Microsoft Flight: free-to-play, pay-to-finish, cancelled in five months
Microsoft Flight killed five months after its free-to-play launch
The market's verdict: +1.1% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
Microsoft Flight, the free-to-play 2012 relaunch of the Flight Simulator lineage, shipped with content carved up for microtransactions and a scope so reduced that the sim community that had flown every version since the eighties revolted, many refusing to touch it. On July 25, 2012, five months after launch, Microsoft ended development of Flight and the Kinect project Columbia along with it, cutting the Vancouver studio behind both. It was the second killing in a row for the franchise, after the 2009 closure of ACES Studio, and the sim went dark until 2020, when a different team made Flight Simulator a triumph. The lesson was on the shelf the whole time.
This one is well documented.
Links
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Impact
- IGN (publication)
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Context
- Ars Technica (publication)
↳ caused by Microsoft Flight cancellation (July 2012)
Timeline
- Jul 25, 2012 Stood by it Microsoft stood by it.