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I hope this is just a rumour that turns out to be false, but Gamasutra is reporting that the entire Flight Simulator development team may have been the victim of the 5,000 job cuts recently announced at Microsoft.
Development sources have told Gamasutra that a large portion of the dev house’s staff has been let go – with multiple reports indicating that the entire Flight Simulator team has been axed.
You can read the full post here. I’ll try and find out how valid this claim is and will report back. Keep your fingers crossed!
Update: Well, it looks like this really is true. Check out Steve Lacey’s blog:
The studio has gone. The products are no more.
I’m a little shocked, but not that surprised. Flight Simulator can’t have been a big earner for Microsoft.
ACES Studios have also been working on Train Simulator 2, so this won’t be seeing the light of day any time soon, either.
So, where does that leave us? It’s certainly not the end of the world. We’ve still got Flight Simulator X and Flight Simulator 2004, not to mention X-Plane, FlightGear, Condor and all of the other sims we know and love.
In some respects, it might even help the add-on industry. A lot of developers are struggling to produce add-ons for both FSX and FS2004 and must have been thinking they’d have to start working on FS11 at some point. This may actually give the market a chance to settle down a bit. FSX and FS9 are still great sims. As time progresses and the hardware gets better and cheaper, we’ll still be able to enjoy these fantastic products with even higher frame rates and better detail.
So, yes, it does look like the “end of an era” in one respect but, who knows, it may be the beginning of another.
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