Steam Announcement: steamcommunity.com/gid/103582... First Look at FSW: • Flight Sim World (FSW)... My Opinions on FSW Initial Release: • My Thoughts on Flight ...
I told people they had no respect for the sim community. Management was a joke DTG are well known for ignoring bugs instead favouring dlc and new buggy features. Typical DTG tbh.
I agree. Just look at Train Sim World. And they did it to Train Simulator years ago....never trusted DTG as a company. They have earned a bad reputation years ago.
Doofer you're a great bloke, I understand you not wanting people to dump on DTG but this is what the community think. DTG, EA & all other game dev teams need to start showing respect to their customers and communities. This is an important message that needs to reach the money grabbing ceo's fast.
What i would like to know is why didnt they take it off the market as soon as they announced it,Then you have 3rd party devs just flight,turbulent designs etc. And DTG just last week had a sale for FSW and DLC they must have known then what was going to happen.
I think they came out early because of X-plane 11 and Prepar3dv4. They were afraid of losing in the market, so they released a very unfinished version in hopes of generating a foot hold in the sim world. By not having jets in the game alone just cut out 50 plus percentage of the flight sim market. I'm not a big fan of X-plane's ATC, but FSW was even worse. I agree with you, they had noble plans but never followed through on any of them. I think it is an opportunity lost by poor management decisions.
You could be right. I can understand that perspective of "missing out" by releasing a product later than the other main contenders. I still believe that they could have overcome that delay by implementing features that aren't in any other sim. The career mode is a fantastic feature and I do believe it would have caused more buzz and interest in FSW if it was available at the start. Dovetail had to bring FSW to the public and "wow" them. Instead they released a barely "Alpha" version of software and ended up putting themselves in a worse position by having to play catch up and develop updates "in public" with pressure from the public as well as the internal pressure from the company.
I didn't like the whole DLC orientation of things but I loved the idea of a career mode. I can't tell I wasn't expecting it to be cancelled cause of the very small progress and the whole buy this DLC in order to get a feature that the game should have had. But I loved the idea they had with the career mode it if done right it would have been awesome.
Yeah, I think if they led with implementing the bigger features and left DLC integration until they had a secure and growing player community, then things could have worked out differently.
I'm no expert on licensing so it really depends what you can do within the terms of the license. I read the other day that PMDG were interested in picking up the "Entertainment" licence a few years ago but they were out-bid by Dovetail. I'm not sure if it's something they would consider nowadays.
*_"FAQ_* *_What happens to Flight Sim World if I already own it?_* _It will remain in your Steam library, available to play in its current format._ *_Will the sim be taken off sale?_* _Yes, and we’re working to the date of 24th May 2018. We want to give anyone who does not yet own a copy of the sim enough time to get a copy and keep it safe in their library for future play._ *_What will happen to any Add-Ons?_* _Add-Ons will also come off sale, but those you already own will still also be in your Steam library."_ *A sick joke, huh? They keep selling it grabbing even the last money they can get for their failure! These executives are supposed to be prosecuted and hauled to court!* So, they took and keep taking the money and wasted it... no refunds whatsoever? lol Of course not, what from? Because it's all spent. For lavish salaries, nice company cars and private jets and Bahamas vacations? That's why I never pay for Early Access crap. Sounds good, till it goes bad. It's legal, though. They're supposed to get a company funding from banks like all other companies in other branches gotta apply for to finance their projects. Since only this ensures that their oh so ambitious projects will be screened thoroughly, with due diligence, by an objective third party which will not risk their money for shady enterprises and companies under supervision of incapable managements. Unlike naive, enthusiastic or hopeful fanboys ... um ... fanbase would do, giving their last money away without knowing anything solid, who trust too much and scrutinise business figures too little, since they have no inside look behind the curtains anyway. But banks/ professional creditors do not only know how mature company business has to work they're not only experts on the subject, but also demand to put the cards on the table, demand business plans, calculations, employees' qualifications and expertises, account balances, proofs of creditworthiness and more BEFORE they advance their money to inapt entrepreneurs. Everything a video game player will not do because 99% of them don't have any idea about how to run a successful business either. And when a bank said 'No!' and rejected to lend them money or said, 'No, that's too much!' then for some particular, well considered reasons an ordinary player would never catch sight of. And when the banks already said 'No! Thanks, but no thanks!' then they run around and invent other financing models/rather traps to get the funding anyway the pros had denied them earlier. This Early Access garbage has become a nuisance ever since. The pitcher is brought to the well until it breaks. That's what comes of it!
I do agree that Early Access/Kickstarter Campaigns can be used to take advantage of early supporters of a game/product etc. However, I do believe that Dovetail did secure funding from an Investment Company (Alcuin Capital Partners) before announcing Flight Sim World so their financing model isn't solely reliant on Early Access and DLC income. However as you said, there must have been development plans etc in place to secure such funding (which Alcuin claim is between £2 - £15 million per transaction). However that now begs the question... how was this project managed? Did most of that investment go into Train Sim World and the flight sim side of the business were left high and dry? That's why I want to see the Dovetail Executives release a statement. After having a bit more time to think about this, if you go back and read the existing announcement... there's not even an apology!
Does anyone know what this does for the licensing of FSX (Microsoft)? I'm probably totally wrong in this, but I was under the impression that Dovetail had the rights to sell a consumer version of FSX in Flight Sim World, whereas Lockheed Martin could only sell an educational copy of FSX in Prepar3D? Does this now open the door for Lockheed Martin to buy the rights to sell a consumer version of their product? To be clear this is all guesswork and not researched on my part.
That's an interesting thought. I've read from PMDG that they along with some other people were interested in buying the "FSX - Entertainment" license from Microsoft but were ultimately out-bid by Dovetail games. I'm not sure what will happen to the license now but it's currently owned by Dovetail so they might regroup and have another crack at it... or they might try and sell it on. The License in terms of the ESP engine (which runs FSX, P3D and FSW) will most likely define how the engine can be used. My understanding is that Microsoft wrote two Licenses, one was a "Professional" version defining that the software must be used for training/education purposes, which is why we see P3D marketed as a professional training tool targetted at organisations... and an "Entertainment" license which allows for more of a computer game focus. But Dovetail are the owners of the license so they now have full control of what happens to it.
I would hazard a guess and say Dovetail are pretty skint at the moment seeing as they are going to have to lay a few people off. They would have lost a shed load of money as well as there is no doubt FSW was a failure waiting to happen. We all called it. That aside I am thinking how could Lockheed implement a consumer licence? Maybe they could turn the academic licence into a consumer licence and keep the professional licence as is. I have only just bought P3D as I was always put off with not wanting to "break the TOS" Luckily my son is taking flying lessons :). Still I would love to see a P3D consumer version. As a side note, I have always been an FSX man and after switching to P3D v4 with PTA, I am blown away. I am so excited about the future of flight sim, and how far it has come. I did have to spend nearly £2K on a PC though :D PPS. I love your videos Doof. Your walk through's are second to none and very detailed. Good on ya ;)
I'm not sure, I know that Dovetail secured Investment from an investment company a couple of years ago. According to the firm (Alcuin Capital Partners), their usual investment amount is in the region of £2 - £15 million. I suspect that was used by Dovetail to develop their new generation of simulators, Flight Sim World and Train Sim World. Dovetail historically have been Train Sim developers and that's the bulk of the business. I've no idea what their financial condition is so I'm not sure if it's just the flight sim side which is struggling or if the business as a whole is having a hard time. I read yesterday that PMDG were interested in buying the "Entertainment" license from Microsoft years ago when they stopped development of the "Microsoft Flight Sim" series, however they were out-bid by Dovetail who got the License. I'm not sure if PMDG would still be interested, nor am I sure if Lockheed Martin would want to get the License and somehow consolidate it with their current License. I guess time will tell. PS. Thanks for the support, I try my best :)
Can I be Devils Advicate here? I agree with all fellow Flight Simmers with this announcement but didnt we know deep down that this was going to happen from the start. But being fair wirh DGT that the ammount of work that goes into making a sim is emence. It was just a matter of time.
It is, but someone mentioned in a comment earlier that this is Dovetail's second flight sim. They had a go with Dovetail Flight School which ultimately didn't work out... so they had previous experience and hopefully applied some lessons learned to FSW. As I said, I think that it should have been kept out of the public eye for longer until they had a more complete product ready.
The direction that they took I had a feeling that FSW would fail. With the announcement of Orbx true earth for x-plane 11 it was only a matter of time.
Amazing to drop it so close to "launch" still on their product page. www.dovetailgames.com/products Thanks for your comments Doofer. Looks like xplane will have stronger numbers now to the moon!
Well I've always believed that X-Plane will grow stronger now that XP11 is more accessible and user-friendly. Now we're seeing the likes of OrbX releasing products for XP now so it's just going to get stronger.
My personal feelings as a purchaser and user of several DTG games are very negative. DTG don't want to listen to the constructive criticism of their products and seem to be only interested in taking peoples money. They promise things and fail to deliver. I think DTG need to up their game and get some new blood both in terms of management and developers or the company as a whole will die.
That's very concerning if you've had negative experiences among their other games as well. There's no doubt that Dovetail need to change their relationship with their customers, the company's reputation was sketchy before this happened, and now with Flight Sim World being cancelled....that's shown a new level of dis-service to their customers.
I had the same negative experience as you found with FSW and I have also played their fishing sim which has gone downhill since the beta release. So full of bugs and has become another cash grab with all the DLC they are releasing instead of fixing the game. It seems a common theme with DTG now. Train Simulator hasn't been updated in a long time all they keep doing is releasing more DLC. Train Sim World is just as bad as Flight Sim World, buggy and lacking content unless you keep throwing money at yet more DLC. On a positive note I guess we should be grateful to DTG for helping to keep FSX alive.
That's another common criticism I'm seeing from a lot of comments... before, during and after Flight Sim World actually. The focus on DLC production. Unfortunately, it's a business model that many game developers have made. You see it rife in the mobile game market and now in the mainstream gaming industry with these "Microtransactions" and "Lootbox" functions in games. I've seen many great game franchises be sullied by this change of focus. Battlefield and subsequently, Star Wars Battlefront. GTA V Online, Counter Strike and the gambling websites. It's led to game developers designing games around DLC and in game purchases rather than focusing on delivering the best day 1 experience. Now we see developers releasing half a game which they fill out later on with DLC etc. I do agree though that we should be grateful for Dovetail bringing FSX Steam Edition to the world. It's certainly given FSX a "second wind" and kept that simulator alive for a few more years, keeping Third Party devs going with it as well.
To be honest, DTG's business model is to release bare bone games with minimal content and then shoving out one DLC after the other. The worst example is TS with its hundreds of sometimes really shitty DLC's. Seriously, what did the people expect? A full price, high quality, product from DTG with full content? You gotta be kidding me.
It certainly appears that way, given how the FSW project was put out there. I can't speak for the Train Sim side of things but at a glance, it appears to follow a similar plan. I guess people hoped that Dovetail would take this opportunity to do something different and bring something fresh to the world of flight simulation but alas, it was not the case. An interesting thing to consider.... was the FSW project poorly managed? Or were the flight sim team being strangled by higher management constraints demanding that business model?
I think the development team might be as easy the victims in all of this as well as the early kickstarter access supporters who believed in the game also. I wonder if management knew for a while this was going to happen........ way before the announcement?? Yet their recent announcements suggested release date and massive improvements...... It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up??
I'm pretty sure they did know, they even say in the annoucement "after many detailed discussions".... but I do wonder if those discussions went beyond senior management. As you say, it doesn't make sense that they would continue to talk about development progress, releasing updates such as the 5th Career Mode update 3 days before shutting everything down. It is very strange and nothing has been explained properly to people eagerly anticipating these update.
They just needed to bring FSX to 64 bit and upgraded the planes to 64 bit. A lot of people have spent big money on fsx and would have stayed with it. Then perhaps introduced career mode, true sky, and etc.
I was caught by the teaser at first release...buy it and what a surprise to notice it was an old FSX with botox...so, fly with X Plane 11, with a bunch of free 3th parts and be happy...
Dovetail has no need to explain anything. They thought they could hit it big with the flight sim community, but they forgot that we ain't 12 year olds that gamble skins and buy lootboxes. That is not bashing. That is what happened. They tried to convince people to buy FSW and DLC when they knew they would cancel it! Dovetail might as well start making clicker mobile games.
As I said, it'd be the responsible thing to do to give their customers some sort of closure on the matter but I doubt it'll happen considering the announcement didn't even contain an apology.
Sad - it was beginning to develop & is visually good. However, DTG philosophy appears to be 'DLCs for the win!' - just total up what's available for TS. That appears to be their finance model. As has been said by many, if only they got on board with add-on devs sooner - even if it meant them signing NDAs at the early stage. But perhaps they don't have suitable dev kit tools themselves to make things easier, so they'd have nothing to offer third-parties!
I'm not sure how their relationship with third party developers was. I know they had a team member solely dedicated to working with Third Parties so it's something they put effort towards. After reading an announcement from PMDG regarding FSW closing development, it seems that some third parties may not have agreed with how Dovetail planned to manage and publish third party addons. There was also some concerns regarding how revenue from add ons would be distributed because the revenue would not only be shared between the Third Party and Dovetail, but Steam would also take a share. So for some developers, that was a sticking point. As for the Dev Kit, I'm not a developer so I'm not sure how Dev kits work but developers would have had experience making addons for FSX using older tools, and Dovetail did release an SDK on Steam so I'm pretty sure the tools were there for Third Parties... maybe low player numbers were a concern for third parties as well?
I was taking something of a wait and see attitude toward FSW, though I was impressed to a point by the sample of it I got to try at Flightsimcon last year. I'd add that I bought a fair bit of what I saw at that convention. I bought the TFDi 717, and when it was finally released, the Just Flight VC-10. If DLC is truly what Dovetail does best, they should have found a way to make some of their new technologies available to FSX users. You'd have to wonder what some of us would pay to have a version of FSX that is stable and doesn't require us to pay monthly. I'm not sure that I can call X-Plane 11 the future yet, as one of the few things I tried doing in it revealed a horrible flaw in its ATC system . Running a simple flight to Kahului from Honolulu, the ATC inevitably vectored me into a mountain. I tried this at least three times, and got the same result. Judging from the remarks I see here, Dovetail may have bought themselves some trouble. One notable theme of the comments is how much Dovetail Games is off of people's shopping lists.
I'm not sure what you mean with the pay monthly thing? To my knowledge, none of the sims have a subscription-based pricing model, you pay once and get the software. The only thing I can think of is Lockheed Martin charging monthly for a developer-focused version of Prepared 3D but that's not something a regular end user would purchase. I do see that common criticism of X Plane having a poor ATC system. I know that X Plane is starting to gather favour and momentum with some of the FSX/P3D developers now putting effort into making X Plane add ons. Hopefully we'll see an improved version of ATC in the sim however it would be nice if Laminar Research put this into X Plane as standard.
Doofer911 Prepar3d was exactly what I was talking about. There's plenty of people who have gone that way, even if they don't really fill the role of a developer...
Are you sure? I was under the impression that most people were buying the "Student" P3D Licence instead of the more expensive "Professional" one, which is still a one-off payment. I'd be interested to hear which casual home-simmers have bought the Developer License.
You are, now that I give it some thought, probably right. But some could make that mistake, especially if they are developing scenery, or aircraft, even with the SDK available for download.
It would be. They seemed very keen to push this new "generation" of simulators to move away from the classic "Train Sim 2016/2017/2018" series of games. I'm not into Train Simulation so I'm not sure how TSW compares to the older games. I'm not sure if the Train Sim community shares similarities with flight simmers, such as investing money into addons for an older game and not seeing enough "value" in the new TSW to justify leaving the old game behind.
Doofer911 I have both TSW and the old RW/TS, and I haven't touched RW/TS for a year already. I find the experience in the London to Reading route to be the most satisfying experience I have ever had. Still, the game is still just a "Prototype", as written in the game folders, since there are obvious aspects missing on the package, the "Content Creation" aspects, like route editing, scenario creation and add-on development. TSW offers beyond what the old platform can deliver, and I'm waiting eagerly for the moment I can start exporting assets for the game. But yeah, there's people who are reluctant to make the move due to their DLC collection, especially those who have their favourite trains/routes already made for RW/TS. Steam enthusiasts, for example, still don't have an excuse to make the move to TSW, simply because there is still no steam locomotives and historic routes. For TSW to succeed, it needs three things: 1. Release the Content Creation Tools; 2. Include proper documentation and developer support; 3. Support for all types of traction. Unfortunately, DTG loves their Add-ons, and they're probably reluctant to share content developing tools, especially when they can control the market and set their quality standards firmly. Still, releasing the game for XBOX was a very huge win from their part. Still, just including a single route shows exactly what kind of business model they're after.
It sounds like they're taking the same approach with TSW as they did with FSW... release the basic foundation of the sim and then build upon it over time. That's interesting that they haven't released an SDK or Tools for the train sim community, that was one of the early goals for Flight Sim World. But your comment regarding DTG and their control of DLC and Add-ons is very interesting. I've heard from other flight sim developers that they had concerns regarding how Dovetail were going to manage third party add ons and integrate them into FSW and the Steam Store. Are there many Third Party Train Simulation developers or is most of the add on content for train sims developed by Dovetail themselves?
In Train Simulation there are several traditions that come way back from the 2001 Microsoft Train Simulator. There are freeware and payware single developers, and also developer teams. Sometimes, in order to look for content from a specific country, you'd probably look around the internet for independent creators. ChrisTrains is a veteran in the field. The bulk of Dutch railways for MSTS and RW/TS comes from him, and for RW/TS he adopted a Payware approach to his creations due to how increasingly complex and time consuming developing trains and routes was becoming. As far as I can remember, Spain has about 5 different websites with freeware add-ons for MSTS, Trainz and RW/TS. Dovetail Games launched years ago a "Partner Program" that helped Third Party developers to include their content on Steam as DLC for TS/RW, and sharing the earnings with the creators, while providing users safe and easy installs and automatic updates. The problem with the Steam Store is that, if DtG launched a new rolling stock that had already been made in a payware package by someone else, it would have these characteristics: - Only include one livery; - More basic and simple to drive; - Routes are shorter and less equipped; - Almost complete disregard to sound design; - More expensive to buy. So, you can image the backlash that DtG had every single time independent creators were able to do better and cheap. It raised the stakes too high, and move people away from DtG's homebrew content. And that is not good. Also, they are VERY picky about what content they want to support. If a Third Party does a route and/or rolling stock that is very popular and will sell well, they'll support that developer and help him get his work done. If a Third Party is doing a route/train for a "niche" country/market, they'll simply ignore and prevent him from accessing useful support. (Basically my life story since I shifted to RW/TS) I reckon Chris doesn't add his content to the Steam Shop, not only because his content would be sold for a more expensive price, the share he would receive would be lower than what he gets on his own terms.
This game was amazing for new comers. I started with aerofly cause scenery means a lot to me. But Aerofly got to shallow to fast. So I debated between x plane and few. Xplane looked better at night, had more planes, more freeware, and was more developed- but personally I think x plane has some of the worst ground visuals. Fsw had great UI, decent ground textures, the cities looked more like the real life cities than x plane, but what won me over was the game 's loaded with training wheels. It gradually teaches people how to fly in these sims. The flight school showed how to maneuver, cold dark mode had a clip board that would high light what you needed to turn on during pre flight, there was a progressive taxi system to show you the ways of the runway, air traffic control was basic but it was easy for beginners. This sim going under is a huge loss for the community. Xplane is not new comer freindly. It turns many people off because of how complicated it is. I mean u have to manually set the GPS.....that's insane for casual simmers. Flight sim world was the perfect middle ground. It would hold you hand in the beginning in till you didn't need it's aid anymore. Now in x plane or flight sim world I can't work a piper with no problem. I'm going to have to move to x plane if fsw doesn't get sold off- but without fsw beginner friendliness, myself and many others wouldn't have gotten into this genre. And a hobby only grows if new people join.
It was shaping up to be a nice entry into the genre. I think that part of the reason it wasn't well received by the existing flight sim community is because Dovetail hyped the game quite a lot before it's initial release. Then when it came out, it was very bare-bones and stripped back compared to FSX/P3D and XPlane, also, there were many glaring bugs which left a bad impression on people as well. Dovetail were getting it into a good shape this year, it had some compelling features that made it much more interesting but I think the damage had been done by it's initial release and first impressions.
Let's face it.. the amount of $$ and development that goes into these products is huge these days... and the flight sim market just isn't big enough to support it.
I beg to differ, we see plenty of add ons being developed for the existing sims. And Dovetail were not designing a simulator from a blank piece of paper. They had the framework of FSX and the ESP engine. Admittedly, they appear to have completely gutted FSX and reworked a lot of the engine to enable better performance. I just don't think that FSW had enough "value" to pull the players away from the other sims.
Me too. As I said in the video, I have been keeping an eye on it and the Career Mode is exactly the type of thing Flight Sim World needed to catch people's attention and show them that FSW is bringing something new to flight simulation. Unfortunately it seems that it was too little too late.
That's fair enough, if you enjoy the sim then feel free to do so. The main points I wanted to make with this video was to announce to my flight sim audience as to what had happened, hopefully try and prompt some sort of further discussion and explanation from Dovetail as to why they've let down their customers, and to educate people so they can avoid this sort of problem in the future.
An important point not emphasised here is that not only was Dovetail's business model deeply flawed, they failed to realise that flight sims can only prosper when third party input is encouraged. Instead Dovetail showed their usual myopic greed by closing down content largely to themselves, or re-issuing old software. They also had no insight into the fact that flight sim enthusiasts are already extremely knowledgable and already had access to addons far, far more sophisticated than Dovetail's own output. If they had opened up Flight Sim World from the beginning they might have survived, but they wanted all the DLC revenue for themselves. That kind of greed is the prime reason the whole enterprise was doomed. They also had a management structure that relied on old fashioned employees/manager relationships which worked the employees hard for not much reward. They approached third parties to help them but offered poor rewards to them too. Add to that the absurdly high Steam cut of 30% and you have no maneouvring leeway to satisfy everybody involved. It works for them regarding railways because the average rail enthusiast who buys rail simulator have fewer choices or access to quality content. The flight sim world has hundreds of addon designers who are nearly all very good at what they do. Dovetail had not a hope of competing with this kind of expertise. But the bottom line is that they were greedy and ended up with a handful of dust, and deservedly so.
Yeah, it pains me to see that they haven't learned a damn thing from Flight Sim World and are applying the same business model to their newest offering Fishing Sim World. I've seen the exact same things cropping up that plagued Flight Sim World, dumb little quality issues that ruin impressions of the game. Just read a review on steam explaining that you can play from a first person perspective but can't walk backwards...... a fundamental part of any first person control in a game and they don't even have full character movement mechanics in place?? Come on Dovetail!
R.I.P. Dovetail Games. This will also reflect on other DTG platforms such as Train Sim World (TSW). I won't never buy any DTG product again. Best apology they could give is a refund to all customers who were deceived by them.
I'm not sure if this will completely ruin the company. It's clear with Flight School and now Flight Sim World that the flight sim side of the business hasn't performed as well as the train sim side which is what Dovetail started with and grown from. But this will certainly cause a lot of distrust and skepticism surrounding Dovetail. I hope that they make a follow-up announcement regarding FSW giving a full explanation as to what happened to give their fans some sort of closure on the matter.
They claim that they did, that was the work being carried out before it's release. My experience with performance though is that it wasn't that much better than FSX.
It appears so, when you consider the performance gains that P3D offers over FSX, considering it's the same engine, it's clear there was room for improvement.
To be honest, I think FSW was doomed from day 1, they entered the community and immediately annoyed everyone by releasing the very bad 'flight school'. The immediately got a bad reputation, and when you want people to invest and move to your platform how you as a company is perceived is very important. It's a shame they couldn't make it work, it might have been something great if they'd have listened to the community and worked on it a lot more before releasing it and expecting to be able to compete with Xplane and P3D.
Well the thing with Flight School, it didn't work out but that was a perfect opportunity to learn from mistakes and come back stronger. But I'm starting to see that a common complaint is that they didn't really take feedback from the community, and that feedback would have been an incredibly valuable asset as they moved away from Flight School and into Flight Sim World. I know that people can be demanding saying "Do this or do that" but there's that old saying "The customer is always right"... and even if they aren't... they give a good indication of what people in general are interested in.
Definitely. Would have been nice to see someone come along and disrupt the stalwarts that are Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research which cater to more experienced simmers. FSW was setting up nicely to be a nice simulator for people getting into flight sim for the first time.
I purchased FSW on 22/05/2017, never installed, never played, and I was even asking you on Stream the other week about my desire to jump on to P3D.. I guess this just makes me feel better I invested Zero time into FSW, sadly, I invested Money.. Oh well.
I think there is certain criteria to get a refund. I believe that you have to have played less than 2 hours in the game and had the game less than a week to qualify for a refund. I'm not sure of the exact criteria but I'm pretty sure that Play Time and the amount of time since buying the game are the two main things.
Thank God, I paid only $9.59 for Flight Sim World® and $4.87 for Flight Sim World: Epic Approaches Mission Pack. Am I selfish? Make sens what you said Joss. I am not sorry for purchasing FSW, I'm sorry for the bad management of DTG. I'm really disappointed because I was expecting a good future for this SIM.
I stand firm by you guys and I watch your channels, I've listened to Novawing and the "Go-around" and a few other UA-camrs on the subject. I don't understand why they blame the failure on the communities harsh criticism and viscously defend Dovetail. It sounds as if they are defending a great group of hobbyists with a big heart who went out to do this on their own.Dovetail bought they rights back in 2014 and got everyone all excited saying they were working on a new sim in 2015. It's a business, they had 3 years. These defenders go on and on and on oh they built so much in just a few short years and everyone was so harsh on them...........? What did the really accomplish? They bought FSX, they bought rights to bake in Accu-sim, they bought rights to bake in Orbx FTX Global, Carenado made some of the aircraft, then at they end they bought True Sky for it. When a new flight sim comes out lets be honest, it's like PlayStation vs X-Box vs Nintendo. Everyone is waiting on standby because you don't wanna buy it and BOOM all the cool games come out for the OTHER platform. X-Plane and P3D released their x64 sims in spring 2017? How long could we all wait for Dovetail while the new x64 sims are out for many months. I was nervous about Buying P3D Pro and waiting and waiting on Flight Sim World and that last 6 months just watching the forums and people saying, ok guys we need lights now please, we need ATC come on, then they released all these stupid mission packs. That's when I thought, ok this isn't going well, somethings not right - it took them three years just to get here something isn't right. Everyone is praying for them to get lights and ATC and they released an explosion of mission packs with no real voice actors - that was insulting to me. I don't need to pay $20 to use my imagination, release that stuff when the games done. I bought P3D Pro just weeks ago so happy I did. I can't defend their management but I'm sure their management is furious. About 8 salaries maybe x 3 years and all the other costs? They probably felt they lost millions for nothing. Think about it, how would you feel as a business owner if you spent 4 million dollars on a small crew to develop your new billing system and after three years all they had was a new menu an a few features but everyone said "meh" would rather use the old one - you'd be LIVID. That took 3 years geesh. I was cheering for this team 2 years ago now just nothing but painfull disappointment. Anyone remember the launch trailer for Flight School? What a cheese ball, more cheese than a Kirk Cameron film trailer.
Yeah when you consider the timeline, with their Flight School product experience they MUST have known how important it was to take the lessons learned forward into FSW. They MUST have known how important it was to make a great first impression with FSW to win back the hearts and minds of flight simmers and they completely blew it. I'm not sure how much blame should be apportioned to the team... they are working under direction from managers who should be driving them to create certain features, meet deadlines and quality requirements. If FSW was released featureless and buggy, that to me shows a lack of pride in work and the standards of work expected by management.
I could care less. Yeah FSW looked cool, but I’ve been pretty contempt with my FSX and money has been an issuer for me for many years so I haven’t been in the market for any upgraded sims. But from the sound of it, I feel like DTG is turning into EA from the sounds of it.
I think that is part of the challenge of developing a new sim... if it doesn't offer "more" than FSX, then why would someone want to leave FSX and invest in a new sim? As for DTG turning into EA... you're probably right considering the CEO at Dovetail was a senior manager at EA and previously worked on "The Sims" franchise.
Well, it is becoming EA. Many of their so called wiz kid developers/programmers used to work at EA. The EA thinking has become more focused at DTG. They seem to think a arcade style sim will be a big hit compared to something that's more realistic.
Yeah I went back and saw a Steam post that went up on the FSW Steam News page where Stephen talked about his lack of interest in aviation before taking on this project. Kind of strange, to paraphrase what he said, he had no interest in aviation whatsoever before this project and then since starting the project, he went and studied and got a PPL. Fair play but I was left with a bad taste in my mouth because there's many aspiring pilots in the world who don't have the finances or opportunity to go and study for a PPL yet are way more passionate about the subject. It just reads like one big ego trip. I'll link the article below if you haven't seen it... steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791458199091/announcements/detail/3375882122118011807
I bought it, tried it, did not like it cuz could not mod it, just sitting on my drive now taking up space, sounds like good reason to delete it, their taking their money and running (some of it what I payed for it), have to say it all sounds a bit shadey
At face value, it does look incredibly bad... which is why I think it's very important for a follow up announcement to explain what's going on at Dovetail and why this announcement has come so suddenly, despite there being constant updates about development progress and new features where it appeared that everything was ticking over nicely.
Hello again my friend . Doing some investigation on Froogle's claims during the Sunday report , I did indeed find verification. Look at Steve Hoods Tweet's .On Jan 12 2018 they were indeed doing some hiring We are looking for both a Lead Programmer and a Flight Business Director, to be directly involved with the Flight team! Full job description can be found at: www.dovetailgames.com/vacancies Feb 24 2018 We've got some epic savings on Epic Approaches, experience the thrill of landing in a variety of challenging scenarios at 60% off! Interesting enough ...Steve Hoods last post was March 24 which was a retweet on a airport closing . I am sure that Steve Hood who was the acting executive director for Dovetail Games had already made the decision . You can look at dovetail games FSW facebook page for the rest. If I find anything else not listed that has some bearing , I will let you know
Yeah, as both Froogle and I mention in our videos, on FSW's Facebook page, they shared a post from Bluesky Simulations I think it was... who made an announcement 3 days before FSW was cancelled saying that they're looking forward to bringing a Spitfire Add on aircraft to FSW... 3 days before it was cancelled. The decision was already made yet they continued to lead customers on. This would suggest that not even the Social Media manager for FSW knew that it was going to be cancelled if they kept getting info from the front line developers saying "We're going to release the next update to the Career mode on this date." etc.
I said it from the beginning... when they released a product that was not ready, not developer friendly. With no real world weather , I could go on and on...Dovetail shot themselves in the foot . The release of a much better platform P3DV4 who in all fairness had a 8 year advantage with members of the original ESP team , and a major focus on the platform rather than the features . Dovetail did not do their homework, and would have done better if they had waited. People might say if they had waited then they would never have released a product...well We waited 10 years for it, another year would not have killed it. They released aircraft that did not work, and waited to release a SDK for development. Had scenery only draw 6 miles max, making it look like an old product. FSX had the same issue, but it was more pronounced in FSW. Night flying was impossible. I could see this without buying the product. RIP FSW !
Yeah I stand by that criticism that it was released way too early. The number of bugs in the initial release REALLY turned me off FSW and made me think that Dovetail weren't taking it seriously. That said.... I think if Dovetail didn't do that... and released FSW as it is today for their initial Early Access release, I think it would have been received a lot better.
I guess I should have included the licences Microsoft Split and then controlled . Separating Pro from entertainment. I am sure they made good money for it , but that was what made FSX the sim of it's time. You did not have to know how to fly, hop into a ultralight hit the throttle and go. If you found a passion for it , you could take it to aircraft systems and learn how to improve your skills. It was a all around simulation for everybody. What is done is done, now the question is, what will happen to the entertainment licence? Will it go back on the market? Could Lockheed pick it up? And if so...will they ? We need a simulator with a user friendly UI . Made for all not just for some.
I've no idea. That seems to be the main topic of speculation now... "What will happen to the "Entertainment" License?" It could go any of the ways you've suggested. I know PMDG were interested in a joint venture with some other people to buy the License when MS put it on the market however Dovetail outbid them to secure it. So another question to throw out there would be... "Could some existing add on developers band-together to buy the license from Dovetail and work together to build a new sim?"
Well my guess is that Microsoft in the selling of the licence , might have added a clause that holds the "Entertainment clause " hostage. In other words they still have a hand in it should rules be broken . I am not a big fan of Bill Gates, but he had a passion and investment in flight simulation . When he retired , that passion ended along with the extra funding he provided. Like I said, FSX was a beast because it included simmers and gamer's in a single package. I still own two boxed Gold editions to this day. I did make a move to P3DV4 but remained loyal to FSX. I looked at FSW / XPlane 11 , and P3DV4 . I would not go to P3D as long as they remained 32 bit. With the release of V4 I made the switch . That decision was based on research of what was available, what I was comfortable with. While FSW had a face lift and the rain effects were good, I have invested $4000 in add-ons for FSX. P3DV4 had the same default scenery, but it would draw out to the horizon . The focus was far better, than FSX. FSW did not hold water despite the scenery face lift. The water looked like FSX default, and there were no add-ons available, where Lockheed had developers ready and on board. Many who offered updates free of charge. Now many say that dovetail listened to the community , but actions indicate something else . Without real world weather , scenery add-ons, GPS not working, brakes not braking , night flying impossible , and the list goes on and on. In many ways Dovetail took 2 steps backwards for every step forward. Now I am rambling ! Sorry
Nah don't worry about rambling at all! I wanted this video to prompt some discussion and act as a forum for people to air their thoughts. It was an interesting read, sounds like your approach to flight simming and upgrading to P3D was the same as mine. I can see what FSW was going for with the facelift but it needed more substantial updates and new features which have not been seen in FSX/3D/XP. Like the Career Mode was a big step in the right direction but it appears to be too little too late.
If they knew they were going to fold how could they get us to buy their P40? I am out of pocket - hard-earned cash which could have gone to other things, but what I am most angry about is the way customers have been treated. Some warning before I purchased the P40 would have been the right thing to do, as it would have been before anyone else put their hand in their wallet to purchase FSW add-ons. I think that it is shameful that they kept trading knowing that they were going to the wall, or could go to the wall in the foreseeable future. We invest more than money with flight sim companies - we invest trust. As for the way the sim was put on the market, a basic sim missing all the things that others had was very disappointing. Even though people get anxious about new sims and the lead time before release it would be better for all, including the developers to hang off and load the sim up so it hits the ground running - ready to go. I feel cheated. You won't be on my Christmas List, Dovetail!
I completely agree and I sympathize with you and all FSW customers. You're completely right, the way you've been treated is disgusting which is why I hope Dovetail's senior executives make a follow up announcement because 1. They owe it to you and 2. You need some sort of closure on the matter after being led on by development promises. Unfortunately since making this video, I've seen more and more rumours that not even the FSW developers knew that this decision was coming. The actual 3D modellers, artists and programmers were continuing work normally only to arrive in the office on a Monday morning to be told that development was being stopped immediately and that they were probably going to lose a job. That makes me resent Dovetail's senior management even more. It's disgraceful to mislead your customers... but to mislead your staff as well would be a whole other level of contempt displayed by management.
I suspect the revenue collected was used for development. It paid for software engineers, managements and all associated overhead. Software development is a very expensive undertake. Ask Google how they are doing despite all of the money in the world they are struggling keeping apps relevant and apple with all its might struggled with 11.0 and the iPhone X has been less than anticipated. In our Sim world the problem is bigger because we lack the numbers and the users are aging fast and a low number of interested younger simmers will not replace the old pilots. :( It puts into perspective the job Microsoft did with FSX and Prepar3D and X-Plane. In regards to FSW I bought the early access and never did have one flight where I enjoyed the flight. Today I am amazed how good FSX with ORBx can be. FSW just never got to any level where I said, boy! they have turned the corner. The last release allowed me to fly a float plane and it was fun. I got my money's worth. I wish the FSW development team good luck and I hope they take the experience to new beginnings and future success. Doofer911 thank you for a heartfelt announcement. in 1982 I flew FS 1.0 in a test computer and the salesman said that if it got more realistic I would need a license. Nope! it was horrible, but 15 years later it was better. LOL
I'm pretty sure that's the case but as I said in the video, I think that development efforts were prioritising the wrong things. I think if they held onto FSW and released it this year after they'd got Float planes in and working, got the Career Mode in, Got TrueSky in and had all of those things available from the first public release... then that would have been received by the whole flight sim community in a more favorable manner and would have drawn in more people and more interest to generate more revenue for continued development. When the game first dropped last year, there wasn't much in there to "wow" people and show that FSW was a BIG step forward from what's currently available. Yes there was some nice eye candy but in terms of features and functionality, it felt like a big step backwards if anything. But they looked like they were starting to get somewhere with this Career mode and just as they're getting things moving in the right direction, it's all stopped suddenly. I just hope the FSW community gets a more detailed explanation. Judging by comments on Steam, a lot of people feel very hard done by, rightly so.
ok guys. never thought id be confused about buying a game. but now its may 2019. im new to the sim world. but love airliners. played fsx years ago. was ok. now what? i ordered x plane 11 with some extras. but its not going to be relased till june? i downloaded flightgear. and it seems to just crash out. im using windows 10, i7-9700k, 32gbs ram, m2 drives, and a amd vega 56. so my pc should be able to cope with most of whats out there. was going to buy virtual pilot 3d. now im reading its a scam?
> X-Plane 11 is available today through the X-Plane website and Steam Store. It's widely regarded as being one of the best consumer flight simulators available today along with... > Prepar3D (P3D) which is an evolution of Microsoft FSX. Prepar3D is marketed as being a professional product but it's still available to buy and use as a regular consumer. > X-Plane 11 and Prepar3D are the two most popular simulators and have active communities and experienced third party developers continuously making high quality add-on content. > Digital Combat Simulations (DCS) is another popular simulator however it's military focused so you can learn to fly fast jets, shoot missiles, drop bombs etc. It's available through the DCS website and Steam Store. Now the other two you mentioned.. > My understanding is that Flight Gear is an open-source simulator and isn't quite a complete product yet. The reviews I've seen seem to suggest that there's varying quality between scenery and aircraft in the sim. I don't know much more about it I'm afraid. > My initial research into Virtual Pilot 3D is that a lot of flight sim "news" websites are indicating that this is a scam. There are several scam flight simulators and a lot of them seem to be built on the back of, or take advantage, or use the Flight Gear simulator because it's open-source and therefore free to download. Meaning it's a little bit of time and effort for potentially big rewards for the scammers. My advice would be to consider Prepar3D or X-Plane 11 if you're looking for a well rounded, feature-full and polished simulator.
The problem was the stupid GA only release, Microsoft did the same mistake with Microsoft Flight,now DTG, they should have followed p3d and xplane when releasing the product, I'm not against GA sim but what catches the public eyes are the airliners, just look at Ivao,pilotedge ,vatsim 85% are jets flying and releasing a flight simulator with no big plane or airliner is a stupid decision, it was promising but those GA would not bring the audience
As Dr Edward and the official announcement says, the game will be available until 24th May and you'll still be able to play it after that date. But just be aware that it won't change and there won't be any more official updates made for it.
I bought from Steam a few weeks ago, but found it buggy and obtained a refund within 2 hours. Turned out to be lucky! I think DTG makes its money from its train sim and the high cost dlcs. I wonder if Microsoft regrets selling off the FSX rights to DTG? Sad day for flight simmers.
Yeah I think you would have fallen inside the refund criteria if you haven't owned the game for long and only played a short amount of time. Unfortunately, it appears that many FSW players have fallen outside of that criteria and can't get a refund now. As for MS... I don't think they're bothered. My understanding is that they sold off the ESP Engine Licenses to Lockheed Martin and Dovetail games as they were the highest bidders. I've recently discovered that PMDG and some others banded togeher to try and buy the ESP "Entertainment" license but were outbid by Dovetail in the end. So I think MS just wanted to get the most money for the software rather than focusing on making sure that flight simulation would be passed onto the best people. That said, I do think that some of the original Microsoft Flight Sim developers now work at Lockheed on P3D so P3D has the best "pedigree" of flight sim developers I would say.
Well I'm planning on getting a more comprehensive schedule together so I'll start to feature more P3D and XP11 content alongside FSX. I may also dip my toes into DCS from time to time.
The moral of the story: NEVER EVER buy early on ANY product. Ditto for anything kickstarter like TANE. Yeah maybe you save $$$ by doing so. But if it goes belly up like this POS did, you're out %100 on your money. (However, if you inform your CC company of what happened, you'll get a full refund better than %90 of the time unlike if you try to deal with Steam, DTG, NV3 all these companies ripping off their customers with BS like this mess.) I personally did this with TANE. I learned from TANE and seriously doubted all the hype when TSW came onto the scene. Reminded me too much of the TANE propaganda BS. And if this POS had made it off the ground, (nice pun there !!) it would have been a POS just like TSW.
I disagree. I think some products released into Early Access are worth investing in if the developers are transparent, have a clear plan and communicate that well with their target audience. Two games that spring to mind which did Early Access well in my opinion were Planet Coaster and Prison Architect. In those cases, the bulk of Planet Coaster had been developed and the end product was a MASSIVE step forward from the previous Theme Park Tycoon games such as RCT1/2/3, even in it's first public release state. With Prison Architect, the game wasn't as fully featured at first, however there was a regular, reliable update schedule with videos and commentary from the developers to fully explain each feature, the design behind it and how it integrates into the bigger picture. Also, the developers took care to keep the game in an "Early Access" status until they clearly developed it to the point where it had many features and matched their "vision" for what they wanted the game to be. ONLY THEN, did they take it out of Early Access and into a full, official release. With FSW... the initial public release didn't have many defining features which indicated it was a step forward from FSX, P3D or X Plane.... which I suspect made many people think "Well why would I give up FSX/P3D/XP for FSW which doesn't offer anything significantly better?" Which is why I say in the video, if Dovetail released FSW as it is now, it would have been received better and got more of a following. With things like the Career Mode and Interactive Checklist system... those are very cool features!
To be honest I'm glad FSW nonsense is over. In my mind they approached subject from absolutely wrong side. Instead of doing very specific set of usage scenarios like carrier of private VFR pilot, commercial pilot or something along those lines, DTG started to implement another clone of FSX with no specific direction.
As I said, I think FSW would have received a better reaction if Dovetail brought things we hadn't seen before. But I agree, the features being developed didn't seem to offer much new very early on. If anything, a lot of features were stripped out of the code while the team worked on upgrading it to take advantage of 64bit and new hardware power etc.
Yeah I think they over-promised and under-delivered which upset a lot of people and they couldn't recover from that bad initial first impression of the sim.
Ah ok, As far as I know it's only Flight School and Flight Sim World that they have abandoned and maybe some old Train Simulator games. But it's very strange to abandon a game after one year (Flight Sim World)
I've said this before and I'll say it again, X Plane is growing stronger. We've now seen Orbx (another big FSX/P3D developer) start making products for X Plane and it won't be long before someone works on an improved ATC system. X Plane seems to be getting bigger and stronger.
Personally, I don't think I will really bother with payware scenery for XP11. Hd global scenery mesh and Ortho4xp are basically all you need and those mods are free. That's right ! payware quality scenery for zero $ Definitely a big improvement, coming from FSX
so basically this means that dovetail will lose trust from the public and in general will lose public's attention and clients in general further down the road ! well too bad for them ! might as well stick to fsx or p3d ! but no way x plane !
If you're a customer of theirs, I think you're well within your right to request that. I imagine for the dedicated fans of FSW, it's a horrible experience. Dovetail releasing updates and more information regarding new features such as the Career mode only to snatch it away 3 days later and stop everything. What's worse is them saying that there were "many detailed discussions"... so they knew they were in trouble, yet continued to lead on their community by releasing more updates and information before suddenly taking everything away.
I'm seeing Dovetail's relationship with Community Feedback being a common criticism. I understand the difficulty of dealing with a community if they're demanding things however if a lot of people are saying the same things.... it's valuable information and something which should be looked at!
I may have sounded a little more cynical than usual, after doing some more research I know the developers were more invested in FSW, but Dovetail management, is just ugh and were quickly making the impression they were going to just nickel and dime it like their train series. That being said, the ESP graphic engine needs to die and be replaced, and I hold out hope that when xplane-11 goes vulkan, that someone will develop truesky for xplane-11 /end rant
Yeah, I suspected it was a higher level manager who pulled the plug which is why I'd like to hear a follow up announcement regarding the sudden, unexpected nature of the development closure. And I disagree about the ESP engine, it's proven to be a reliable platform and many developers seem to work with it easily enough to give us add ons. And with a company like Lockheed Martin developing it with P3D... I doubt it's going away any time soon.
I'm not sure if that will happen. Dovetail own a License to develop a product using the ESP Engine, which drives FSX, FSW and P3D. It's possible that if this decision was driven by financial concerns, that they could sell that License and possibly even sell the content they've made to recoup some money. As I said, I'm hoping for a more comprehensive announcement explaining what has actually happened because what Dovetail have said already doesn't explain much and doesn't even offer an apology to the fans of FSW.
"Let's copy fsx, give it a different name, sell it for 40$ and promise that it's going to be good once, and as soon as it made enough money, cancel it with no option of money back" Jesus Christ. What a pathetic mess. I actually feel scammed and stupid for falling for this shit. Unbelievable
I'm sorry that this has happened to you. It's a very messy situation and I think that more explanation needs to be given considering that the game was only out on "full" release for three months. I read the announcement again and there's not even an apology to their supporters in there. It's just an announcement saying that they're stopping development.
" We are in it for the long haul " This was the statement made by the CEO of Dovetail games . Many other promises were either broken or never intended to be delivered. When watching the folks at Sky Lounge discussing the end of FSW, I was amazed when the head of that forum stated " Dovetail never said they were competing with P3D or X Plane " My first thought was , why are you doing it then ? Talk about a false non sensible statement! So what started the chain of events that lead the demise of FSW? 1) The release of Flight School and the reaction of the serious sim community . This was Dovetails wake up call, but those in charge never woke up. From reactions both subtle and dramatic in reviews , dovetail should have pushed the slow down button , and created a forum where they could have interacted with the whole community. In fact the end user was pretty well left out of the loop. 2) Lack of communication with the third party developers. Now here in is the controversy . Dovetail claimed they needed to work with these developers, but behind the scenes , there were many problems not exposed . PMDG / Carenado and a host of others were not getting on board...Why? One developer who I will not mention here, claimed that Dovetail would not release a SDK for development. This engine is a must have for development of products. Many Flight sim fans had invested thousands into these products including myself, and I was not going to start that process over again. I had $ 4000 invested in software not including the hardware I was running it on . 3) Good programming team run by poor management . Those who were hired to create this platform were not to blame for the poor management decisions made by the CEO's of Dovetail 4) The release of early access FSW. This was the worst decision of all . Dovetail in their hurry to get a product out before P3D, shot themselves in the foot by taking a two steps back for every step forward approach into the market place. This combined with the lack of communication with third party development teams spelled doom at the onset of FSW's release. Combine these realities with a one way conversation with end users ( meaning Dovetail did all the talking ) meant , this next generation of the ESP platform never had a chance. Features that FSX already contained and became a standard expectation were omitted on this early release. They are Controls removed for detailed radius ( in fact Dovetail decreased the level of detail down to 5 miles and then the horizon would have out of focus mesh Many controls FSX had for setting up detail and performance were removed. Washed out scenery, and buildings with no textures . Runways that required the user to put on sunglasses . No replay system No jet ways or ability to set up start locations. You would start up on the runway Clouds with no textures ( Pure Bright White ) Aircraft limited to a hand full of GA aircraft and understandable , because if Dovetail had released high flying aircraft with a program that had a limited detail radius all the pilot would have seen is a pile of out of focus mesh below. Add to that limited aircraft selection, the models were buggy at best, and not fully functional . No AI traffic, no road traffic , no living breathing world In short the immersion factor took many steps backwards . A simulator is not a simulator unless you combine the physics of flight with a level of detail that makes you feel immersed in the real world. I am sure the programmers had a passion for making FSW right....Too bad the CEO's did not !
Thanks for the long comment Darrin, I made sure to read it all. One of my early criticisms of Dovetail after the initial release was their communication, specifically the disparity between what they were announcing in pre-release trailers and what the sim actually delivered. For example... they said things like "We have the most detailed aircraft in any sim" however in the initial release, there was one aircraft where labels on all switches and lights was missing. In another aircraft there were switches which had very blurry textures, so bad that you couldn't even read the text on the switches. They kept saying in pre-release trailers "We're listening to the community, we're releasing the game to get community feedback" so they must have known how important it was to make a good first impression and they still released a buggy, barebones simulator. I talk about it and demonstrate it in this video here which I made a couple of weeks after it was released: ua-cam.com/video/OYr9RK6rZvU/v-deo.htmlm7s I don't know as much about their interactions with 3rd Party Devs. I knew there was some controversy regarding the Steam Store and DLC and how it was going to be managed but I didn't look into that side of things in detail. I also believe that the people on the "front line" were just doing their best. I've been part of IT Support teams in the past which have been run under a similar management style where the managers seem so disconnected from the work that their employees are doing which is why I sympathise with them and hope for further explanation from managers at Dovetail as to why FSW was cancelled. Since making this video, I've also heard rumours that not even the front line developers knew that the project was going to be cancelled, which goes some way to explaining why even 3-5 days before the cancellation, FSW fans were still receiving development updates and news about new things such as the career mode and new add on aircraft coming to the Steam Store. As for the barebones nature....again, this circles back to early hype. If you watch the video I linked above, you'll see a pre-release trailer as part of that. Dovetail were making comments about how they wanted to move flight simulation forward and offer things never seen.... but they release a buggy, featureless simulator. Again, they say one thing but the product and evidence indicates something else. As you correctly identified... FSW was a massive step backwards when talking about built in features, even when compared to FSX, even compared to FS9(2004)... possibly even as far back as Flight Simulator 98 which still offered GA, Jet Aircraft and a helicopter!!!
Thanks for your time and comment as well... Have you seen the activity on FSW 's facebook page during the last 2 months? Buy our stuff day after day . Buy our DLC's . In fact after watching Froogle Sunday News, he brought up a point that is of concern for all of us . It appears that not only was Dovetail in the process of trying to sell everything they could to the masses , but made a future outlook 2 days before they killed it ! Perhaps they knew they were in trouble and needed finance , but here is the other point...You can still buy FSW on steam until May 24... Why would they continue to want to make sales? Froogle came up with a very likely reason. They are attempting to cover the conservative investment of 3 million as well as their contract to sell from Microsoft. Froogles conclusions are sound. What Dovetail can't make up in their investment, could cause them to go after Lockheed Martin for lack of enforcement of their licences . Dovetail could blame Lockheed for the failure of FSW. This is of great concern to me and I am sure everyone in the community. Such a move could cause Lockheed to react in the following 1) Taking away the Academic Licence from their website 2) Increasing the cost of their product in order to pay the damage claims of Dovetail 3) Pulling the plug on Prepared all together One last thing Froogle reminded us, If you are a third party developer and want to introduce a product on FSW, There are two methods for doing so 1) Put it on the Dovetail site which will cost you 30% 2) Put it on Steam which will cost you 60% ( 30% to Dovetail/ 30% to Steam ) FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Yeah I did see Froogle's video today about FSW. I did like the way he compared Facebook posts between developers... it really put things into perceptive to indicate the activity of each developer on social media however I personally would have liked to have seen screenshots of each post. I believe that if you're going to present an argument in any situation, you should have evidence to support it. Regardless, I know Froogle has experience in software development and has been part of the flight sim community longer than me so it's worth paying attention to his views. I believe he also wrote for PC Pilot Magazine in the past as well. The most logical explanation for Dovetail pulling the plug on FSW is financial reasons. I know that Dovetail received investment from a company called Alcuin who state that their usual investment amount ranges between £2-15 million pounds so that would match up with a $3 million dollars estimate. I've since discovered from the UK Companies House (A UK government website that records and publishes information in relation to Ltd companies) that Alcuin is now legally recognized as "a person with significant control" of Railsimulator.com Ltd (Dovetail's official, legal name). In that documentation, it reads "Nature of Control - The relevant legal entity has the right to exercise, or actually exercises, significant influence or control over the company." So with that information, I believe that Alcuin have been putting pressure on Dovetail in relation to financial matters. As for Dovetail going after Lockheed.... I don't think it'll happen. A company with suspected financial difficulties going after one of the world's biggest Aerospace and Defence companies which is also financially supported by the US Government. I don't know specifics of the legal stuff but I'm pretty sure that Lockheed's legal team probably exceeds the total number of staff at Dovetail, they have a wealth of knowledge and experience drawing up legal arrangements worth unfathomable amounts of money with Governments and private firms around the world. I'm sure they would be able to defend against any issues regarding their Academic license.
I hope you are right.. At any rate, I fully support our community which means both the end user like me and the third party developers that create the immersion I need to enjoy this hobby. It really pisses me off that Dovetail not only pulled the plug on members of our community, but have the nerve to continue to promote, buy our stuff before it is removed. That is a cold slap in the face ! Whether intended or not....Dovetail has damaged the flight sim family by this move.
I do still think that Dovetail should take responsibility and make a further announcement. As weird as it sounds, I think that a proper explanation would give fans of FSW some sort of closure on the matter.
Yeah, their reputation wasn't the strongest to begin with but this sudden move to completely cut their flight sim efforts is incredibly bad for their committed FSW fans. Hence why I believe it's very important that a follow up announcement is made explaining fully what's going on. If you read the announcement carefully, you'll see that there's not even an apology in there. It's also not been announced on Dovetail's website, only through quieter channels that only FSW users would see, on Steam and the official FSW forums.
FSW...total bullshit company objective. The community understood this from the very beginning. I did not spend ONE PENNY on FSW and now I'm glad to see them go. More focus on the three stable platforms.
Yeah, one positive thing that I've seen are more people being pushed towards X-Plane which is also on Steam which is good for Laminar Research and the wider X Plane community.
FSW cockpit view let’s you zoom out farther. X plane doesn’t. Plus X plane is hard to see over the dash board. I called the developers about the problem. They just blew me off acting like their cockpit view is normal. After the conversation with X plane engineers, I lost confidence. I don’t know if Microsoft has a patent on their cockpit view zoom. X plane confuses me. I have Lockheed prepar3d Simulator. Lockheed Cockpits view zoom is fine.
X Plane's camera system is different but that's not necessarily a bad thing. By default, I believe that it offers more freedom to move about but I agree that the zoom range is less than FSX and P3D.
...think, there's no more market for Flighsim. Everbody is playing with their smartphone. Stupid and dumb.. Think the time of intelligent people is OVER :-( - Ich denke, das die Menschen heute einfach keinen PS mehr benutzen und die Aufmerksamkeitsdauer einfach viel zu kurz ist. Flugsimulatoren sind eben nichts für "gerade mal eben"... Schade
I don't think so, we still see many add ons being developed, Prepar3D and X Plane 11 seem to have active communities and FSX still has over 2000 players per day.
Interesting thought... the flight simulation market has been active for at least 10 years and countless developers have released countless products in that time. Just because it's a niche hobby and interest, doesn't mean it's not interesting. The Flight Sim community are relatively small when you compare them to AAA game communities such as Counter Strike, League of Legends, Starcraft etc.... however the flight sim community and industry has been alive and well for a long time and despite one developer dropping out, there are still two major flight simulator programs which have active communities and many third party developers enhancing those simulators with add on content, both payware and freeware.
I know. Whatever..it's a shame. I'm flying 30 years in "reality" and ~ 20 with FSX and P3D. Made my own airport (EDTA, Trier, between Luxemburg and Spangdhalem), programming and adapt airports for PMDG - FMC etc etc... but.. think we are just a very very small community :-/ . Flight-Sim has NOTHING to do with "Gaming" (MHO) ... it's ... a shame that there isn't much more interest for those things... :-(
That's how I see it. They had a really good opportunity to bring in some fresh ideas and features and they were almost there with that Career Mode! If they led with that, things could have gone differently.
![Lp. Последняя Реальность #97 ЧЁРНАЯ МАТЕРИЯ [Анти Скинт] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/k4MjXCzKsYw/mqdefault.jpg)
I really appreciate that this commentary came out so quickly. it was hard finding much information otherwise on the event.
I'm glad this could give some insight into the situation.
I told people they had no respect for the sim community. Management was a joke DTG are well known for ignoring bugs instead favouring dlc and new buggy features.
Typical DTG tbh.
I agree. Just look at Train Sim World. And they did it to Train Simulator years ago....never trusted DTG as a company. They have earned a bad reputation years ago.
Doofer you're a great bloke, I understand you not wanting people to dump on DTG but this is what the community think.
DTG, EA & all other game dev teams need to start showing respect to their customers and communities.
This is an important message that needs to reach the money grabbing ceo's fast.
What i would like to know is why didnt they take it off the market as soon as they announced it,Then you have 3rd party devs just flight,turbulent designs etc.
And DTG just last week had a sale for FSW and DLC they must have known then what was going to happen.
Sim UK Well said.
Totally agree. DTG are a joke. They scam people so much. TSXX was a mess and even the over priced DLC was terrible with bugs.
I think they came out early because of X-plane 11 and Prepar3dv4. They were afraid of losing in the market, so they released a very unfinished version in hopes of generating a foot hold in the sim world. By not having jets in the game alone just cut out 50 plus percentage of the flight sim market. I'm not a big fan of X-plane's ATC, but FSW was even worse. I agree with you, they had noble plans but never followed through on any of them. I think it is an opportunity lost by poor management decisions.
You could be right. I can understand that perspective of "missing out" by releasing a product later than the other main contenders. I still believe that they could have overcome that delay by implementing features that aren't in any other sim. The career mode is a fantastic feature and I do believe it would have caused more buzz and interest in FSW if it was available at the start. Dovetail had to bring FSW to the public and "wow" them. Instead they released a barely "Alpha" version of software and ended up putting themselves in a worse position by having to play catch up and develop updates "in public" with pressure from the public as well as the internal pressure from the company.
I thought TML studios were known for abandoning games in development but dovetail seem to be worse.
I didn't like the whole DLC orientation of things but I loved the idea of a career mode. I can't tell I wasn't expecting it to be cancelled cause of the very small progress and the whole buy this DLC in order to get a feature that the game should have had. But I loved the idea they had with the career mode it if done right it would have been awesome.
Yeah, I think if they led with implementing the bigger features and left DLC integration until they had a secure and growing player community, then things could have worked out differently.
Doofer911 Exactly. I agree 100% with you on that one!!!!
So cool seeing the "hello, hello" live!! :P
haha, the funny thing is... I have NEVER said that in any day to day interaction! It's just something that became a catchphrase here on UA-cam.
I wanted to buy it too, glad I held off. Great video Doofer.
Yeah I was waiting for it to be fleshed out some more before re-visiting the sim. I keep looking at FSW and keep thinking of what could have been.
Am I disapointed? Yes
Am I surprised? No
Should they keep the license? No
Will anyone else take up the license? Doubtful
I'm no expert on licensing so it really depends what you can do within the terms of the license. I read the other day that PMDG were interested in picking up the "Entertainment" licence a few years ago but they were out-bid by Dovetail. I'm not sure if it's something they would consider nowadays.
*_"FAQ_*
*_What happens to Flight Sim World if I already own it?_*
_It will remain in your Steam library, available to play in its current format._
*_Will the sim be taken off sale?_*
_Yes, and we’re working to the date of 24th May 2018. We want to give anyone who does not yet own a copy of the sim enough time to get a copy and keep it safe in their library for future play._
*_What will happen to any Add-Ons?_*
_Add-Ons will also come off sale, but those you already own will still also be in your Steam library."_
*A sick joke, huh? They keep selling it grabbing even the last money they can get for their failure! These executives are supposed to be prosecuted and hauled to court!*
So, they took and keep taking the money and wasted it... no refunds whatsoever? lol Of course not, what from? Because it's all spent. For lavish salaries, nice company cars and private jets and Bahamas vacations?
That's why I never pay for Early Access crap. Sounds good, till it goes bad. It's legal, though.
They're supposed to get a company funding from banks like all other companies in other branches gotta apply for to finance their projects. Since only this ensures that their oh so ambitious projects will be screened thoroughly, with due diligence, by an objective third party which will not risk their money for shady enterprises and companies under supervision of incapable managements. Unlike naive, enthusiastic or hopeful fanboys ... um ... fanbase would do, giving their last money away without knowing anything solid, who trust too much and scrutinise business figures too little, since they have no inside look behind the curtains anyway.
But banks/ professional creditors do not only know how mature company business has to work they're not only experts on the subject, but also demand to put the cards on the table, demand business plans, calculations, employees' qualifications and expertises, account balances, proofs of creditworthiness and more BEFORE they advance their money to inapt entrepreneurs. Everything a video game player will not do because 99% of them don't have any idea about how to run a successful business either.
And when a bank said 'No!' and rejected to lend them money or said, 'No, that's too much!' then for some particular, well considered reasons an ordinary player would never catch sight of. And when the banks already said 'No! Thanks, but no thanks!' then they run around and invent other financing models/rather traps to get the funding anyway the pros had denied them earlier.
This Early Access garbage has become a nuisance ever since. The pitcher is brought to the well until it breaks. That's what comes of it!
I do agree that Early Access/Kickstarter Campaigns can be used to take advantage of early supporters of a game/product etc. However, I do believe that Dovetail did secure funding from an Investment Company (Alcuin Capital Partners) before announcing Flight Sim World so their financing model isn't solely reliant on Early Access and DLC income. However as you said, there must have been development plans etc in place to secure such funding (which Alcuin claim is between £2 - £15 million per transaction). However that now begs the question... how was this project managed? Did most of that investment go into Train Sim World and the flight sim side of the business were left high and dry? That's why I want to see the Dovetail Executives release a statement. After having a bit more time to think about this, if you go back and read the existing announcement... there's not even an apology!
Does anyone know what this does for the licensing of FSX (Microsoft)? I'm probably totally wrong in this, but I was under the impression that Dovetail had the rights to sell a consumer version of FSX in Flight Sim World, whereas Lockheed Martin could only sell an educational copy of FSX in Prepar3D? Does this now open the door for Lockheed Martin to buy the rights to sell a consumer version of their product?
To be clear this is all guesswork and not researched on my part.
You're reply reappeared like dovetails DLC's lol. It certainly opens the door for speculation :)
That's an interesting thought. I've read from PMDG that they along with some other people were interested in buying the "FSX - Entertainment" license from Microsoft but were ultimately out-bid by Dovetail games. I'm not sure what will happen to the license now but it's currently owned by Dovetail so they might regroup and have another crack at it... or they might try and sell it on. The License in terms of the ESP engine (which runs FSX, P3D and FSW) will most likely define how the engine can be used. My understanding is that Microsoft wrote two Licenses, one was a "Professional" version defining that the software must be used for training/education purposes, which is why we see P3D marketed as a professional training tool targetted at organisations... and an "Entertainment" license which allows for more of a computer game focus. But Dovetail are the owners of the license so they now have full control of what happens to it.
I would hazard a guess and say Dovetail are pretty skint at the moment seeing as they are going to have to lay a few people off. They would have lost a shed load of money as well as there is no doubt FSW was a failure waiting to happen. We all called it. That aside I am thinking how could Lockheed implement a consumer licence? Maybe they could turn the academic licence into a consumer licence and keep the professional licence as is. I have only just bought P3D as I was always put off with not wanting to "break the TOS" Luckily my son is taking flying lessons :). Still I would love to see a P3D consumer version.
As a side note, I have always been an FSX man and after switching to P3D v4 with PTA, I am blown away. I am so excited about the future of flight sim, and how far it has come. I did have to spend nearly £2K on a PC though :D
PPS. I love your videos Doof. Your walk through's are second to none and very detailed. Good on ya ;)
I'm not sure, I know that Dovetail secured Investment from an investment company a couple of years ago. According to the firm (Alcuin Capital Partners), their usual investment amount is in the region of £2 - £15 million. I suspect that was used by Dovetail to develop their new generation of simulators, Flight Sim World and Train Sim World. Dovetail historically have been Train Sim developers and that's the bulk of the business. I've no idea what their financial condition is so I'm not sure if it's just the flight sim side which is struggling or if the business as a whole is having a hard time.
I read yesterday that PMDG were interested in buying the "Entertainment" license from Microsoft years ago when they stopped development of the "Microsoft Flight Sim" series, however they were out-bid by Dovetail who got the License. I'm not sure if PMDG would still be interested, nor am I sure if Lockheed Martin would want to get the License and somehow consolidate it with their current License. I guess time will tell.
PS. Thanks for the support, I try my best :)
Can I be Devils Advicate here? I agree with all fellow Flight Simmers with this announcement but didnt we know deep down that this was going to happen from the start. But being fair wirh DGT that the ammount of work that goes into making a sim is emence. It was just a matter of time.
It is, but someone mentioned in a comment earlier that this is Dovetail's second flight sim. They had a go with Dovetail Flight School which ultimately didn't work out... so they had previous experience and hopefully applied some lessons learned to FSW. As I said, I think that it should have been kept out of the public eye for longer until they had a more complete product ready.
The direction that they took I had a feeling that FSW would fail. With the announcement of Orbx true earth for x-plane 11 it was only a matter of time.
I don't think Orbx making products for XPlane had any impact on FSW.
anyone remember doofers charity thing that he would donate money if he didnt get to 100,000 subs in a year? (more than a year ago now i think lol)
*sigh*.... yeah.....
Amazing to drop it so close to "launch" still on their product page. www.dovetailgames.com/products Thanks for your comments Doofer. Looks like xplane will have stronger numbers now to the moon!
Well I've always believed that X-Plane will grow stronger now that XP11 is more accessible and user-friendly. Now we're seeing the likes of OrbX releasing products for XP now so it's just going to get stronger.
An honest and well balanced critique Doofer
Thank you Greg. I'm glad it didn't come across as just complaining or bashing of Dovetail.
My personal feelings as a purchaser and user of several DTG games are very negative. DTG don't want to listen to the constructive criticism of their products and seem to be only interested in taking peoples money. They promise things and fail to deliver. I think DTG need to up their game and get some new blood both in terms of management and developers or the company as a whole will die.
That's very concerning if you've had negative experiences among their other games as well. There's no doubt that Dovetail need to change their relationship with their customers, the company's reputation was sketchy before this happened, and now with Flight Sim World being cancelled....that's shown a new level of dis-service to their customers.
I had the same negative experience as you found with FSW and I have also played their fishing sim which has gone downhill since the beta release. So full of bugs and has become another cash grab with all the DLC they are releasing instead of fixing the game. It seems a common theme with DTG now. Train Simulator hasn't been updated in a long time all they keep doing is releasing more DLC. Train Sim World is just as bad as Flight Sim World, buggy and lacking content unless you keep throwing money at yet more DLC. On a positive note I guess we should be grateful to DTG for helping to keep FSX alive.
That's another common criticism I'm seeing from a lot of comments... before, during and after Flight Sim World actually. The focus on DLC production. Unfortunately, it's a business model that many game developers have made. You see it rife in the mobile game market and now in the mainstream gaming industry with these "Microtransactions" and "Lootbox" functions in games. I've seen many great game franchises be sullied by this change of focus. Battlefield and subsequently, Star Wars Battlefront. GTA V Online, Counter Strike and the gambling websites. It's led to game developers designing games around DLC and in game purchases rather than focusing on delivering the best day 1 experience. Now we see developers releasing half a game which they fill out later on with DLC etc.
I do agree though that we should be grateful for Dovetail bringing FSX Steam Edition to the world. It's certainly given FSX a "second wind" and kept that simulator alive for a few more years, keeping Third Party devs going with it as well.
To be honest, DTG's business model is to release bare bone games with minimal content and then shoving out one DLC after the other. The worst example is TS with its hundreds of sometimes really shitty DLC's. Seriously, what did the people expect? A full price, high quality, product from DTG with full content? You gotta be kidding me.
It certainly appears that way, given how the FSW project was put out there. I can't speak for the Train Sim side of things but at a glance, it appears to follow a similar plan. I guess people hoped that Dovetail would take this opportunity to do something different and bring something fresh to the world of flight simulation but alas, it was not the case. An interesting thing to consider.... was the FSW project poorly managed? Or were the flight sim team being strangled by higher management constraints demanding that business model?
I think the development team might be as easy the victims in all of this as well as the early kickstarter access supporters who believed in the game also. I wonder if management knew for a while this was going to happen........ way before the announcement?? Yet their recent announcements suggested release date and massive improvements...... It doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up??
I'm pretty sure they did know, they even say in the annoucement "after many detailed discussions".... but I do wonder if those discussions went beyond senior management. As you say, it doesn't make sense that they would continue to talk about development progress, releasing updates such as the 5th Career Mode update 3 days before shutting everything down. It is very strange and nothing has been explained properly to people eagerly anticipating these update.
They just needed to bring FSX to 64 bit and upgraded the planes to 64 bit. A lot of people have spent big money on fsx and would have stayed with it. Then perhaps introduced career mode, true sky, and etc.
I was caught by the teaser at first release...buy it and what a surprise to notice it was an old FSX with botox...so, fly with X Plane 11, with a bunch of free 3th parts and be happy...
Yeah Dovetail seemed to introduce some already developed add ons as standard in FSW.
Dovetail has no need to explain anything. They thought they could hit it big with the flight sim community, but they forgot that we ain't 12 year olds that gamble skins and buy lootboxes. That is not bashing. That is what happened. They tried to convince people to buy FSW and DLC when they knew they would cancel it! Dovetail might as well start making clicker mobile games.
As I said, it'd be the responsible thing to do to give their customers some sort of closure on the matter but I doubt it'll happen considering the announcement didn't even contain an apology.
Sad - it was beginning to develop & is visually good. However, DTG philosophy appears to be 'DLCs for the win!' - just total up what's available for TS. That appears to be their finance model. As has been said by many, if only they got on board with add-on devs sooner - even if it meant them signing NDAs at the early stage. But perhaps they don't have suitable dev kit tools themselves to make things easier, so they'd have nothing to offer third-parties!
I'm not sure how their relationship with third party developers was. I know they had a team member solely dedicated to working with Third Parties so it's something they put effort towards. After reading an announcement from PMDG regarding FSW closing development, it seems that some third parties may not have agreed with how Dovetail planned to manage and publish third party addons. There was also some concerns regarding how revenue from add ons would be distributed because the revenue would not only be shared between the Third Party and Dovetail, but Steam would also take a share. So for some developers, that was a sticking point. As for the Dev Kit, I'm not a developer so I'm not sure how Dev kits work but developers would have had experience making addons for FSX using older tools, and Dovetail did release an SDK on Steam so I'm pretty sure the tools were there for Third Parties... maybe low player numbers were a concern for third parties as well?
I was taking something of a wait and see attitude toward FSW, though I was impressed to a point by the sample of it I got to try at Flightsimcon last year. I'd add that I bought a fair bit of what I saw at that convention. I bought the TFDi 717, and when it was finally released, the Just Flight VC-10. If DLC is truly what Dovetail does best, they should have found a way to make some of their new technologies available to FSX users. You'd have to wonder what some of us would pay to have a version of FSX that is stable and doesn't require us to pay monthly. I'm not sure that I can call X-Plane 11 the future yet, as one of the few things I tried doing in it revealed a horrible flaw in its ATC system . Running a simple flight to Kahului from Honolulu, the ATC inevitably vectored me into a mountain. I tried this at least three times, and got the same result.
Judging from the remarks I see here, Dovetail may have bought themselves some trouble. One notable theme of the comments is how much Dovetail Games is off of people's shopping lists.
I'm not sure what you mean with the pay monthly thing? To my knowledge, none of the sims have a subscription-based pricing model, you pay once and get the software. The only thing I can think of is Lockheed Martin charging monthly for a developer-focused version of Prepared 3D but that's not something a regular end user would purchase.
I do see that common criticism of X Plane having a poor ATC system. I know that X Plane is starting to gather favour and momentum with some of the FSX/P3D developers now putting effort into making X Plane add ons. Hopefully we'll see an improved version of ATC in the sim however it would be nice if Laminar Research put this into X Plane as standard.
Doofer911 Prepar3d was exactly what I was talking about. There's plenty of people who have gone that way, even if they don't really fill the role of a developer...
Are you sure? I was under the impression that most people were buying the "Student" P3D Licence instead of the more expensive "Professional" one, which is still a one-off payment. I'd be interested to hear which casual home-simmers have bought the Developer License.
You are, now that I give it some thought, probably right. But some could make that mistake, especially if they are developing scenery, or aircraft, even with the SDK available for download.
I hope they don't pull the same thing with Train Sim World. They nailed the sim clearly to home, and would be an absolute shame if they dropped TSW
It would be. They seemed very keen to push this new "generation" of simulators to move away from the classic "Train Sim 2016/2017/2018" series of games. I'm not into Train Simulation so I'm not sure how TSW compares to the older games. I'm not sure if the Train Sim community shares similarities with flight simmers, such as investing money into addons for an older game and not seeing enough "value" in the new TSW to justify leaving the old game behind.
Doofer911 I have both TSW and the old RW/TS, and I haven't touched RW/TS for a year already. I find the experience in the London to Reading route to be the most satisfying experience I have ever had. Still, the game is still just a "Prototype", as written in the game folders, since there are obvious aspects missing on the package, the "Content Creation" aspects, like route editing, scenario creation and add-on development. TSW offers beyond what the old platform can deliver, and I'm waiting eagerly for the moment I can start exporting assets for the game. But yeah, there's people who are reluctant to make the move due to their DLC collection, especially those who have their favourite trains/routes already made for RW/TS. Steam enthusiasts, for example, still don't have an excuse to make the move to TSW, simply because there is still no steam locomotives and historic routes.
For TSW to succeed, it needs three things: 1. Release the Content Creation Tools; 2. Include proper documentation and developer support; 3. Support for all types of traction.
Unfortunately, DTG loves their Add-ons, and they're probably reluctant to share content developing tools, especially when they can control the market and set their quality standards firmly.
Still, releasing the game for XBOX was a very huge win from their part. Still, just including a single route shows exactly what kind of business model they're after.
It sounds like they're taking the same approach with TSW as they did with FSW... release the basic foundation of the sim and then build upon it over time. That's interesting that they haven't released an SDK or Tools for the train sim community, that was one of the early goals for Flight Sim World. But your comment regarding DTG and their control of DLC and Add-ons is very interesting. I've heard from other flight sim developers that they had concerns regarding how Dovetail were going to manage third party add ons and integrate them into FSW and the Steam Store. Are there many Third Party Train Simulation developers or is most of the add on content for train sims developed by Dovetail themselves?
In Train Simulation there are several traditions that come way back from the 2001 Microsoft Train Simulator. There are freeware and payware single developers, and also developer teams. Sometimes, in order to look for content from a specific country, you'd probably look around the internet for independent creators.
ChrisTrains is a veteran in the field. The bulk of Dutch railways for MSTS and RW/TS comes from him, and for RW/TS he adopted a Payware approach to his creations due to how increasingly complex and time consuming developing trains and routes was becoming. As far as I can remember, Spain has about 5 different websites with freeware add-ons for MSTS, Trainz and RW/TS.
Dovetail Games launched years ago a "Partner Program" that helped Third Party developers to include their content on Steam as DLC for TS/RW, and sharing the earnings with the creators, while providing users safe and easy installs and automatic updates.
The problem with the Steam Store is that, if DtG launched a new rolling stock that had already been made in a payware package by someone else, it would have these characteristics:
- Only include one livery;
- More basic and simple to drive;
- Routes are shorter and less equipped;
- Almost complete disregard to sound design;
- More expensive to buy.
So, you can image the backlash that DtG had every single time independent creators were able to do better and cheap. It raised the stakes too high, and move people away from DtG's homebrew content. And that is not good.
Also, they are VERY picky about what content they want to support. If a Third Party does a route and/or rolling stock that is very popular and will sell well, they'll support that developer and help him get his work done. If a Third Party is doing a route/train for a "niche" country/market, they'll simply ignore and prevent him from accessing useful support. (Basically my life story since I shifted to RW/TS)
I reckon Chris doesn't add his content to the Steam Shop, not only because his content would be sold for a more expensive price, the share he would receive would be lower than what he gets on his own terms.
This game was amazing for new comers. I started with aerofly cause scenery means a lot to me. But Aerofly got to shallow to fast. So I debated between x plane and few. Xplane looked better at night, had more planes, more freeware, and was more developed- but personally I think x plane has some of the worst ground visuals. Fsw had great UI, decent ground textures, the cities looked more like the real life cities than x plane, but what won me over was the game 's loaded with training wheels. It gradually teaches people how to fly in these sims. The flight school showed how to maneuver, cold dark mode had a clip board that would high light what you needed to turn on during pre flight, there was a progressive taxi system to show you the ways of the runway, air traffic control was basic but it was easy for beginners.
This sim going under is a huge loss for the community. Xplane is not new comer freindly. It turns many people off because of how complicated it is. I mean u have to manually set the GPS.....that's insane for casual simmers. Flight sim world was the perfect middle ground. It would hold you hand in the beginning in till you didn't need it's aid anymore. Now in x plane or flight sim world I can't work a piper with no problem.
I'm going to have to move to x plane if fsw doesn't get sold off- but without fsw beginner friendliness, myself and many others wouldn't have gotten into this genre. And a hobby only grows if new people join.
It was shaping up to be a nice entry into the genre. I think that part of the reason it wasn't well received by the existing flight sim community is because Dovetail hyped the game quite a lot before it's initial release. Then when it came out, it was very bare-bones and stripped back compared to FSX/P3D and XPlane, also, there were many glaring bugs which left a bad impression on people as well. Dovetail were getting it into a good shape this year, it had some compelling features that made it much more interesting but I think the damage had been done by it's initial release and first impressions.
Let's face it.. the amount of $$ and development that goes into these products is huge these days... and the flight sim market just isn't big enough to support it.
I beg to differ, we see plenty of add ons being developed for the existing sims. And Dovetail were not designing a simulator from a blank piece of paper. They had the framework of FSX and the ESP engine. Admittedly, they appear to have completely gutted FSX and reworked a lot of the engine to enable better performance. I just don't think that FSW had enough "value" to pull the players away from the other sims.
I really wanted the career mode. That sounded great
Me too. As I said in the video, I have been keeping an eye on it and the Career Mode is exactly the type of thing Flight Sim World needed to catch people's attention and show them that FSW is bringing something new to flight simulation. Unfortunately it seems that it was too little too late.
Im still going to fly on fsw as i do on xplane and p3dv4 and fsx
That's fair enough, if you enjoy the sim then feel free to do so. The main points I wanted to make with this video was to announce to my flight sim audience as to what had happened, hopefully try and prompt some sort of further discussion and explanation from Dovetail as to why they've let down their customers, and to educate people so they can avoid this sort of problem in the future.
An important point not emphasised here is that not only was Dovetail's business model deeply flawed, they failed to realise that flight sims can only prosper when third party input is encouraged. Instead Dovetail showed their usual myopic greed by closing down content largely to themselves, or re-issuing old software. They also had no insight into the fact that flight sim enthusiasts are already extremely knowledgable and already had access to addons far, far more sophisticated than Dovetail's own output. If they had opened up Flight Sim World from the beginning they might have survived, but they wanted all the DLC revenue for themselves. That kind of greed is the prime reason the whole enterprise was doomed.
They also had a management structure that relied on old fashioned employees/manager relationships which worked the employees hard for not much reward. They approached third parties to help them but offered poor rewards to them too. Add to that the absurdly high Steam cut of 30% and you have no maneouvring leeway to satisfy everybody involved. It works for them regarding railways because the average rail enthusiast who buys rail simulator have fewer choices or access to quality content. The flight sim world has hundreds of addon designers who are nearly all very good at what they do. Dovetail had not a hope of competing with this kind of expertise. But the bottom line is that they were greedy and ended up with a handful of dust, and deservedly so.
Yeah, it pains me to see that they haven't learned a damn thing from Flight Sim World and are applying the same business model to their newest offering Fishing Sim World. I've seen the exact same things cropping up that plagued Flight Sim World, dumb little quality issues that ruin impressions of the game. Just read a review on steam explaining that you can play from a first person perspective but can't walk backwards...... a fundamental part of any first person control in a game and they don't even have full character movement mechanics in place?? Come on Dovetail!
R.I.P. Dovetail Games. This will also reflect on other DTG platforms such as Train Sim World (TSW). I won't never buy any DTG product again. Best apology they could give is a refund to all customers who were deceived by them.
I'm not sure if this will completely ruin the company. It's clear with Flight School and now Flight Sim World that the flight sim side of the business hasn't performed as well as the train sim side which is what Dovetail started with and grown from. But this will certainly cause a lot of distrust and skepticism surrounding Dovetail. I hope that they make a follow-up announcement regarding FSW giving a full explanation as to what happened to give their fans some sort of closure on the matter.
Sounds like the same developers of Battle of Stalingrad
DTG broke one of the golden rules of game design here: First the program base/core/engine, THEN the content.
They claim that they did, that was the work being carried out before it's release. My experience with performance though is that it wasn't that much better than FSX.
Well if they think that's what they did, they didn't do a very good job on that.
It appears so, when you consider the performance gains that P3D offers over FSX, considering it's the same engine, it's clear there was room for improvement.
To be honest, I think FSW was doomed from day 1, they entered the community and immediately annoyed everyone by releasing the very bad 'flight school'. The immediately got a bad reputation, and when you want people to invest and move to your platform how you as a company is perceived is very important. It's a shame they couldn't make it work, it might have been something great if they'd have listened to the community and worked on it a lot more before releasing it and expecting to be able to compete with Xplane and P3D.
Well the thing with Flight School, it didn't work out but that was a perfect opportunity to learn from mistakes and come back stronger. But I'm starting to see that a common complaint is that they didn't really take feedback from the community, and that feedback would have been an incredibly valuable asset as they moved away from Flight School and into Flight Sim World. I know that people can be demanding saying "Do this or do that" but there's that old saying "The customer is always right"... and even if they aren't... they give a good indication of what people in general are interested in.
When a sim like this dies we all lose
Definitely. Would have been nice to see someone come along and disrupt the stalwarts that are Lockheed Martin and Laminar Research which cater to more experienced simmers. FSW was setting up nicely to be a nice simulator for people getting into flight sim for the first time.
I purchased FSW on 22/05/2017, never installed, never played, and I was even asking you on Stream the other week about my desire to jump on to P3D.. I guess this just makes me feel better I invested Zero time into FSW, sadly, I invested Money.. Oh well.
I think there is certain criteria to get a refund. I believe that you have to have played less than 2 hours in the game and had the game less than a week to qualify for a refund. I'm not sure of the exact criteria but I'm pretty sure that Play Time and the amount of time since buying the game are the two main things.
Same for me. I can't get the refund, because the 2 weeks time limit has expired a long time ago.
I given it a try anyway.. They denied it.
Thank God,
I paid only $9.59 for Flight Sim World® and $4.87 for Flight Sim World: Epic Approaches Mission Pack.
Am I selfish?
Make sens what you said Joss.
I am not sorry for purchasing FSW, I'm sorry for the bad management of DTG. I'm really disappointed because I was expecting a good future for this SIM.
Nope, they did put FSW on sale at a discounted price which again is kind of a strange decision so close to it's "full" release in January.
Who didn't see this coming?
I think a lot of people did but we all hoped it wouldn't be the case.
I stand firm by you guys and I watch your channels, I've listened to Novawing and the "Go-around" and a few other UA-camrs on the subject. I don't understand why they blame the failure on the communities harsh criticism and viscously defend Dovetail. It sounds as if they are defending a great group of hobbyists with a big heart who went out to do this on their own.Dovetail bought they rights back in 2014 and got everyone all excited saying they were working on a new sim in 2015. It's a business, they had 3 years. These defenders go on and on and on oh they built so much in just a few short years and everyone was so harsh on them...........?
What did the really accomplish? They bought FSX, they bought rights to bake in Accu-sim, they bought rights to bake in Orbx FTX Global, Carenado made some of the aircraft, then at they end they bought True Sky for it.
When a new flight sim comes out lets be honest, it's like PlayStation vs X-Box vs Nintendo. Everyone is waiting on standby because you don't wanna buy it and BOOM all the cool games come out for the OTHER platform.
X-Plane and P3D released their x64 sims in spring 2017? How long could we all wait for Dovetail while the new x64 sims are out for many months.
I was nervous about Buying P3D Pro and waiting and waiting on Flight Sim World and that last 6 months just watching the forums and people saying, ok guys we need lights now please, we need ATC come on, then they released all these stupid mission packs. That's when I thought, ok this isn't going well, somethings not right - it took them three years just to get here something isn't right. Everyone is praying for them to get lights and ATC and they released an explosion of mission packs with no real voice actors - that was insulting to me. I don't need to pay $20 to use my imagination, release that stuff when the games done. I bought P3D Pro just weeks ago so happy I did.
I can't defend their management but I'm sure their management is furious. About 8 salaries maybe x 3 years and all the other costs? They probably felt they lost millions for nothing. Think about it, how would you feel as a business owner if you spent 4 million dollars on a small crew to develop your new billing system and after three years all they had was a new menu an a few features but everyone said "meh" would rather use the old one - you'd be LIVID. That took 3 years geesh. I was cheering for this team 2 years ago now just nothing but painfull disappointment.
Anyone remember the launch trailer for Flight School? What a cheese ball, more cheese than a Kirk Cameron film trailer.
Yeah when you consider the timeline, with their Flight School product experience they MUST have known how important it was to take the lessons learned forward into FSW. They MUST have known how important it was to make a great first impression with FSW to win back the hearts and minds of flight simmers and they completely blew it.
I'm not sure how much blame should be apportioned to the team... they are working under direction from managers who should be driving them to create certain features, meet deadlines and quality requirements. If FSW was released featureless and buggy, that to me shows a lack of pride in work and the standards of work expected by management.
I could care less. Yeah FSW looked cool, but I’ve been pretty contempt with my FSX and money has been an issuer for me for many years so I haven’t been in the market for any upgraded sims. But from the sound of it, I feel like DTG is turning into EA from the sounds of it.
I think that is part of the challenge of developing a new sim... if it doesn't offer "more" than FSX, then why would someone want to leave FSX and invest in a new sim? As for DTG turning into EA... you're probably right considering the CEO at Dovetail was a senior manager at EA and previously worked on "The Sims" franchise.
Doofer911 Right, and wow I loved the sims games, never knew that guy worked on them
Well, it is becoming EA. Many of their so called wiz kid developers/programmers used to work at EA. The EA thinking has become more focused at DTG. They seem to think a arcade style sim will be a big hit compared to something that's more realistic.
Stephen Hood has never had anything to do with aviation, he is just a decent lawnmower man.
Yeah I went back and saw a Steam post that went up on the FSW Steam News page where Stephen talked about his lack of interest in aviation before taking on this project. Kind of strange, to paraphrase what he said, he had no interest in aviation whatsoever before this project and then since starting the project, he went and studied and got a PPL. Fair play but I was left with a bad taste in my mouth because there's many aspiring pilots in the world who don't have the finances or opportunity to go and study for a PPL yet are way more passionate about the subject. It just reads like one big ego trip. I'll link the article below if you haven't seen it...
steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791458199091/announcements/detail/3375882122118011807
I bought it, tried it, did not like it cuz could not mod it, just sitting on my drive now taking up space, sounds like good reason to delete it, their taking their money and running (some of it what I payed for it), have to say it all sounds a bit shadey
At face value, it does look incredibly bad... which is why I think it's very important for a follow up announcement to explain what's going on at Dovetail and why this announcement has come so suddenly, despite there being constant updates about development progress and new features where it appeared that everything was ticking over nicely.
Hello again my friend . Doing some investigation on Froogle's claims during the Sunday report , I did indeed find verification. Look at Steve Hoods Tweet's .On Jan 12 2018 they were indeed doing some hiring
We are looking for both a Lead Programmer and a Flight Business Director, to be directly involved with the Flight team! Full job description can be found at: www.dovetailgames.com/vacancies
Feb 24 2018 We've got some epic savings on Epic Approaches, experience the thrill of landing in a variety of challenging scenarios at 60% off!
Interesting enough ...Steve Hoods last post was March 24 which was a retweet on a airport closing . I am sure that Steve Hood who was the acting executive director for Dovetail Games had already made the decision . You can look at dovetail games FSW facebook page for the rest. If I find anything else not listed that has some bearing , I will let you know
Yeah, as both Froogle and I mention in our videos, on FSW's Facebook page, they shared a post from Bluesky Simulations I think it was... who made an announcement 3 days before FSW was cancelled saying that they're looking forward to bringing a Spitfire Add on aircraft to FSW... 3 days before it was cancelled. The decision was already made yet they continued to lead customers on. This would suggest that not even the Social Media manager for FSW knew that it was going to be cancelled if they kept getting info from the front line developers saying "We're going to release the next update to the Career mode on this date." etc.
I said it from the beginning... when they released a product that was not ready, not developer friendly. With no real world weather , I could go on and on...Dovetail shot themselves in the foot . The release of a much better platform P3DV4 who in all fairness had a 8 year advantage with members of the original ESP team , and a major focus on the platform rather than the features . Dovetail did not do their homework, and would have done better if they had waited. People might say if they had waited then they would never have released a product...well We waited 10 years for it, another year would not have killed it. They released aircraft that did not work, and waited to release a SDK for development. Had scenery only draw 6 miles max, making it look like an old product. FSX had the same issue, but it was more pronounced in FSW. Night flying was impossible. I could see this without buying the product. RIP FSW !
Yeah I stand by that criticism that it was released way too early. The number of bugs in the initial release REALLY turned me off FSW and made me think that Dovetail weren't taking it seriously. That said.... I think if Dovetail didn't do that... and released FSW as it is today for their initial Early Access release, I think it would have been received a lot better.
I guess I should have included the licences Microsoft Split and then controlled . Separating Pro from entertainment. I am sure they made good money for it , but that was what made FSX the sim of it's time. You did not have to know how to fly, hop into a ultralight hit the throttle and go. If you found a passion for it , you could take it to aircraft systems and learn how to improve your skills. It was a all around simulation for everybody. What is done is done, now the question is, what will happen to the entertainment licence? Will it go back on the market? Could Lockheed pick it up? And if so...will they ? We need a simulator with a user friendly UI . Made for all not just for some.
I've no idea. That seems to be the main topic of speculation now... "What will happen to the "Entertainment" License?" It could go any of the ways you've suggested. I know PMDG were interested in a joint venture with some other people to buy the License when MS put it on the market however Dovetail outbid them to secure it. So another question to throw out there would be... "Could some existing add on developers band-together to buy the license from Dovetail and work together to build a new sim?"
Well my guess is that Microsoft in the selling of the licence , might have added a clause that holds the "Entertainment clause " hostage. In other words they still have a hand in it should rules be broken . I am not a big fan of Bill Gates, but he had a passion and investment in flight simulation . When he retired , that passion ended along with the extra funding he provided. Like I said, FSX was a beast because it included simmers and gamer's in a single package. I still own two boxed Gold editions to this day. I did make a move to P3DV4 but remained loyal to FSX. I looked at FSW / XPlane 11 , and P3DV4 . I would not go to P3D as long as they remained 32 bit. With the release of V4 I made the switch . That decision was based on research of what was available, what I was comfortable with. While FSW had a face lift and the rain effects were good, I have invested $4000 in add-ons for FSX. P3DV4 had the same default scenery, but it would draw out to the horizon . The focus was far better, than FSX. FSW did not hold water despite the scenery face lift. The water looked like FSX default, and there were no add-ons available, where Lockheed had developers ready and on board. Many who offered updates free of charge. Now many say that dovetail listened to the community , but actions indicate something else . Without real world weather , scenery add-ons, GPS not working, brakes not braking , night flying impossible , and the list goes on and on. In many ways Dovetail took 2 steps backwards for every step forward. Now I am rambling ! Sorry
Nah don't worry about rambling at all! I wanted this video to prompt some discussion and act as a forum for people to air their thoughts. It was an interesting read, sounds like your approach to flight simming and upgrading to P3D was the same as mine. I can see what FSW was going for with the facelift but it needed more substantial updates and new features which have not been seen in FSX/3D/XP. Like the Career Mode was a big step in the right direction but it appears to be too little too late.
If they knew they were going to fold how could they get us to buy their P40? I am out of pocket - hard-earned cash which could have gone to other things, but what I am most angry about is the way customers have been treated. Some warning before I purchased the P40 would have been the right thing to do, as it would have been before anyone else put their hand in their wallet to purchase FSW add-ons. I think that it is shameful that they kept trading knowing that they were going to the wall, or could go to the wall in the foreseeable future. We invest more than money with flight sim companies - we invest trust. As for the way the sim was put on the market, a basic sim missing all the things that others had was very disappointing. Even though people get anxious about new sims and the lead time before release it would be better for all, including the developers to hang off and load the sim up so it hits the ground running - ready to go. I feel cheated. You won't be on my Christmas List, Dovetail!
I completely agree and I sympathize with you and all FSW customers. You're completely right, the way you've been treated is disgusting which is why I hope Dovetail's senior executives make a follow up announcement because 1. They owe it to you and 2. You need some sort of closure on the matter after being led on by development promises.
Unfortunately since making this video, I've seen more and more rumours that not even the FSW developers knew that this decision was coming. The actual 3D modellers, artists and programmers were continuing work normally only to arrive in the office on a Monday morning to be told that development was being stopped immediately and that they were probably going to lose a job. That makes me resent Dovetail's senior management even more. It's disgraceful to mislead your customers... but to mislead your staff as well would be a whole other level of contempt displayed by management.
never been this close to a english face, great rant!
English? ENGLISH? och noooooo! haha, I'm Scottish ;)
I suspect the revenue collected was used for development. It paid for software engineers, managements and all associated overhead. Software development is a very expensive undertake. Ask Google how they are doing despite all of the money in the world they are struggling keeping apps relevant and apple with all its might struggled with 11.0 and the iPhone X has been less than anticipated. In our Sim world the problem is bigger because we lack the numbers and the users are aging fast and a low number of interested younger simmers will not replace the old pilots. :( It puts into perspective the job Microsoft did with FSX and Prepar3D and X-Plane. In regards to FSW I bought the early access and never did have one flight where I enjoyed the flight. Today I am amazed how good FSX with ORBx can be. FSW just never got to any level where I said, boy! they have turned the corner. The last release allowed me to fly a float plane and it was fun. I got my money's worth. I wish the FSW development team good luck and I hope they take the experience to new beginnings and future success. Doofer911 thank you for a heartfelt announcement. in 1982 I flew FS 1.0 in a test computer and the salesman said that if it got more realistic I would need a license. Nope! it was horrible, but 15 years later it was better. LOL
I'm pretty sure that's the case but as I said in the video, I think that development efforts were prioritising the wrong things. I think if they held onto FSW and released it this year after they'd got Float planes in and working, got the Career Mode in, Got TrueSky in and had all of those things available from the first public release... then that would have been received by the whole flight sim community in a more favorable manner and would have drawn in more people and more interest to generate more revenue for continued development. When the game first dropped last year, there wasn't much in there to "wow" people and show that FSW was a BIG step forward from what's currently available. Yes there was some nice eye candy but in terms of features and functionality, it felt like a big step backwards if anything. But they looked like they were starting to get somewhere with this Career mode and just as they're getting things moving in the right direction, it's all stopped suddenly.
I just hope the FSW community gets a more detailed explanation. Judging by comments on Steam, a lot of people feel very hard done by, rightly so.
ok guys. never thought id be confused about buying a game. but now its may 2019. im new to the sim world. but love airliners. played fsx years ago. was ok. now what? i ordered x plane 11 with some extras. but its not going to be relased till june? i downloaded flightgear. and it seems to just crash out. im using windows 10, i7-9700k, 32gbs ram, m2 drives, and a amd vega 56. so my pc should be able to cope with most of whats out there. was going to buy virtual pilot 3d. now im reading its a scam?
> X-Plane 11 is available today through the X-Plane website and Steam Store. It's widely regarded as being one of the best consumer flight simulators available today along with...
> Prepar3D (P3D) which is an evolution of Microsoft FSX. Prepar3D is marketed as being a professional product but it's still available to buy and use as a regular consumer.
> X-Plane 11 and Prepar3D are the two most popular simulators and have active communities and experienced third party developers continuously making high quality add-on content.
> Digital Combat Simulations (DCS) is another popular simulator however it's military focused so you can learn to fly fast jets, shoot missiles, drop bombs etc. It's available through the DCS website and Steam Store.
Now the other two you mentioned..
> My understanding is that Flight Gear is an open-source simulator and isn't quite a complete product yet. The reviews I've seen seem to suggest that there's varying quality between scenery and aircraft in the sim. I don't know much more about it I'm afraid.
> My initial research into Virtual Pilot 3D is that a lot of flight sim "news" websites are indicating that this is a scam. There are several scam flight simulators and a lot of them seem to be built on the back of, or take advantage, or use the Flight Gear simulator because it's open-source and therefore free to download. Meaning it's a little bit of time and effort for potentially big rewards for the scammers.
My advice would be to consider Prepar3D or X-Plane 11 if you're looking for a well rounded, feature-full and polished simulator.
The problem was the stupid GA only release, Microsoft did the same mistake with Microsoft Flight,now DTG, they should have followed p3d and xplane when releasing the product, I'm not against GA sim but what catches the public eyes are the airliners, just look at Ivao,pilotedge ,vatsim 85% are jets flying and releasing a flight simulator with no big plane or airliner is a stupid decision, it was promising but those GA would not bring the audience
total shock for me, i wanted to get it
You can still buy the game up untill the 24th of May if you think you'll be satisfied with the current features on offer.
As Dr Edward and the official announcement says, the game will be available until 24th May and you'll still be able to play it after that date. But just be aware that it won't change and there won't be any more official updates made for it.
I bought from Steam a few weeks ago, but found it buggy and obtained a refund within 2 hours. Turned out to be lucky! I think DTG makes its money from its train sim and the high cost dlcs. I wonder if Microsoft regrets selling off the FSX rights to DTG? Sad day for flight simmers.
Yeah I think you would have fallen inside the refund criteria if you haven't owned the game for long and only played a short amount of time. Unfortunately, it appears that many FSW players have fallen outside of that criteria and can't get a refund now.
As for MS... I don't think they're bothered. My understanding is that they sold off the ESP Engine Licenses to Lockheed Martin and Dovetail games as they were the highest bidders. I've recently discovered that PMDG and some others banded togeher to try and buy the ESP "Entertainment" license but were outbid by Dovetail in the end. So I think MS just wanted to get the most money for the software rather than focusing on making sure that flight simulation would be passed onto the best people. That said, I do think that some of the original Microsoft Flight Sim developers now work at Lockheed on P3D so P3D has the best "pedigree" of flight sim developers I would say.
Doofer911 - I’ll need to watch more of your videos if I’m going to upgrade to either of the others and I may also need a new rig!!
Well I'm planning on getting a more comprehensive schedule together so I'll start to feature more P3D and XP11 content alongside FSX. I may also dip my toes into DCS from time to time.
The moral of the story: NEVER EVER buy early on ANY product. Ditto for anything kickstarter like TANE. Yeah maybe you save $$$ by doing so. But if it goes belly up like this POS did, you're out %100 on your money. (However, if you inform your CC company of what happened, you'll get a full refund better than %90 of the time unlike if you try to deal with Steam, DTG, NV3 all these companies ripping off their customers with BS like this mess.) I personally did this with TANE. I learned from TANE and seriously doubted all the hype when TSW came onto the scene. Reminded me too much of the TANE propaganda BS. And if this POS had made it off the ground, (nice pun there !!) it would have been a POS just like TSW.
I disagree. I think some products released into Early Access are worth investing in if the developers are transparent, have a clear plan and communicate that well with their target audience. Two games that spring to mind which did Early Access well in my opinion were Planet Coaster and Prison Architect. In those cases, the bulk of Planet Coaster had been developed and the end product was a MASSIVE step forward from the previous Theme Park Tycoon games such as RCT1/2/3, even in it's first public release state. With Prison Architect, the game wasn't as fully featured at first, however there was a regular, reliable update schedule with videos and commentary from the developers to fully explain each feature, the design behind it and how it integrates into the bigger picture. Also, the developers took care to keep the game in an "Early Access" status until they clearly developed it to the point where it had many features and matched their "vision" for what they wanted the game to be. ONLY THEN, did they take it out of Early Access and into a full, official release. With FSW... the initial public release didn't have many defining features which indicated it was a step forward from FSX, P3D or X Plane.... which I suspect made many people think "Well why would I give up FSX/P3D/XP for FSW which doesn't offer anything significantly better?" Which is why I say in the video, if Dovetail released FSW as it is now, it would have been received better and got more of a following. With things like the Career Mode and Interactive Checklist system... those are very cool features!
To be honest I'm glad FSW nonsense is over. In my mind they approached subject from absolutely wrong side. Instead of doing very specific set of usage scenarios like carrier of private VFR pilot, commercial pilot or something along those lines, DTG started to implement another clone of FSX with no specific direction.
As I said, I think FSW would have received a better reaction if Dovetail brought things we hadn't seen before. But I agree, the features being developed didn't seem to offer much new very early on. If anything, a lot of features were stripped out of the code while the team worked on upgrading it to take advantage of 64bit and new hardware power etc.
Worst 25€ i've spent in my life, i had so many expectations. F*ck DTG.
Yeah I think they over-promised and under-delivered which upset a lot of people and they couldn't recover from that bad initial first impression of the sim.
Turns out CEO Paul Jackson is an ex vice president of EA. Just flight need an explanation.
I'm curious, why do you think Just Flight need an explanation?
@@Doofer911 Just Flight has put resources into a product that was doomed.
Why DTG don´t close the doors too and stop killing games!!!
Do you think they are killing games? If you do, what is it they do that "kills" a game?
I'm sorry, I was wrong, they do not kill the games they abandon them...
Ah ok, As far as I know it's only Flight School and Flight Sim World that they have abandoned and maybe some old Train Simulator games. But it's very strange to abandon a game after one year (Flight Sim World)
all we have is p3d and fsx :(
but we wont let flight simming go down. :)
I've said this before and I'll say it again, X Plane is growing stronger. We've now seen Orbx (another big FSX/P3D developer) start making products for X Plane and it won't be long before someone works on an improved ATC system. X Plane seems to be getting bigger and stronger.
The knight is rising :)
Personally, I don't think I will really bother with payware scenery for XP11. Hd global scenery mesh and Ortho4xp are basically all you need and those mods are free.
That's right ! payware quality scenery for zero $
Definitely a big improvement, coming from FSX
so basically this means that dovetail will lose trust from the public and in general will lose public's attention and clients in general further down the road ! well too bad for them ! might as well stick to fsx or p3d ! but no way x plane !
Yeah, their reputation is a bit shaky as it is with their "DLC first" focus however this decision will certainly reflect negatively on the company.
X-plane 11
A few people do seem to be moving over to XP11 now from FSW.
I let them have it on their Facebook page. I believe they owe us all a refund.
If you're a customer of theirs, I think you're well within your right to request that. I imagine for the dedicated fans of FSW, it's a horrible experience. Dovetail releasing updates and more information regarding new features such as the Career mode only to snatch it away 3 days later and stop everything. What's worse is them saying that there were "many detailed discussions"... so they knew they were in trouble, yet continued to lead on their community by releasing more updates and information before suddenly taking everything away.
Glad that i refunded it before it was too late :). They dont listen to the community. Their greed took over early in development.
I'm seeing Dovetail's relationship with Community Feedback being a common criticism. I understand the difficulty of dealing with a community if they're demanding things however if a lot of people are saying the same things.... it's valuable information and something which should be looked at!
good riddance, the only thing good about it was Tru sky, which needs to be ported to xplane 11 imo
It's possible... TruSky is a software plugin for game engines so it's possible that it could be worked on to allow integration into X Plane..
I may have sounded a little more cynical than usual, after doing some more research I know the developers were more invested in FSW, but Dovetail management, is just ugh and were quickly making the impression they were going to just nickel and dime it like their train series. That being said, the ESP graphic engine needs to die and be replaced, and I hold out hope that when xplane-11 goes vulkan, that someone will develop truesky for xplane-11 /end rant
Yeah, I suspected it was a higher level manager who pulled the plug which is why I'd like to hear a follow up announcement regarding the sudden, unexpected nature of the development closure. And I disagree about the ESP engine, it's proven to be a reliable platform and many developers seem to work with it easily enough to give us add ons. And with a company like Lockheed Martin developing it with P3D... I doubt it's going away any time soon.
Someone should take over development of FSW. DTG is just terrible
I'm not sure if that will happen. Dovetail own a License to develop a product using the ESP Engine, which drives FSX, FSW and P3D. It's possible that if this decision was driven by financial concerns, that they could sell that License and possibly even sell the content they've made to recoup some money. As I said, I'm hoping for a more comprehensive announcement explaining what has actually happened because what Dovetail have said already doesn't explain much and doesn't even offer an apology to the fans of FSW.
"Let's copy fsx, give it a different name, sell it for 40$ and promise that it's going to be good once, and as soon as it made enough money, cancel it with no option of money back"
Jesus Christ. What a pathetic mess. I actually feel scammed and stupid for falling for this shit. Unbelievable
I'm sorry that this has happened to you. It's a very messy situation and I think that more explanation needs to be given considering that the game was only out on "full" release for three months.
I read the announcement again and there's not even an apology to their supporters in there. It's just an announcement saying that they're stopping development.
" We are in it for the long haul " This was the statement made by the CEO of Dovetail games . Many other promises were either broken or never intended to be delivered. When watching the folks at Sky Lounge discussing the end of FSW, I was amazed when the head of that forum stated " Dovetail never said they were competing with P3D or X Plane " My first thought was , why are you doing it then ? Talk about a false non sensible statement! So what started the chain of events that lead the demise of FSW?
1) The release of Flight School and the reaction of the serious sim community . This was Dovetails wake up call, but those in charge never woke up. From reactions both subtle and dramatic in reviews , dovetail should have pushed the slow down button , and created a forum where they could have interacted with the whole community. In fact the end user was pretty well left out of the loop.
2) Lack of communication with the third party developers. Now here in is the controversy . Dovetail claimed they needed to work with these developers, but behind the scenes , there were many problems not exposed . PMDG / Carenado and a host of others were not getting on board...Why? One developer who I will not mention here, claimed that Dovetail would not release a SDK for development. This engine is a must have for development of products. Many Flight sim fans had invested thousands into these products including myself, and I was not going to start that process over again. I had $ 4000 invested in software not including the hardware I was running it on .
3) Good programming team run by poor management . Those who were hired to create this platform were not to blame for the poor management decisions made by the CEO's of Dovetail
4) The release of early access FSW. This was the worst decision of all . Dovetail in their hurry to get a product out before P3D, shot themselves in the foot by taking a two steps back for every step forward approach into the market place. This combined with the lack of communication with third party development teams spelled doom at the onset of FSW's release. Combine these realities with a one way conversation with end users ( meaning Dovetail did all the talking ) meant , this next generation of the ESP platform never had a chance. Features that FSX already contained and became a standard expectation were omitted on this early release. They are
Controls removed for detailed radius ( in fact Dovetail decreased the level of detail down to 5 miles and then the horizon would have out of focus mesh
Many controls FSX had for setting up detail and performance were removed.
Washed out scenery, and buildings with no textures . Runways that required the user to put on sunglasses .
No replay system
No jet ways or ability to set up start locations. You would start up on the runway
Clouds with no textures ( Pure Bright White )
Aircraft limited to a hand full of GA aircraft and understandable , because if Dovetail had released high flying aircraft with a program that had a limited detail radius all the pilot would have seen is a pile of out of focus mesh below. Add to that limited aircraft selection, the models were buggy at best, and not fully functional .
No AI traffic, no road traffic , no living breathing world
In short the immersion factor took many steps backwards . A simulator is not a simulator unless you combine the physics of flight with a level of detail that makes you feel immersed in the real world.
I am sure the programmers had a passion for making FSW right....Too bad the CEO's did not !
Thanks for the long comment Darrin, I made sure to read it all. One of my early criticisms of Dovetail after the initial release was their communication, specifically the disparity between what they were announcing in pre-release trailers and what the sim actually delivered. For example... they said things like "We have the most detailed aircraft in any sim" however in the initial release, there was one aircraft where labels on all switches and lights was missing. In another aircraft there were switches which had very blurry textures, so bad that you couldn't even read the text on the switches. They kept saying in pre-release trailers "We're listening to the community, we're releasing the game to get community feedback" so they must have known how important it was to make a good first impression and they still released a buggy, barebones simulator. I talk about it and demonstrate it in this video here which I made a couple of weeks after it was released: ua-cam.com/video/OYr9RK6rZvU/v-deo.htmlm7s
I don't know as much about their interactions with 3rd Party Devs. I knew there was some controversy regarding the Steam Store and DLC and how it was going to be managed but I didn't look into that side of things in detail.
I also believe that the people on the "front line" were just doing their best. I've been part of IT Support teams in the past which have been run under a similar management style where the managers seem so disconnected from the work that their employees are doing which is why I sympathise with them and hope for further explanation from managers at Dovetail as to why FSW was cancelled. Since making this video, I've also heard rumours that not even the front line developers knew that the project was going to be cancelled, which goes some way to explaining why even 3-5 days before the cancellation, FSW fans were still receiving development updates and news about new things such as the career mode and new add on aircraft coming to the Steam Store.
As for the barebones nature....again, this circles back to early hype. If you watch the video I linked above, you'll see a pre-release trailer as part of that. Dovetail were making comments about how they wanted to move flight simulation forward and offer things never seen.... but they release a buggy, featureless simulator. Again, they say one thing but the product and evidence indicates something else. As you correctly identified... FSW was a massive step backwards when talking about built in features, even when compared to FSX, even compared to FS9(2004)... possibly even as far back as Flight Simulator 98 which still offered GA, Jet Aircraft and a helicopter!!!
Thanks for your time and comment as well... Have you seen the activity on FSW 's facebook page during the last 2 months? Buy our stuff day after day . Buy our DLC's . In fact after watching Froogle Sunday News, he brought up a point that is of concern for all of us . It appears that not only was Dovetail in the process of trying to sell everything they could to the masses , but made a future outlook 2 days before they killed it !
Perhaps they knew they were in trouble and needed finance , but here is the other point...You can still buy FSW on steam until May 24... Why would they continue to want to make sales? Froogle came up with a very likely reason. They are attempting to cover the conservative investment of 3 million as well as their contract to sell from Microsoft. Froogles conclusions are sound. What Dovetail can't make up in their investment, could cause them to go after Lockheed Martin for lack of enforcement of their licences . Dovetail could blame Lockheed for the failure of FSW. This is of great concern to me and I am sure everyone in the community. Such a move could cause Lockheed to react in the following
1) Taking away the Academic Licence from their website
2) Increasing the cost of their product in order to pay the damage claims of Dovetail
3) Pulling the plug on Prepared all together
One last thing Froogle reminded us, If you are a third party developer and want to introduce a product on FSW, There are two methods for doing so
1) Put it on the Dovetail site which will cost you 30%
2) Put it on Steam which will cost you 60% ( 30% to Dovetail/ 30% to Steam )
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Yeah I did see Froogle's video today about FSW. I did like the way he compared Facebook posts between developers... it really put things into perceptive to indicate the activity of each developer on social media however I personally would have liked to have seen screenshots of each post. I believe that if you're going to present an argument in any situation, you should have evidence to support it. Regardless, I know Froogle has experience in software development and has been part of the flight sim community longer than me so it's worth paying attention to his views. I believe he also wrote for PC Pilot Magazine in the past as well.
The most logical explanation for Dovetail pulling the plug on FSW is financial reasons. I know that Dovetail received investment from a company called Alcuin who state that their usual investment amount ranges between £2-15 million pounds so that would match up with a $3 million dollars estimate. I've since discovered from the UK Companies House (A UK government website that records and publishes information in relation to Ltd companies) that Alcuin is now legally recognized as "a person with significant control" of Railsimulator.com Ltd (Dovetail's official, legal name). In that documentation, it reads "Nature of Control - The relevant legal entity has the right to exercise, or actually exercises, significant influence or control over the company." So with that information, I believe that Alcuin have been putting pressure on Dovetail in relation to financial matters.
As for Dovetail going after Lockheed.... I don't think it'll happen. A company with suspected financial difficulties going after one of the world's biggest Aerospace and Defence companies which is also financially supported by the US Government. I don't know specifics of the legal stuff but I'm pretty sure that Lockheed's legal team probably exceeds the total number of staff at Dovetail, they have a wealth of knowledge and experience drawing up legal arrangements worth unfathomable amounts of money with Governments and private firms around the world. I'm sure they would be able to defend against any issues regarding their Academic license.
I hope you are right.. At any rate, I fully support our community which means both the end user like me and the third party developers that create the immersion I need to enjoy this hobby. It really pisses me off that Dovetail not only pulled the plug on members of our community, but have the nerve to continue to promote, buy our stuff before it is removed. That is a cold slap in the face ! Whether intended or not....Dovetail has damaged the flight sim family by this move.
I do still think that Dovetail should take responsibility and make a further announcement. As weird as it sounds, I think that a proper explanation would give fans of FSW some sort of closure on the matter.
Aside from FSX I will never purchase another Dovetail new game. Give up when there's a struggle show signs of weakness. DTG has lost all my respect.
Yeah, their reputation wasn't the strongest to begin with but this sudden move to completely cut their flight sim efforts is incredibly bad for their committed FSW fans. Hence why I believe it's very important that a follow up announcement is made explaining fully what's going on. If you read the announcement carefully, you'll see that there's not even an apology in there. It's also not been announced on Dovetail's website, only through quieter channels that only FSW users would see, on Steam and the official FSW forums.
FSW...total bullshit company objective. The community understood this from the very beginning. I did not spend ONE PENNY on FSW and now I'm glad to see them go. More focus on the three stable platforms.
Yeah, one positive thing that I've seen are more people being pushed towards X-Plane which is also on Steam which is good for Laminar Research and the wider X Plane community.
I’m flying fsw right now. FSW Better than x plane 11 airplanes
If that's what you prefer, that's fine!
FSW cockpit view let’s you zoom out farther. X plane doesn’t. Plus X plane is hard to see over the dash board. I called the developers about the problem. They just blew me off acting like their cockpit view is normal. After the conversation with X plane engineers, I lost confidence. I don’t know if Microsoft has a patent on their cockpit view zoom. X plane confuses me. I have Lockheed prepar3d Simulator. Lockheed Cockpits view zoom is fine.
X Plane's camera system is different but that's not necessarily a bad thing. By default, I believe that it offers more freedom to move about but I agree that the zoom range is less than FSX and P3D.
...think, there's no more market for Flighsim. Everbody is playing with their smartphone. Stupid and dumb.. Think the time of intelligent people is OVER :-( - Ich denke, das die Menschen heute einfach keinen PS mehr benutzen und die Aufmerksamkeitsdauer einfach viel zu kurz ist. Flugsimulatoren sind eben nichts für "gerade mal eben"... Schade
I don't think so, we still see many add ons being developed, Prepar3D and X Plane 11 seem to have active communities and FSX still has over 2000 players per day.
..think it has to be > 200.000 to be an interesting market for developpers... :-/
Interesting thought... the flight simulation market has been active for at least 10 years and countless developers have released countless products in that time. Just because it's a niche hobby and interest, doesn't mean it's not interesting. The Flight Sim community are relatively small when you compare them to AAA game communities such as Counter Strike, League of Legends, Starcraft etc.... however the flight sim community and industry has been alive and well for a long time and despite one developer dropping out, there are still two major flight simulator programs which have active communities and many third party developers enhancing those simulators with add on content, both payware and freeware.
I know. Whatever..it's a shame. I'm flying 30 years in "reality" and ~ 20 with FSX and P3D. Made my own airport (EDTA, Trier, between Luxemburg and Spangdhalem), programming and adapt airports for PMDG - FMC etc etc... but.. think we are just a very very small community :-/ . Flight-Sim has NOTHING to do with "Gaming" (MHO) ... it's ... a shame that there isn't much more interest for those things... :-(
Potential wasted!
That's how I see it. They had a really good opportunity to bring in some fresh ideas and features and they were almost there with that Career Mode! If they led with that, things could have gone differently.