Provocative thread title perhaps..!

Personally I think that the reason sims have started to disappear compared to the golden 90's is because the sims have gotten too complex. In particular, flight sims now require a lot of extremely expensive hardware to run competitively or online - the PC and graphics outfit itself, the flight controls, headsets and high speed internet to download the huge patches that come out every other week, etc. etc.

But besides the hardware requirements, users have to learn very long procedures that were not necessary in the past. Example, in the A-10 or F-16 sims popular now, starting up the aircraft alone takes 10 minutes or more just to get all the systems online from a cold dark cockpit. Then you have to program the weapons or nav systems, etc.

In the old days of simming a lot of this stuff was simpler, but not toooo simple. I guess this made it a lot easier for people to jump in and play.

At the same time though, I do wonder if people (young people in particular) are just more stupid than they used to be. When I was 12, 13, 14 years old I was playing very detailed sims like Falcon 4. It was complicated stuff. These days I don't know anyone in their teens who plays anything other than minecraft, skyrim or some console trash. Time spent thinking or studying something seems to have shrunk to zero and answers to any problem are available immediately on youtube.

Dark times ahead for detailed sims?

It is sad because I have long hoped for a higher detail version of Dangerous Waters, the naval simulator, but it will never happen.

Maybe the only future for high fidelity sims is open source collaborative projects. Most independently developed sims fail after the first year or two of development and the programmer fades into obscurity. Perhaps if someone created a sim completely with open source from the beginning, it could be picked up by later developers and eventually become something good.