Microsoft's Flight Simulator is one of the longest running game in the history of computer games. Unfortunately, Microsoft made the entire development team redundant by shutting down the Aces studio. By cutting almost 5,000 jobs the software giant made it questionable whether the series would live to have another episode or not.
The very first episode of Flight Simulator dates back to the early '80s. As Nels Anderson, founder of the site FlightSim.com told BBC, "Microsoft have apparently cancelled a 27 year franchise. Flight sims were one of the few things about Microsoft people actually liked. It made them money and had an enormous following. To cancel something like that is an amazing thing to do."
According to Dermot Stapleton, who is the director of a company that published third party add-ons for Microsoft's simulator games, "it's the end of the line for their in-house development studio, but that doesn't mean it's the end of the line for the game. All Microsoft did was name a group of developers working on the game Aces Studio and now, as they've laid them and a load of other developers off, they have been somewhat hoisted on their own petard. My guess is that Microsoft will now licence the code to a third party developer and then cross that "cash bridge" when they come to it."
But will that do good to the series? Could they preserve the values for which it had been successful if the franchise is given to a third-party developer team? Nels Anderson did not seem to be as optimistic as Dermot Stapleton was, as he said that MS had already canceled one of its long-life series, MS Train Simulator, which had been buried in 2003. Even though announcements were given of sequels, these did not make it and the project were canceled, eventually. As Mr Anderson says shutting down Aces studio also means the shutting down of Flight Simulator once and for all.
Other sources say that it is the kind of game that requires more time to "age". Some still use Flight Simulator 2004 instead of the latest release, Flight Simulator X.
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