A company representative declined to comment on whether Microsoft told people in the simulator community about the release ahead of time. Microsoft, which hasn't yet revealed a price for the updated product, said on the Flight Simulator website that it does want contributions from outside developers. But other than that, Microsoft effectively exited the market. Two years later the simulator came to Valve's Steam video-game store.
In 2007 Microsoft did issue an expansion pack, and in 2012 it released a spin-off to the series called Microsoft Flight. "There were rumors but those rumors have been seen from time to time in the last years." "I was as much surprised as all others," said Winfried Diekmann, CEO of Aerosoft, a German manufacturer of simulation software and content for Microsoft Flight Simulator, in an email. Because Microsoft kept quiet about the latest update, third-party developers like Stough say they weren't given the opportunity to play a role in building cool new features. Stough, who as a kid went flying with his uncle, makes money by selling enhancements to simulator software - even Microsoft's technology from over a decade ago. A simulator called X-Plane is developed by Laminar Research, and Lockheed Martin makes a program called Prepar3D (pronounced prepared). There are also rival products on the market. "You've got so much competition in the general gaming area that it's hard for a simulator of flying a plane from point A to point B, without much of a purpose or drive behind it, to keep that momentum going," Stough said in an interview. A single flight on Flight Simulator can span several hours. That's because consumers have moved onto smartphones and attention spans have been shortened from the quick hits of social media. Still, Microsoft may struggle to generate much excitement in a business that it helped popularize.
But the update could showcase some of the cutting-edge technology coming out of Microsoft, including mapping imagery from the Azure public cloud, and it plays into CEO Satya Nadella's push toward subscription products and away from traditional packaged software. On its own, Flight Simulator is a niche product that isn't likely to move the needle for a company that generates over $30 billion in quarterly revenue. "They might hint that they did, but honestly, I don't believe it." "I don't think anybody in our industry had a clue this was going on," said Reed Stough, managing partner of Rex Game Studios, which develops detailed clouds and weather patterns for flight simulator programs.
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