The news shell shocked the Flight Simulator community earlier this week - Microsoft has closed down the ACES studio which is responsible for Flight Simulator. Currently, there are quite a few theories in circulation why this happened. I'll recap what happened over the last few years, so we have some facts to look at.
Flight Simulator X has been released
In 2007, Microsoft released a highly anticipated follow-up - Flight Simulator X. However, the acceptance by the community was very mixed. The main problem was performance related, many users expected more performance than they got. This overall verdict is reflected in the amazon.com rating which at 3 stars out of 5 is not really great.
Despite the mixed reception, sales numbers were very good, in fact better than initial FS2004 sales (which may just be due to the fact that Flight Simulator was at an all time high at that time). However, Microsoft took the criticisms on board and dedicated a whole year to developing two patches to improve performance.
Commitment to Flight Simulator
Despite the mixed reception, Microsoft fully stood behind the series and heavily committed into it. Firstly, as mentioned, two patches were developed. Then, Microsoft also developed an add-on - Flight Simulator: Acceleration. Lastly, the decision was made to target the commercial market with a new product called ESP. This meant a big influx of people to the Aces team, in parallel the team also started work on Train Simulator 2. The team probably more than doubled in size.
Another thing worth noting may be that lead Mike Gilbert left and Phil Taylor stepped into his shoes. This change reflected heavy restructuring and commitment on the side of Microsoft.
Problems
The development of the two patches took about one year which wasn't budgeted for. This meant a delay of one year until a new version could even be started and would have eaten a significant amount of profits.
Flight Simulator: Acceleration can probably called a flop. Despite an interesting concept, online racing never became main stream and the add-on never shared the same success as Flight Simulator X (unlike add-ons for the popular video game The Sims which are hugely successful).
Getting clients for ESP was not easy. While I truly believe ESP is a great product and a great strategy, from my professional experience in the field ESP was targeting I know the commercial market takes a disproportionate amount of marketing and convincing. ESP could have been a great product one day, but it was a major investment which needed some successes now.
Phil Taylor left the team in 2008. Now, I don't blame Phil for the closure - I wish him well in his new job. An interesting fact though is that, as far I can tell, there never was a successor appointed. That always struck me as odd.
More Problems - the situation now
So where is Flight Simulator today? Let's have a look at some interesting stats
Two very recent polls (Just Flight and PMDG) reveal that only 30% of their customers are fully committed to Flight Simulator X today. Flight Simulator 2004 is still doing very well (how well we'll see in a minute). Avsim.com still run two forums one for FS2004 and one for FSX - over two years after the release of Flight Simulator X.
Over 2008, traffic to Flight Simulator sites has dropped dramatically. Google tells us that avsim.com shows a drop from 27,000 visitors a day in January 2008 to 15,000 in December 2008. Flightsim.com dropped from 20,000 visitors to 12,000. This is more than a third - the FS community almost shrunk to half its former size during 2008! In comparison, in 2007 the numbers stayed pretty constant (at the 27,000 and 20,000 marks for avsim.com and flightsim.com). The same trend has hit other Flight Simulator sites as well. Commercial add-on developers are not hit quite as hard, but numbers there are also in decline. In fact, I'm suspecting that Flight1.com is heading into dire straights based on their traffic numbers - and other developers will soon too.
If you have a look at the PC bestsellers at amazon.com right now, you're in for a surprise. Flight Simulator 2004 clocks in at #20, Flight Simulator X clocks in at #25! I'm not saying that Flight Simulator X sells poorly, or is a flop, however, it is a problem that Flight Simulator 2004 sells more copies than Flight Simulator X right now.
Conclusion
I think a long hard look at these numbers do suggest that there is a problem with Flight Simulator X. I'm sure it did contribute to the closure. However, I don't believe this is the only reason. As Phil Taylor points out, there have been several developments that contributed. However, fact is that the Flight Simulator market is declining, FS2004 is still very popular and the high investment that Microsoft put into the series put the team in a weak spot when 5000 employees had to go.
However, there is no point blaming individuals here, what happened happened. My sympathy goes to the people who now have to look for a new job. Judging from the outside, the closure could have been handled a lot more humane rather than closing the group from one day to the other.
I also want to make it clear that the numbers in this article are based on Internet tools and there is a slight give and take. Also, I don't know exactly what happened within the Aces team, because I wasn't there. These are all 'well educated' guesses and reflect my personal opinion. I'm convinced I'm pretty close to the mark, otherwise I wouldn't have written this article, but there is of course the possibility of inaccuracies...
