I don't think people are understanding the point behind ms and flight.MS has already said there are levels of game play. This said I would assume that level 1 would be easy and the higher the level the more it would need to play it, like the highest level would include click-able switches and realistic flight controls.But this is what all the companies are doing today.A sample of this is DCS Black shark. It caters to both novice and hardcore playing.Even BF3 has a softcore and hardcore mode.

But at the end we get the core game for free and from there can make better judgment.

I very much doubt that they are really worried about all of their loyal customers ditching them for Flight. I'm sure MS will fail to resist the temptation to over-charge for POS add-ons in a market without competition. Will they get millions of DL's? Sure, the price is right for the base Flight software. Will they sell millions of dollars in add-ons? Probably not.

Most of those devs are upset because MS called them during Flight's Alpha,and shooed them away when they realized they could eat their lunch instead. In short: MS want's not just a slice, but ALL of the third party content pie, and killed the goose laying the golden egg to get it.

Also, according to a post from an Orbx dev, there's no sense in starting over, the FSX engine apparently is the best of it's type ever built. The reason it performs (relatively) poorly is because it was never shown the love it deserved. IIRC, they post said that Orbx had done the math, and it would require millions in start up cash to begin from scratch on a competing platform. With LM in a position to possibly go retail with Prepar3d anyway, why risk it?

Absolutely none of what you say about "levels" is in the game nor is there any evidence of the framework to support it. The options regarding flight realism even are laughable, there's like one checkbox for realistic or arcade and another for prop effects which doesn't seem to do anything. You really need to think xbox game here, and i'm not exaggerating at all. You need to go over to avsim and read what some addon developers for FSX are saying about their "flight" experience. Yeah they have an axe to grind to some extent since flight is shutting them out, but the stories from two different companies are almost identical. If you want a high level sim that's realistic in the vein of FSX and the entire history of the microsoft flight sims, this then is not the game you are looking for as this is a cash shop front end with some arcade planes and some goofy arcade challenges.

Who knows this game might be a huge hit as PC flight sims are basically long sine dead and no one wants to play them anymore except us few die hards, but this game doesn't remotely live up to it's history and microsoft should be ashamed.

Basically if you thought pilotwings on the super nintendo was the best flight sim ever, then this is right up your alley. If your looking for something that could be a successor to FSX, then this is NOT it.

I understand what you are saying,about MS wanting all the money. But honestly MS (I'm no MS fan)has spent a large amout of money and time on a game they produced. In all honestly I think MS was very generous with FSX in the past,letting the 3rd party people make millions off a game MS created. I have read where MS wanted a "cut" in the 3rd party addon market,but the 3rd party market was greedy and said no.

MS created the 3rd party SDK with the specific purpose of opening it up to 3rd party developers and they did not include any sort of revenue sharing license agreement thinking that the 3rd party products would sell more copies of FSX, and I suspect they have indeed made a ton of money selling copies of FSX that would otherwise not have been sold if people were stuck with the simple aircraft and scenery included.

The freeware and payware addons are the reason MS is still selling copies of FSX 5 years later even though they quit providing any patches or even paying developers to support it.

I personally own multiple copies since I got tired of having to do the phone call thing for activation whenever I reinstall the OS or upgrade h/w as a result of too many past activations, I own:
1ea FSX Deluxe
1ea FSX Acceleration
1ea FSX Gold

That also doesn't include the cost of Windows 7x64 which I did the upgrade to mainly to get rid of the FSX out of memory errors, so I bought an OS upgrade for FSX as one of the primary reasons.

Also there was nothing keeping MS from putting out quality addon aircraft or scenery themselves, so if they wanted a bigger piece of the pie I think it was theirs to take, even now if they put out FS11 with DirectX11 and multi-GPU support and some sort of adjusted licensing agreement that still allowed 3rd party developers to make a profit most of us FSX fans would go out and buy it happily.

We don't have all the background data, but I'm thinking that MS did not lose money on FSX, and I doubt the lack of 3rd party vendor licensing fees was the cause for MS to dump the ACES team and focus on a free-to-play simlite version of FSX, I suspect it has more to do with internal business "strategic alignment" within the company that saw all the game studios fall under the "Xbox" senior executive management and they closed many of the studios (ACES, FASA, Bungie, Ensemble) and re-aligned many of the titles to be more focused on the recurring revenue yearly release and DLC console type of model.

Of course that's just my opinion based on some of the articles and my experience working at humongous corporations, probably not worth $.02 :-)

I'm kind of in a wait and see on MS Flight. Everything I have seen on Xplane 10 has kind of made it a non-starter and the fact that it isn't getting much attention makes it even more of a non-starter.

The little bit I have seen on Flight shows impressive graphics. I obviously can't comment on the flight model but I have a hard time believing it was made worse than FSX.

Most everything seems to come down the business model and development of a sort of multi-player flight environment as opposed to the more traditional open approach. I can see value in keeping it "locked down" like it has been with the idea that everyone is using the same equipment and has the same scenery especially from the MMOFG perspective.

To me it is kind of like comparing Iracing and Rfactor. Iracing is closed source where you buy cars and tracks from iracing (or more correctly....rent them). Rfactor has a lot of generated third party freeware products.....some are very good some not so. The same applies for FSX add-ons....some are exceptional some are mediocre at best. It could be that MS is not wanting to have that kind of variability in their MMOFG.

Having the scenery and planes purchased piecemeal has some value for the consumer as well. Also it gives the developer incentive to develop some very detailed scenery instead of going generic and update it in the future as well. I don't doubt that they will have fully functional airliners and world wide detailed scenery ( with more popular areas and planes making appearances first). The plus side of it from a consumer is that you pay for what you want. For those that want to fly airliners world wide with detailed scenery then I'm sure you will be able to do it......its just going to cost you (kind of like racing full schedule of oval and road tracks at iracing will cost you a lot of money in track purchases). If you are interested in just flying a single engine plane in one physical area then you are likely going to have a much more economical experience.

Basically.......the more you want the more it is going to cost.....but in reality that isn't much different than those of us who have invested in add-ons and mods for FSX.

So basically, I'm just going to wait an see and probably try the free version when its released, see what is available with the add-ons and make my decision from there.....you can't beat the price (and any ranting or raving isn't going to get microsoft to change their business model for this)