

[allardjd 1,853]

Here's a link to their official announcement on Steam.

 

https://steamcommunity.com/games/389280/announcements/detail/3400657079148405506

 

John

[brett 2,315]

Somehow I'm not totally surprised. Gamers weren't interested enough and they couldn't possibly reach hard core flight simmers when they weren't able to compete with the sims already out there. FSW wasn't even half complete, developers were not ready to jump in yet and the amount of work they still had to fulfill was probably draining money away from the cheaper to produce money making games. P3D and x-Plane already in 64bit probably didn't help there odds either not to mention how many users are still flying FSX.  

 

It's a shame for the simmers that already dumped money into it thinking they would go the whole nine yards. It might even slightly hurt the sale of future betas for those that got burned.

 

Who knows, they might even sell what they have so far to someone else. We will just have to see what happens in this ever changing flight sim market.   

[mutley 4,498]

This current development has certainly polarized the market to two sims. Looking around on FS developers forums like Aerosoft and PMDG, who were outbid for MSFS, Dovetail paid way over the odds for the product with the idea that they could control its destination regarding 3rd party applications. I am sure many end user flight simmers recognised this as an attempt at a closed shop, and were waiting to be proved otherwise. Maybe some of their (DTG) innovations will be taken on by other simulator developers, but I feel sure that LM and Laminar will stay with their own core product and carry on allowing 3rd party Devs live Hi-Fi sim and REX take the lead in their specialist fields which by definition should be better than the core product developer.

Now we can focus on the two main sims, AF2 is pretty, but so far behind in terms of navigation and flight modelling that surely it will only be regarded as a light entertainment diversion.

Joe (still on vacation)

[wain 879]

slightly surprised, however it was taking a long time......jusy glad my copy was free and I hadn't bought any addons.....I never understood their logic of trying to make a closed shop, all the other sims flourish because there is a massive 3rd party dev and freeware availabilty......greed maybe, trying to recoup what they paid out in the first place? who knows........got to feel a bit sorry for all those people I see on Steam that had seen FSW as the future and invested money and time into it....can't beleive it's not instantly coming off sale after the announcement has been made......

do we think anyone else might be prepared to take it on? I guess that would invole and investment and then theres all the legal stuff to.....I am sure this will run for a while on different forums I have already seen a lot of abuse on Steam but that's not unusual.....

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

This is partly why I am rarely a "first" adopter of new technologies, wait till the dust and prices settle is my general plan (still dreaming/lusting for VR, but am happy to just read about the problems with it so far...). FSW ended up being a rock which is not surprising if they weren't planning for 3rd party development... rather dense considering the field.

[allardjd 1,853]

I believe that DTG in this case, and MS before them with MS F-Light, was looking at Apple and their success with the Apple App-Store with relish.  Apple has done very well with a closed shop and all "add-ons" having to come through them.  It's not hard to imagine that DTG and MS saw that with a gleam in their eye and thought maybe they could do the same for flight sim related DLC.  It didn't work out for them, mainly since flight simming and phone apps are not the same kind of market at all - Apples and oranges if you'll excuse the pun.

 

Can you think how much extra revenue MS could have generated over the years if all the FS add-ons for all the versions of FS had been through them with them getting a piece of the action?  Even allowing for the stifling effect an arrangement like that might have had on independent development, it would have amounted to serious money over quite a long time.  I'm not surprised that MS and DTG were tempted to try to make that happen, but I guess they didn't reckon with the fact that flight simmers as a community may not be quite so gullible as the great unwashed smart-phone-named-for-fruit users of the world.

 

I'm not sorry for DTG, but am sorry for all the employees who will lose their jobs and am kind of bummed out that one of the successful licensees of MS software has mucked it up.  Not sure if and when someone else will get a chance.  DTG still holds and uses their license from MS for development at some level and distribution of FSX-Steam, but that's all now.  

 

I've thought for quite some time that P3D is where we will all be going eventually, though X-Plane is becoming an ever more promising alternative to the FSX-based sims.  We'll have to wait and see how that plays out.  Anyway, it gives us a couple of ways forward still, even with DTG having gone more or less static on FSX-Steam and out of the game for a 64-bit sim. 

 

For me, for now, FSX-Steam is good, stable and works well and P3D v 4 is very good and improving.  

 

John

[J G 927]

I have to echo the good Captains comments here. I always wait for some maturity in a produce unless I see that it has someone large behind it. P3D has LM behind it and has already proved its worth.

 

But Dovetail?  Sure they produce plenty of games so they should stick to doing just that. Any FS worth its salt is not really a game, again P3D is a good example of this, and if is seen as a game it will probably fail as it will never be able to produce the immediate full on action that a good game will. Microsoft's attempt at a re-entry into the FS world failed for this very reason. It was so dull that I cant even remember its name . MS Flight?

 

I think we will only have a real choice of two FS products going forward. X-Plane and P3D.  You have only to look at the pace of change with P3D to know that LM are serious about this product, no games developer can compete with it.  My money is on P3D.  Not because I think X-Plane is a bad product, I don't. It has been around for a long while, its very pretty to look at, has a good track record of development and it has a good market share. It will endure.

 

I went with P3D for three reasons; firstly my roots are in MS FS and so the transition is easy, secondly I have a lot of faith in LM - they are a massive company with a good development model that brings a product to the market that satisfies FS users at all levels - and lastly there are a lot more military aircraft out there for P3D. (I only fly RAF aircraft - it keeps my add-on purchases in check!)

 

In Johns post above (posted while I was writing this) he points out that "Apple has done very well with a closed shop and all "add-ons" having to come through them." Very true, but others have tried to do the same and failed. Sony tried with Betamax VCRs and IBM went off on an IBM only card slot in their PCs.  Both lost out on their market share, IBM's PC business withered and Betamax quickly ran out of steam.  There are signs that Apple are starting to loose out to Android devices as their fan base wakes up to the fact that there are phones and tablets out there with higher specs for way less money.   

 

Greed never works out in the long term. Steve Jobs might argue against that. But nothing worked out in the long term for him. 

Edited April 24, 2018 by J G

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

I was raised on Macintoshes. Played my first games in green wireframes on black screens.

 

What really Soured the fruited machines for me back in the day when I bought my first computer was the unavailability of flight and flight combat sims on that crateform.

 

That and an identical photoshopLE task performed on PC and a FruitC at the CompUSA store was done in 3/4 the time on the PC for 1/2 the price. 

 

Bye bye DaddyMac.

 

No one in the FS community is sleeping on a sidewalk for a new Gold Addon...unless it was reviewed here at Mutley's ofc.