Microsoft Flight

» see microsoftflight.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

One hundred and forty seven days. That is the distance between 29 February 2012, when Microsoft Flight went up as a free download, and 25 July 2012, when Microsoft announced it had stopped developing it. The company described the decision as part of the natural ebb and flow of managing a portfolio. Roughly thirty five people at Microsoft Studios Vancouver were laid off the same day, along with an unannounced Kinect project called Columbia.

The idea had been announced in August 2010 and it was not stupid. Microsoft Flight Simulator was one of the longest running franchises in software, dating to 1982, and Microsoft had closed the studio that made it in 2009. Flight was the attempt to bring the name back for a wider audience: no box, no price, land on an island in Hawaii in a small sport aircraft and see whether flying was fun before anyone asked you for money.

What you got for free was the Icon A5 and the Big Island of Hawaii. Everything past that came from the Games for Windows Marketplace, and everything in that marketplace was built by Microsoft Studios, because Flight shipped with no public SDK. Flight Simulator's whole culture was third party aircraft and payware scenery built by small studios. Cutting that off and selling the parts yourself was the decision the audience actually objected to.

Reviewers put the failure more plainly. Flight had less terrain and fewer aircraft than the game it succeeded, and it was less accurate than X-Plane while asking for a credit card from people who had spent fifteen years building their own hangars. Five months later the whole thing was over.

This one never came near me. My PC gaming years happened in Turkish internet cafes where the whole room was playing Counter-Strike, and paying real money to unlock a second airplane would have been treated as a joke at that counter. By 2012 I was working as an engineer with no time for a simulator anyway, which is the other half of why a free flight sim from Microsoft could launch and die inside one summer without my noticing.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

Mechanically it was a competent piece of software. The terrain rendering was better than Flight Simulator X, and the flight model was approachable where the old one had been punishing. If it had shipped as a fifty dollar boxed game in 2008 nobody would remember it badly.

The free-to-play part is what dated it. In 2012 every publisher was converting something to free-to-play, mostly on the evidence of mobile games and Asian MMOs, and the reasoning rarely got as far as asking whether this particular audience behaved that way. Flight simulator people are hobbyists who spend enormous sums, but they spend it on aircraft made by people who fly, not on a storefront run by the platform holder.

~ the day it died ~

25 July 2012 was a Wednesday and the announcement was not a shutdown notice. Nothing was switched off, the servers stayed up and the download stayed available. Microsoft simply said it would build nothing further, which for a live service product is the same sentence with better manners.

The actual switch came thirteen months later. Microsoft closed the Xbox.com PC Marketplace on 22 August 2013, which ended any possibility of buying the aircraft and scenery that made up most of the product. Purchases already made kept working. The game itself is no longer distributed at all.

~ what got buried with it ~

Flight's failure is the reason the franchise sat still for eight years. The name did not come back until August 2020, when a new Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived built by Asobo with satellite terrain and cloud streaming, sold as a normal game at a normal price with third party add-ons welcomed back immediately. Every design decision in it reads as a correction of 2012.

The Vancouver studio survived its own cancellation. What was left of it was folded into the team that later became The Coalition and given Gears of War, which turned out considerably better for everyone except the thirty five people who were let go in July.

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