Dovetail's Flight Sim World Discontinued/EOL

If anyone was into Flight Sim World, Dovetail is ending the project. First Flight School and now FSW.

Lots of speculation on what this means for FSX:SE, P3D, etc. Since Dovetail had the entertainment rights to FSX, will they go after Lockheed-Martin for not policing the academic license, etc.

At any rate, it looks like development of any flight sim at Dovetail is now over unless there is some surprise in there of some kind.

Looks like DCS, P3D, and X-Plane are the paths forward at least for now. Just P3D and X-Plane for civilian simulation.

I don't know that I agree with Froogle on his hypothesis on Dovetail going after Lockheed-Martin, though. IANAL but I think they kind of put themselves in a corner.

Dovetail has the entertainment rights to FSX and put it up on Steam as FSX:SE. It's still up for sale at $25 and there are some 10+ pages of add-ons there too. Yet Dovetail let it just stagnate and are only fronting for a bunch of aftermarket plane and feature companies. FSX:SE is the direct analog of P3D and FSX:SE is a Dovetail product. If anything, Dovetail was competing with themselves on Flight School and Flight Sim World. There were sales on FSX:SE at only $4.99 for a while and maybe still.

For Dovetail to make any kind of compelling case against Lockheed-Martin and Prepar3d, they would need to explain why a $60 "Academic" sim and even a $200 "Professional" sim were taking sales away from a $40 Flight Sim World when Dovetail themselves were placing its nearest neighbor, FSX:SE, on sale for an undiscounted price of $25 and putting it on sale all the way down to $5.

Also, Dovetail made a big to-do about Flight Sim World being all new code but then people kept finding bugs and quirks that showed it was just FSX with a graphics overhaul. Granted the graphics looked good in FSW, but with the code base being mostly the same and them still selling FSX:SE, that's another nail in the lawsuit coffin - I think. Again, IANAL.

I think Dovetail did a great job on the graphics but in locking up the platform from anything but branded aftermarket stuff just deviated too far from what the established flight sim market wanted and people stayed away. They did it to themselves. They might have picked up some more sales had they ever supported VR. There were a lot of us asking them to support VR but they never would commit. Now Aerofly FS2 is probably the best at visuals but may find themselves in the same boat as Dovetail and Flight Sim World if they keep everything under as tight of control as they are doing. ORBX has been porting things over but if Aerofly doesn't get some features out users have been wanting, they could go unsustainable as well.

Or not. Just my take on the whole thing.

Dovetail vs Lockheed-Martin is a Dogfight I'd pay to see....

Dove-tail between their legs.

At the end of the day, P3D is a True Sim. FSW was a casual flyer at best. You simply can't compare the two IMHO.

I'm an X-plane convert purely for the VR experience, but I still hold P3D in high regard.

Now ORBX has started scenery for X-Plane, and with the first release being my home town of Manchester. (Barton Aerodrome more specifically) I'm fully committed to X-plane now