"Golden Age" of flight sims?

[Baldrick33]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

Nostalgia is fine. The above statement that 90s games or flight simulation as a whole was “better” than today is what I disagree on. 

I had a massive gap in flight sims due to getting into competitive sim racing multiplayer with the release of Grand Prix Legends the end of the nineties through to getting an HP Reverb VR headset in 2019 and an online sim racing friend persuading me I must try DCS with it. 

I have never been so excited about combat flight sims thanks to the modern tech, yet my experience of the nineties era was that it had more and bigger companies funding it at a greater pace of development, whilst the current developers are having to find more creative ways to do what they do, along with community involvement.

[SharpeXB]

17 minutes ago, Baldrick33 said:

whilst the current developers are having to find more creative ways to do what they do, along with community involvement.

Because flight sim games have become exponentially more expensive to make but are still supported by the same limited market segment / player base. That’s why making these games today is such a challenge. I would still argue there are more total players today than there ever were. 

Edited August 9, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Eugel]

2 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Nostalgia is fine. The above statement that 90s games or flight simulation as a whole was “better” than today is what I disagree on. 

So you´re saying they weren´t better, yet as you said yourself you didn´t play any of them in the 90s ?

OK, I´ll try one more time: "Golden Era" doesn´t necessarily mean that each of those games was "better" than DCS in a 1:1 comparison.
Of course, none of those sims would hold up to DCS in the simulation aspect. But, most if not all of those had stories, campaigns, some even dynamic campaigns, nice intros, (rendered) cutscenes that told a story, NPCs you could talk to, etc.

In these aspects they were better than DCS. 

And the number of titles is quantifiable.
Every couple of months/weeks, you were presented with a new sim, with a new story, setting, better graphics, etc. that you got excited for.
Of course, in DCS you can get equally excited when a new module is announced, but the thing is: You´ll probably have to wait for it for 1-2 years ...

Don´t get me wrong: I´m happy with DCS and combining all modules in one sim has it´s own merits.

15 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

I would still argue there are more total players today than there ever were. 

 

I would probably agree on that, but mainly because the whole gaming market itself has grown a lot since the 90s.
The total player count today is most likely higher, but I don´t think the percentage of the whole gaming market is.

[MAXsenna]

Nostalgia isn’t quantifiable. I’m looking for a definition of “better” or “golden era” that is. 

Dude! You literally wrote this: "My goal here is to point out that flight sims aren’t dead."
Point out to whom? None of us have said such a thing. OP asked if the time now was the "Golden Age", and that we would soon reach peek. Not that flightsims are dead.
Yet again you just argue for arguing sake.


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[Baldrick33]

8 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Because flight sim games have become exponentially more expensive to make but are still supported by the same limited market segment / player base. That’s why making these games today is such a challenge. I would still argue there are more total players today than there ever were. 

 

I have a greater knowledge of sim racing but flight sims seemed to go down the same path, for instance EA and Microprose created the first big racing sims and were massive in flight sims. They lost interest or their new owners did in Microprose’s case to chase bigger emerging markets in console titles and ports to PC. This was twenty odd years ago. 

I agree with you it is economics, simply that the big publishers can make more returns on other genre since the turn of the century.

[Hiob]

25 minutes ago, MAXsenna said:

Yet again you just argue for arguing sake.

This thread has become pointless a long time ago - and you just nailed the reason. 

[SharpeXB]

11 minutes ago, Eugel said:

But, most if not all of those had stories, campaigns, some even dynamic campaigns, nice intros, (rendered) cutscenes that told a story, NPCs you could talk to, etc.

In these aspects they were better than DCS. 

Flight sims now have campaigns etc. DCS modules mostly all come with campaigns. But of course many of them are extra DLC due to the increased costs today. 
That aspect isn’t fundamentally different than before. 
When players ask for this holy grail of a dynamic campaign (I would like to see that too) it’s again going to be something exponentially more expensive to make than in prior years. If I recall correctly that F-16 games dynamic campaign bankrupted its developer. 

26 minutes ago, Eugel said:

And the number of titles is quantifiable.
Every couple of months/weeks, you were presented with a new sim, with a new story, setting, better graphics, etc. that you got excited for.
Of course, in DCS you can get equally excited when a new module is announced, but the thing is: You´ll probably have to wait for it for 1-2 years ...

Sure and without any other information no doubt that makes it seem like flight sims were a big thing. But I think what you were really seeing was the cost difference in making those games compared to today, not more players. If there were millions of flight sim players where did they go? Answer; they’re still here, the games they buy are just 30x as expensive to make so instead of 30 games out there it’s just a few. 

[Eugel]

6 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

But I think what you were really seeing was the cost difference in making those games compared to today, not more players. If there were millions of flight sim players where did they go? Answer; they’re still here, the games they buy are just 30x as expensive to make so instead of 30 games out there it’s just a few. 

I´ll assume you just made up that "30x" number ... but even if it is correct, why should I as a customer care how much it cost to make a game ? 
What I care about is what is offered to me.
If in the 90s, dozens of studios managed to create 95 flight sim titles for me to choose from and still make profits with it, and todays companies don´t, doesn´t that make the 90s more "golden" ?

And as I said earlier, EVERY genre was x-times cheaper to make 30 years ago, whether it be action games, adventures, RPGs, Jump&Run ... that´s not special to flight sims.

[LucShep]

28 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

Flight sims now have campaigns etc. DCS modules mostly all come with campaigns. But of course many of them are extra DLC due to the increased costs today. 
That aspect isn’t fundamentally different than before. 
When players ask for this holy grail of a dynamic campaign (I would like to see that too) it’s again going to be something exponentially more expensive to make than in prior years. If I recall correctly that F-16 games dynamic campaign bankrupted its developer. 

Sure and without any other information no doubt that makes it seem like flight sims were a big thing. But I think what you were really seeing was the cost difference in making those games compared to today, not more players. If there were millions of flight sim players where did they go? Answer; they’re still here, the games they buy are just 30x as expensive to make so instead of 30 games out there it’s just a few. 

Dude you make no sense. You contradict yourself in just two sentences. 

First it's the Dynamic Campaign on that one single game title (and one of the reasons users kept that game alive through modding), so complicated and costly that it bankrupted its developer house.
While forgeting that didn't happen with other developers (among others, EF2000 and Jane's Longbow also had Dynamic Campaigns). Meaning, if they did it, then....
btw... have you even tried a Dynamic Mission/Campaign in those old titles, to understand why it's such a big deal?

And then the cost difference, they were much cheaper to produce then than today. If it was so much cheaper... why have they gone bankrupted then?

PLEESE STAAAP 

Edited August 9, 2023 by LucShep

[MAXsenna]

22 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

When players ask for this holy grail of a dynamic campaign (I would like to see that too) it’s again going to be something exponentially more expensive to make than in prior years.

Not if you own the code. It's of course still very much usable. It's still in use every day today.

Guess who didn't purchase the IP when it was for sale! Guess who bought it back!

Yes, it will of course be expensive to implement it in any product, but not like making it from scratch. 

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by MAXsenna

[SharpeXB]

9 minutes ago, Eugel said:

I´ll assume you just made up that "30x" number ... but even if it is correct, why should I as a customer care how much it cost to make a game ? 
What I care about is what is offered to me.
If in the 90s, dozens of studios managed to create 95 flight sim titles for me to choose from and still make profits with it, and todays companies don´t, doesn´t that make the 90s more "golden" ?

And as I said earlier, EVERY genre was x-times cheaper to make 30 years ago, whether it be action games, adventures, RPGs, Jump&Run ... that´s not special to flight sims.

Actually the anecdotal figure in the Kickstarter video amounts to 60x but to be fair what he said was certain tasks are that much more, not the entire game. But he does say they’re exponentially more expensive to make due to how realistic everything needs to be now. The thing that makes sim games expensive is they have reality to measure against. The players expect them to be real. Nobody expects the radar behavior or flight model of a Hornet in Battlefield 3 to be totally accurate. They expect that out of sims today though. It sets a high bar for the Devs. And with a limited audience who appreciates that aspect.
Why that matters to you as a customer is it literally affects what you get for the money. Quality vs quantity. 90s devs were able to crank out more games with more content because they’re were simply less expensive to make. You can see this explained straight from a DCS Dev on the DCS 1944 Kickstarter. 

[SharpeXB]

53 minutes ago, LucShep said:

First it's the Dynamic Campaign on that one single game title (and one of the reasons users kept that game alive through modding), so complicated and costly that it bankrupted its developer house.

That’s the one I always see mentioned. No doubt DCS is taking so long to create its dynamic campaign because they fear it will never live up to the expectations of this demanding player base. And you wonder why these sims are so expensive to make?

53 minutes ago, LucShep said:

And then the cost difference, were cheaper then than toda. If it was cheaper, why they bankrupted?

You can still overspend on things even if they’re cheap. A dynamic campaign certainly sounds like a bottomless pit to pour money into. DCS players will expect every tire to need changing and every screw to come loose and every pilot to eat a different lunch every day in real time. 

Edited August 9, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Baldrick33]

14 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Without any real statistics to back up that claim I find it very hard to believe. People would have been the same then as now. Why would there be this surge of interest 30 years ago? Was there a baby boom of sim pilots? For the same reasons flight sims are niche today they would have been a niche then. There was an abundance of these games simply because it appears they were just easy to make.

I will be glad to be wrong if you can find a chart like the one above with a big fat bar that says “Flight”

I have to believe every DCS module sells more than that. They’d have to or ED wouldn’t be in business. 

You raise some interesting points.

Maybe there was a baby boom of sim pilots. Bearing in mind most of the nineties were pre PlayStation, those with PCs capable of playing games were probably more mature than your average gamer now. That was the games market where PC was king for a while and the big publishers wanted their share of it. Things then moved on and computer gaming for the masses became a thing and the share of hardcore simulation players got diluted.

[Eugel]

20 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

90s devs were able to crank out more games with more content because they’re were simply less expensive to make. You can see this explained straight from a DCS Dev on the DCS 1944 Kickstarter. 

Again, not exclusive to flight sims. The first Tomb Raider 1996 had a budget of 440.000 (british) pounds while "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" 2018 cost a total of 135 Million Dollars...

[Baldrick33]

15 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:

A piece of advice: dont lose time debating with Sharpe, its a lost cause .. Use the forum’s ignore facility, its there just for this kind of people

 

I quite enjoy debating with @SharpeXB , maybe it is just me!

[SharpeXB]

31 minutes ago, Eugel said:

Again, not exclusive to flight sims. The first Tomb Raider 1996 had a budget of 440.000 (british) pounds while "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" 2018 cost a total of 135 Million Dollars...

The thing with flight sims is there are a lot less people to sell them to. It’s all relative. A Call of Duty game makes a billion, yes with a “B” billion $ on its first day! They can spend anything they want making those games. If there were indeed billions of flight sim players, it wouldn’t be a struggle to make these games. There were likely not billions of players in the 90s either, the games just cost less to make. 

18 minutes ago, Baldrick33 said:

I quite enjoy debating with @SharpeXB , maybe it is just me!

It’s a genuinely interesting topic. Heck it’s the topic for these games for the last decade or so. What happened to flight sims?! Again the Kickstarter guy answers this in a few sentences. It’s pretty logical. 

Edited August 9, 2023 by SharpeXB

[Eugel]

And again, you are making up numbers ...

"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II became the fastest-selling Call of Duty game of all time.[58] The game earned US$800 million in revenue in its first three days of release,[59] and US$1 billion within 10 days"

[LucShep]

1 hour ago, SharpeXB said:

You can still overspend on things even if they’re cheap. A dynamic campaign certainly sounds like a bottomless pit to pour money into. DCS players will expect every tire to need changing and every screw to come loose and every pilot to eat a different lunch every day in real time. 

No, nothing to do with "overspend" and DC certainly isn't a bottomless pit.
I'd even say, in the mid-long term, that it can save money and work to the dev-team, and make it more lucrative if it's a long-term project (like DCS is, for instances) as it actually immortalizes your game, replayability wise. Because it renders every mission or campaign forever fresh and nearly unpredictable (it's always different, throughout and in the outcome), makes it an unknow "true conflict scenario" instead of plain scripts that always repeat "those two from the left as always, and next those three at the right... zzZZzzZ", keeping interest from players in your own game, on and on and on. It's worth every bit of the investment, IMO.

Every one of the "big" flight sim titles went through bad management, and/or horrible aquisitions from bigger greedy companies, bastardising or ending such series.
And (directly or indirectly) it broke those teams of hyper talented people, who went to other places (competitors) or quit the genre entirely.
ED is probably the sole exception to all of this, maybe the only true survivor today from that era (a feat on its own, and worthy of everyone's admiration).

Add to that the market over-saturation and the "consolization" way of things that went on in the 2000s, sadly it was the perfect storm.
At some point it happened with racing-sims, isometric RPGs, and even Beat'em up games, no genre escaped it so far (it's happening now with "Battle Royale" games!). 

Money and business always mess with creativity and passion at some point. That's the cyclic nature of the gaming industry too (it repeats itself), unfortunately.  
That's why the "Golden Age" of flight-sims ended. Fortunately there has been a bit of a slow resurgence in recent years, and we're all here to savour it.  

Edited August 9, 2023 by LucShep

[SharpeXB]

17 minutes ago, Eugel said:

And again, you are making up numbers ...

"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II became the fastest-selling Call of Duty game of all time.[58] The game earned US$800 million in revenue in its first three days of release,[59] and US$1 billion within 10 days"

Ok I’m rounding up a bit but those games make a lot. Almost a billion… Flight sims aren’t in that league. I think MSFS2020 was pretty high on the charts though when it debuted. 

[Eugel]

On a lighter, more nostalgic note, look what I´ve found in the cupboard:

Funny thing: When you look at the small pictures on the back of the boxes, the graphics look way better than I remembered them.

Oh, and I think, I´ve posted this in another thread a while ago, but it fits nicely here as well:

Edited August 9, 2023 by Eugel

[LucShep]

14 minutes ago, Eugel said:

On a lighter, more nostalgic note, look what I´ve found in the cupboard:

Funny thing: When you look at the small pictures on the back of the boxes, the graphics look way better than I remembered them.

They actually look quite ok in a good old CRT monitor.
It's when you try to recreate the nostalgia on a modern LCD (of whatever kind) that it makes you think "OMG NOO WHY YOU SO UGLY NOW?!?" 

 

14 minutes ago, Eugel said:

 

Oh, and I think, I´ve posted this in another thread a while ago, but it fits nicely here as well:

AAAH...   that's a TM Mark II FCS system, you lucky you!
Maybe you can resurrect that museum piece:  https://www.hackster.io/zachary_fields/thrustmaster-mark-ii-fcs-resurrection-08b793#story

Edited August 9, 2023 by LucShep

[Slippa]

Eugel, I’m afraid we have to lock this thread now. It’s been tumbling towards us all for days and now you start posting up the saucy pics.

Twenty odd miles away from where I am is an old friends house. He has a nice big loft and in it, he’s still storing my Amiga1200 with a couple of boxes full of games and software. I’m getting the itch to get over there and start dusting off the disk drive. Last time I got that itch I did fire it up for a laugh. Surprisingly, it loaded up without any bother. “Let’s have a look at F1” I said, remembering it’s ridiculous speed and playability. We laughed our arses off, neither of us could drive it for toffee never mind race it but it was still rapid.

I daren’t go up in that loft. It would be funny but I’m gonna hold back, just nobody post any more joystick pics or game boxes and don’t even start with gameplay clips. 

[Rudel_chw]

3 hours ago, Eugel said:

On a lighter, more nostalgic note, look what I´ve found in the cupboard:

 

Me too, I know that we have to save the trees, but I do really miss the boxes of the sims of yesterday:

 

 

[Hiob]

11 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:

 

Me too, I know that we have to save the trees, but I do really miss the boxes of the sims of yesterday:

 

 

When I moved in with the Missis, I had to scrap like a couple dozend of such boxes. Not only flight-sims, all kinds of games. My heart bled. But I kept all the printed manuals and maps! From time to time, I dig through them and dwell in the good old (golden ) times of gaming! 

[MAXsenna]

10 minutes ago, Hiob said:

When I moved in with the Missis, I had to scrap like a couple dozend of such boxes. Not only flight-sims, all kinds of games. My heart bled. But I kept all the printed manuals and maps! From time to time, I dig through them and dwell in the good old (golden ) times of gaming! 

I've kept all of mine with boxes somewhere. Even kept all my computers foe a while, but they got too numerous. I'm quite sure though I kept my US Robotics something, ISDN card, 3DFx etc. My Avatar has my VR helmet, and I have the ISA controller for it somewhere. I definitely have all my joysticks and cellphones.

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Edited August 10, 2023 by MAXsenna