When I got my first computer.
The variety of military sims was fantastic nearly every major military platform was simulated Tanks helicopters
Planes ships. Ok the graphics by todays standard would be laughable but the game play missions manuals were Mostly to a pretty high standard There was a good cache of developers (most noteworthy was micropose)
Then year by year there were fewer and fewer new military sim titles released with the exception of games like Delta force Ghost recon although I don't think you could class them as military sims.
Was it the introduction of game consoles.
I think the fall of communism played a part. Peoples around the world lived with the Possibility of a world war Till communism collapsed, But the world has seen more conflict since it fell. so who knows.
There are still some decent company's out there but they a few in number. DCS and Esim
Are about the only two that stand out.
But I for one. Miss the variety Military sim fans use to have back in there heyday.
BRING BACK MICROPOSE.LoL
.

I think most of us feel the same way. We wish we could still walk into a store with four isles full of just pc games, half of which were simulators. But I think the 90s were the golden era. Even still we have some great sims to have come out after and being currently developed. I don't have to same kind of time anymore anyways as when I was a kid and a teen so fewer choices isn't such a bad thing as long as what comes out is quality.

when I got my first computer back in 1998 I remember my first combat sim ...and it was awesome. "Panzer Elite". There have been some good ones since then for sure ...flight, tanks, subs, you name it. But yea it's not like the old days I agree

The Third Wire guy / Strike Fighters series is the spiritual successor to the great sims of old, IMO. Fun, just the right depth if you would rather play than study PDF manuals.

IL2 and Falcon 4.0 are just as good and playable now as they were on initial release ( better now, actually )

Anyone been to the fighterops forum lately? I wonder how all those people that paid them for "special" access to development news are feeling right about now...

How long has fighter ops been in the works now? Well over ten years I think. A shame it turned out that way and a real shame if they keep getting support after this long with nothing to show.

Micropose 1983 Flight Sim was my first on my old Franklin 1100-Apple 2E clone.
Still have it in storage.Computer and and game.

http://oldcomputers.net/ace1000.html

The cornerstone of any decent military sim is realism.

And realism is hard to reach these days because everyone is a critic. Every rivet must be right, every switch must be right, every range, capacity, turn rate, etc. etc. must be right or some one somewhere will make it their life's work to berate the creators of the subject sim to the ends of the earth. Avoiding that situation makes creating military sims difficult and expensive.

It's much easier to make fantasy games, where nothing is real and therefore no one can set an impossible goal for you to match "real life".

Demise of milsims from 90's


I think there are a couple of reasons for this demise. But the single biggest reason is that we consumers got VERY greedy.

In the mid-90's, if it had the right number of engines, and you could use flaps to land, it was accepted as "realistic". Today people try finding flight envelope charts to compare them...and promptly dismiss the entire product if it diverges from that chart. And if it uses less than 3000 poly's, or the cockpit is for an A model and not the C model in exterior view, its branded "garbage". Today high rez textures are expected for every visible item...labor intensive for artists to create. Back then 16 color textures....or even no textures at all, just a single color value for an entire wing.

In the 90's, making games realistic was impressive to everyone. Today many "gamers" look at the complex switchology of a detailed flight sim... and get turned off at the prospect of punching buttons for an hour before getting airborne, before searching for enemy jets to shoot at. To most "gamers" its too much like school AND work... right when they are wanting an escape from both.

In the 90's a campaign was a bonus. A dynamic campaign was amazing. And developers might come up with new features. Today...we are criticizing everything about it, regardless of what's offered. And there are no new features to add...but all features MUST be included.

In the 90's we paid full retail price . By 2000 most sims could be bought in bargain bins for $10. And now its all steam sales. Which gives better revenue for the developer?

Back then a programmer and a few buddies could hammer out a complete sim from the garage, funded by working part time at Subway, or off the last hit. Today a tier 1 title requires financing of perhaps a million or much more, to support the payroll of so many employees, contractors and subcontractors and purchases from music/sound/object libraries.

Back then, every simulator was new...a new plane to fly, a new tank to drive. Today World of Tanks has hundreds of types and variants...and its free. And nearly all the planes have been flown by enthusiasts many times. Online and in campaigns. And back then, there was no "retro gaming" for milsims. Today, retro sims get makeovers upgrades and such from mods. How does a new company compete with an old product costing a dollar, that keeps being tweeked and modified to perfection?

There are many reasons for the stunted growth of mil sims. But part of it is that we are now more demanding than the creators are able to match, on increasingly larger budgets?

Personally, I would dearly love to see either a sequel or serious upgrade to DID's EF2000 2.0... one with brand new textures. But that's much more likely from mods by fans than from a company.

Could any of this change in the future? Yea. It could:

- reduce our expectations of absolute perfection

- reduce our expectations of having every single feature

- creation of new ways to make high resolution textures faster more efficiently

- creation of vehicle, terrain, object, sound, and music libraries that have "entry level" pricing options. A sim that sells 40,000 units needs to pay less to purchase what it needs, than an Xbox game with a budget of 80mil and expected sales of a billion dollars in two days. Since a small sim maker can't predict its sales success, the library fees should be on a sliding scale based on sales success, just like a movie star sometimes makes a percentage of ticket sales. The libraries could be filled with objects terrain and content made by simulation enthusiasts, some of whom currently make mods.

The core idea is make sims with modular components that a developer can quickly plug this or that into, on a modest budget that matches the size of the market for milsims. Similar to how so many addons for Microsoft FlightSim are available, both freeware and payware. And be more willing to accept minor imperfections that really don't have a deep impact on playing enjoyment. We've taken the notion of "voting with your wallet" to the point of nearly killing the market.

Alternatively...we could use the MS Flightsim community as a model to seriously empower the mod makers, extending the life of existing sim classics well beyond the original product.

But we as a community of sim enthusiasts need to do SOMETHING. Or it'll just slowly whither.

Being a long term follower of fighterops (no money given), I think its absolutely disgraceful and almost criminal that those despicable Devs deceived so many subscribers knowing that it was going vapourware.

The shame is that xsi are conmen and should have closed their revenue income many years ago instead of relying on the good will of simmers sucking them dry.

Luckily for me (many years ago) an area 51 member who was in the know pm'd me advising its going to be as tangible as a fart.

Shame on you xsi.

What happened is that in the early days the PC was so horrible to use that only engineer-minded people would use it for gaming and for programming. It takes an engineer-minded person to program a simulator in the first place. What also happened is that the Cold War ended, and it shouldn't come as a big surprise that cold war scenarios and vehicles are still the favorite of our players even though it ended about a quarter century ago (and even more people apparently love WW2, which ended seven decades ago).
The cold war and the war against the Nazis easily fits a "good vs bad" binary morality (at least at first look, things get a bit muddied if you look closer), which makes a great backdrop for the comparatively simple narration that a simulation can actually convey.

What else happened - the PC matured, drew in more players who didn't have an engineers' mentality, and since there are vastly more non-engineers in the world, the games catering to that new audience grew exponentially faster while the simulation game community essentially stagnated. I suppose there are still about half a million to a million regular mil sim players in the world, maybe even two million. But that's a nearly irrelevant quantity these days, when casual games have literally hundreds of millions of regular players. That's the market size that draws investment dollars for new title development.

Finally, even survey sims that have a wild hodge podge of different airplanes (or, ahem, armored fighting vehicles) offer usually more realism today than a classic study sim of the mid 1990s, and they all look infinitely better. So, looking at Steel Beasts for example (I'm always picking my own title as an example to make sure that I know what I'm talking about) there's about two or three dozen vehicles now with 3D interiors or at least a relatively detailed, relatively high fidelity model of their fire control systems. That's literally two dozen classic simulation games in a single title. So, fewer titles cater to still the same bandwidth of people interested in diverse vehicles/weapon systems (and more; I don't think that without Steel Beasts there would ever have been a commercial simulation of, say, a Spanish or Austrian infantry fighting vehicle - certainly not as a standalone simulation game). I don't know if it's the same situation with flight sims (X-Plane comes to mind, but it doesn't seem to be hugely popular).

Also, I don't think that most military simulations have done a good job in the multiplayer field (and I'm including our own title there). This is partly due to the fact that in a military sim, if you want to play a realistic scenario, you need a lot of coordination and mission planning, and adherence of the players to communication drills and hierarchy. So, popping into some random mission at a random time and location doesn't work very well except for eternal furballs like "Warbirds"/"World of Warplanes". As a consequence, people need to agree in advance on a certain time and server to meet for some multiplayer action. Add to that a more or less clunky user interface and you weed out anyone with just a mild interest in such an event (which is a pity - maybe a blessing to some; either way, it doesn't help to grow the fan base).

The short and simple answer to what happened to military sims is consoles.

Developers/publishers can make far more money doing mainstream games for consoles. That's why there are no big publishers left in the flight sim genre and everything under development now is either a spin off from professional training software or made by a small, independent developer with very limited resources.




I wouldn't try and emulate MSFS with regards to addons as that market is in a very precarious position and I think is a bubble just waiting to burst.

Besides, DCS World has already opened up to third parties. I remain somewhat sceptical about this and have my doubts about the big list of third party modules that have been announced.

Rick.50cal,your post just about nailed it for me. I'm done with flight sims now.As the years progressed I became less and less interested. It will take something special to get me into them again.

I just don't accept this 'blame the consoles' theory at all. It's too simplistic and the facts don't support it.

Back in the 90s there were plenty of sim titles for consoles. I can well remember playing: LHX Attack Chopper, Mig 29, 688 Attack Sub, M1 Abrams, F22 Interceptor and F15 Strike Eagle.

No, they weren't quite as realistic as the PC versions, but despite being adapted for 3 button joypads they weren't that far away, and for the time they were definitely out and out sims. I distinctly remember an article on the BBC about how simulations were getting ever closer to the real world, and the example they showed was 'LHX Attack chopper' on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis)

Sims died on console at the same time they died on PC. I could equally blame PCs and the release of 'Doom' which lead to the obsession for FPS titles we see today. However, the reality is that the limited sim gamer base across all platforms could just no longer support the ever increasing costs and demand for more realism and more features.

What happened to a lot of other niche genres; there's simply not enough interest and therefore little money.

It doesn't help that even within this little simulator community that people are sometimes way too critical about the games actually being released. Everyone still clings on to the capabilities of their old simulators, "Oh dynamic this" and "large world that" when that simply isn't something you just do because games and engines have become so complex and expensive that even getting the basics down right costs a fortune - So comparing it to an ancient simulator that was made up of squares and MIDI sounds just isn't fair.

You probably won't find a SimHead today that doesn't sit in a constant haze of nostalgia, comparing every game to their 1998 favourites.

So it's just the reverse snowball effect happening as well. Dwindling sales cause fewer releases with less features, which then means people buy less games which again means, less money and less features.

I am so bored of flight sims which is why I've stopped playing them. I still have SB PE and ARMA but flight sims are all the same to me now.

There are a lot of reasons. Rick, SSnake, and even Pielstick point out part of the reasons for the demise. In one form or another they all contributed to the demise of the combat simulation.

Here is the reality. Gaming companies don't see any profit in realistic combat simulations, especially those for the PC. And they are right. As much as we loved some of the classics that we have played they have never, financially, made a blip on the market. The writing was on the wall in the mid to late 90s when games like Myst and The Sims literally kicked the crap out of simulations in total sales. Why would someone like EA, a company that literally got it's start creating games like USNF continue making these games when a it can release repeated idiotic The Sim's packages and sell literally billions of dollars worth of product.

From a revenue standpoint it was a no brainer. Keep producing games like Janes F/A 18, great titles with content and depth but expensive and time consuming to create or throw out another The Sims module that cost 10% of F/A 18 and will bring in 100X the money. Of course they cut out the entire group, especially when games like Battlefield raked in tons of money. Why would any large firm keep people on staff for games that might break even when they can make money hand over fist creating crap? Hell, how many times as EA drug out almost the exact same graphics in Madden and the morons just slobber it up at 55 bucks a pop?

Now you can't even get any of these games on computer, they are all console oriented. I am amazed and how my 16 year old was slobbering over another release of Call of Duty which looks exactly and plays exactly like the last version of call of duty only with different maps and slightly different graphics. I ask him what is the difference in these games and he honestly doesn't know but I am pretty sure that when Call of Duty: Whatever comes out this winter he will be lined up with his hard earned money ready to explore those whole new maps or play another round of zombies. Zombies are the greatest idea, put out the stupidest AI running an indential script again and again and bill it as a zombie shooter and you can pay cash for a Porche.

I am extremely proud to be around the guys that make combat sims today because I KNOW that they are doing it because they love what they do. They have to love what they do because no one would be stupid enough to go through this much hassle to create a game like Steel Beasts or IL2: BoS when some idiotic Candy Crush Saga app could get them a summer home in Rio. 777, ED, ESims and the fools at places like Corned Rat Software and HiTech creations have my undying respect because they are creating games based upon their personal passions and not strictly based upon a bottom line desire.

I'm going to add one more thing to the argument.

Modern combat simulations have simply gotten too complicated in many ways. There is a market for 'combat' games, look at the Medal of Honor/Battlefield games or even World of Tanks/Warplanes. Those games have thousands of people playing them. They are played for one simple reason; they are fun and easy to get into. Yet many of us in the 'simulation world' look down on those kinds of games.

Lets face it, A-10 is a marvel of complexity and rewards the player with the feeling that he/she is actually flying a complext piece of military hardware. It is amazing but 99% of games simply don't have the time or desire to spend as much time as it takes to figure out a game as complicated as A10 or even IL2 Cliffs of Dover. To appreciate a game like Lock On you almost have to have not only a high powered computer but also a full blown 250 plus dollar HOTAS, rudder pedals and a TrackIR. While many of us have understanding spouses not everyone has 500 dollars laying around that they can devote to such setups.

As far as I'm concerned, hardcore simulations are doing just fine. Between DCS World, Rise of Flight and IL-2 1946 I'm more than busy. And there's Battle of Stalingrad coming soon as well which I'll be getting.

As has just been explained, why would a publisher invest in a flight sim which will take a long time to develop, eat up lots of development resources, and will only appeal to a limited audience?

They can instead spend that money re-hashing last year's Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed or FIFA knowing full well that there are quite literally millions of potential console owning customers who will buy it purely because it's the latest Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed or FIFA.

The console provides instant gaming gratification with absolutely no effort required on the part of the user. You buy a console, plug it into your TV, put a game in and play. Console games don't have manuals... they're simple and intuitive enough that a ten minute (if that) in-game tutorial suffices. The user can quite literally just pick it up and play. Instant gratification!

Look at a lot of the console games nowadays... outside of the multiplayer the singleplayer content may only last a few hours before it's over. The number of console games with a serious amount of singleplayer content is very small. That's because the publishers don't want you spending too long on one game. They want you to finish it and go out again to buy the next one. Where's the business sense in making a game that can be played over and over?

Unfortunately this means genres that don't suit the console or its associated business model (flight sims, strategy games, etc) no longer get made by the big publishers who are out to turn a quick profit and keep their shareholders happy.

Which is why we see annual releases of the games mentioned above which are all short lived instant gratification gaming titles, but we don't see anything like Elite, Railroad Tycoon, Master of Orion or <insert favourite flight sim series here>.

Flight sims got too complex for the mainstream gamers. Their development got too lengthy and expensive for the mainstream publishers. The rising popularity of consoles gave those same publishers a much larger and more lucrative market to exploit.