Frooglesim News

[Mach3DS]

A very good YouTube post about the state of FS. Highly suggest you all watch. His opinion of course, but at the very end he does bring up a few points that I had not thought of previously.

https://youtu.be/4ujKNoCVvVM

[Roger]

Saw that myself earlier today, Rick. Some interesting thoughts from Pete on the machinations that may occur in time.

We've closed the FSW thread here in the FsX forum, so I will move this to the FSW forum, which we will leave open for information

[falcon409]

A very good YouTube post about the state of FS. Highly suggest you all watch. His opinion of course, but at the very end he does bring up a few points that I had not thought of previously.

https://youtu.be/4ujKNoCVvVM

I have never been interested in Steam as an alternative for my FSX use and as such have never cared about how all that works and had no idea that Dovetail was building a new Simulator. I guess I had heard the name FlightSim World knock around in discussions on the FSX forum but had no interest at all in even looking at it.

Having said that, and given what he had to say at the end, despite the demise of FSW DTG in theory is now holding a very large sword over the heads of two very successful and lucrative programs. I hope, as does Pete, that what might happen. . .does not happen. It could be very devastating.

[bazzar]

I personally, do not believe that Lockheed will "have a problem" . They are just too big. XPlane needs to make things a LOT more user friendly for developers in particular. So Dovetail might well pull the plug on FSX Steam. So what? they pulled support for it already. FSX will continue to exist as long as developers continue to support it. It is that simple.

[Mach3DS]

I too don't believe that DTG will be able to touch LM. You're talking about one of the world's largest military contractors. Compared to DTG? It's laughable. LM's agreement with MS would have been bullet proof from a legal stands point. I work for another extremely large aerospace company. We operate like a small government. I'm sure LM operates the same way. There's no way that when they offered the software in the way they did that their attorneys would not have dotted every I and crossed every T before they pushed forward in the form in which they are executing their product. Here's what IMO would happen. IF a case is taken against LM, they will bleed DTG of funds until they can't afford to keep it going. This isn't just some random software company we're talking about. Again, just my opinion. Purely speculative. Plus, P3D existed prior to FSW. So I think, it would be a moot point

[gman5250]

Well...after listening to Froogle end to end I come away with one or two opinions.

First...I'll hang on to my pristine FSX boxed set because it is going to become a commodity. Fine, but it's not for sale.

Second...the idea of DTG going after Lockheed Martin in the legal arena brings up a fundamental legal principal. Money, money and more money. LM has limitless resources to grind DTG into fine powder if the occasion were to arise that DTG filed a damage suit. It is highly doubtful that DTG has the resources to tackle such a legal entanglement, and the corporate decision to move forward would be the death nail of the company. I doubt that the various contributors, vendors and licensees would be inclined to support such a decision.

On the whole, DTG would be wisest to lick their wounds, re-evaluate their corporate strategy and go back to selling entertainment that will appeal to a demographic which will support their business model.

Flight sim is a different animal, the people who support it are distinctly different in their loyalties. FSX third party will undoubtedly continue to support their user base, and LM will undoubtedly move forward with P3D...after dealing with any legalities brought about by DTG.

The "third rail" topic of the license shall remain open for private conjecture...but I"m not anticipating any changes in my plans.

What is interesting to me is that the "entertainment" aspect of the MS intellectual property are still a consideration for value. I wonder where that will lead?


IMO....

[IanP]

You'd never guess that Pete Wright was involved with the "consortium of well regarded developers", would you?

How about that, following the protracted attempt to get Microsoft to sell the franchise to them, unsuccessfully, the fact that it was sold to DTG so quickly might have been because Microsoft didn't want to sell to the consortium?

Possibly because MS were aware that there was a lot of competition between said developers, that they had different goals and opinons and weren't exactly likely to be able to hold up as a single entity for any length of time without breaking up? That's my guess, not based on any published evidence, but knowing who was involved and knowing how long MS held out for, they clearly weren't overly impressed by what was on offer. I do also suspect that DTG significantly overbid, though, to agree with his point there. I really don't think they did their homework at all well before deciding to get involved, but they were a single company with a single opinion on how to use the franchise they were bidding for. They had, to someone like MS, a lot more credibility behind their offer than a disparate bunch of developers, most of whom had been roundly attacking Microsoft in public about Flight.

Anyway. A few challenges to the actual speech...

First, DTG did engage with the community - and what they got in return was a massive amount of abuse from people who had already, having decided that FSX was dead, bought very heavily into P3D. The sheer amount of bile aimed from this "community" at DTG was appalling to see. That said, though, DTG did try to build their own community, but their reps were on Avsim, they were on Steam forums, they were on their own forums, they went to flight sim shows... It wasn't that they didn't engage with the community, but a lot of the time, when they did, they were met with utter hatred.

Second, why didn't the likes of A2A or PMDG try and sell products that they were just bringing to market during that period? Because neither company brought any products to market during that period. Other companies, such as JustFlight and Aerosoft, advertise constantly. So why didn't his chosen developers advertise products? Not because they're somehow pious and perfect, but because they had nothing new to sell. DTG were adding products to the line-up (although often they were somewhat iffy and I'm not surprised most people weren't interested) so they were advertising them. Perhaps a little too heavily. Perhaps because I'm used to the fact that TS stuff is almost always on sale, I ignored the fact that FSW stuff was. Why didn't Pete Wright pick up on the fact that the sales weren't just for FSW products, but also for FSX:SE, TS201n and TSW? My guess is he did. he also got the advertising mails, Facebook posts and Tweets from other companies, but he chose to ignore them, to hammer home a single minded point about "evil DTG trying to steal the money from your pockets".

Third, he keeps hammering on that "it wasn't released". Well, when it exited early access, it was released. You could argue with good ground that it wasn't finished, you could argue that the EA period was pointless, but you cannot say it wasn't released, so why keep saying it wasn't?

Fourth, he didn't mention why, having had so much opportunity to do so, DTG haven't already used their mythical ability to hold L-M to ransom to do so... Could it be because L-M aren't in breach of their license with Microsoft, so DTG wouldn't have a leg to stand on? Plenty of people are in breach of their license agreements with Lockheed-Martin, but I suspect that what others have said is quite correct - L-M want the developers on board and they know that if they're only selling to a tiny, if lucrative, customer base then most developers will walk away? Don't know. That's conjecture.

Now, I am biased here because I don't like Pete Wright. I haven't liked him since way before DTG had any involvement with the FS world (small w!) and this "editorial" shows exactly why. He's full of himself and puts out his opinions as fact, without any evidence to back them up and often when the evidence actually points a completely different way. He always has done and I don't think I've heard him apologise once when he's got it wrong. He's just said that he's "surprised" or "amazed" and gone on to explain how he will eventually be proven right all along. If he has, then I apologise. It's because I don't tend to listen to his rants, so probably missed it.

I do agree with him that the big opportunity here is for Laminar Research. Lockheed-Martin have no interest in whether DTG succeeded or not (other than had DTG succeeded, it might have solved L-M's licensing problems... ) as they didn't and still don't see them as a competitor. However, a lot of people who had already tied their flags to P3D's mast have a lot of vested interest in seeing DTG fail. Odd that wasn't mentioned as well, isn't it?

To be honest, it's all a moot point, because it was DTG's management's decisions that led to this point. "We're in it for the long haul, we're in it for the long haul, we're in it for the... we're out." - they kind of lose any credibility that they had, there, don't they? To us, as simmers, however, it means that we've lost an opportunity, though. We now have to choose between a developer that could pull the rug from under our feet at any time and a developer that has a track record of not actually listening to the community either, although, to be fair, that does seem to be changing significantly for the better. I do agree with Mr. Wright on that point - X-Plane is probably where we should be looking and aiming to try and mould into what we want. Maybe DTG will sell the license to PMDG et al, so we can see how well that arrangement actually does stand up to reality, rather than trying to protect their own incomes without diversifying their development paths (which is why they wanted the sim in the first place, after all... No, it wasn't about the community, it was about protecting their incomes.)

Ian P.

[Mach3DS]

In have plenty of developer friends and owners, and many end user friends. I think the real reason FSW failed is that most flight simmers who spend money on content, are a fickle bunch. We'rve amassed literally multi thousands of dollars in content for FSX or P3D. It's not that FSW was "bad" it's that at the end of the day, if it didn't offer much more than what we were currently flying in terms of features, people were very unwillingness to spend more money in less, and not be able to have their extensive aircraft hangars brought over. There's all kinds of valid reasons why that shouldn't matter... But the key thing is that I think it DID matter. PBR and true sky were not enough. People wanted PMSG airliners. They wanted A2A Warbirds and GA, they want their Orbx airports. When the realization that those things were not forth coming and probably not going to be forthcoming any time soon, that was enough to keep the paying community members away. Myself included. People are simply unwilling to pay for something that is essentially what they already have in their current setup. There in lies the real problem to over come. In order to be successful in this niche. The flight simulator niche, I mean (I don't include X-Plane because I don't think it competes directly with FS). I know plenty of people that fly both and buy for both. The problem is that for an "FSW" to really be successful you need to eliminate the other almost identical options, or be so much better that you make those options irrelevant. And that simply didn't happen with FSW. Any way. I can't comment as to the individual that Frooglesim is. I don't know him. But, and editorial is just an opinion piece...

[vortex]

You'd never guess that Pete Wright was involved with the "consortium of well regarded developers", would you?

Well, there's a surprise if that's true. I've occasionally found his vlogs to be informative but Sunday's rant (and I'm being generous here) was way off the mark for me. He was very negative about FSW when it was released, even though he'd never tried it. When he finally did try it, he was impressed and said that he had to eat his words. Then when it failed, he basically said that he knew it would happen all along! It's obviously useful having such flexible opinions.

There were a number of factual errors in what he said (I hesitate to say lies) and the whole thing just seemed to be a deliberate attempt stir things up and then blame it all on DTG. One of the most interesting aspects of watching his video was being able to read the comments left below it. Particularly those from someone called Chris Trott which had some interesting information about DTG and were quite critical of Froogle. In his video, Froogle was very annoyed that DTG had won the rights to the franchise saying that, unlike the other bidders, they had zero experience in flight simulation. Chris Trott reminded him that DTG was made up of many of the original ACES team that had worked on both Microsoft Train Simulator and FSX. In his reply to that comment, Froogle even admitted that he was "well aware former members of Aces were involved with this project". Why, then, would he say that they had zero experience?

It's worth reading all of Chris Trott's comments (even though they also sound a bit like a rant, at times - but probably justified) and Froogle's response to them. I think that it's unlikely that I'll watch any more of his videos as there was definite evidence of an agenda to this last one.

I'm not an apologist for DTG - they certainly made mistakes during the brief life of FSW. However, I do think that they had some good ideas and seemed to genuinely want to create something new and innovative. They certainly deserved some of the criticism they got but a lot of it, particularly the very negative comments from people who didn't even own the product, seemed more aimed at sabotaging the project (to good effect, it would appear).

[txnetcop]

I've always thought of Peter as a negative Nelly unless he gets special attention anyway..so his vlog was a NOTHING event!
Ted