American Airlines Virtual

It appears to be the same thing MS is doing with their other applications - they are taking them to "the cloud" (and that's the network cloud and not flight clouds). MS is heavily pushing networked (or cloud based) applications and it seems no different for Flight sim. Simply a hosted version of flight sim. Will be interesting to see how they change it to look and feel different.

Jeff Jett wrote: you have any info about that?? A link to an article or anything??

A little while ago when they started the new campaign for the "flight" which you could access off the FSX front page for the ACES team news. It stated that that is what they were going to do with the flight program. A good friend of mines son who is game programer, was offered the job as the ACES boss, but turned it down as he saw the "writing on the wall" about the team. He told me that Microsoft games were going to go to web based play, which is what Microsoft is now doing with all the games they make, now. My friends son went on to the competition. If you watch the trailers they show on the link above at the end of the movie it shows on the screen, the title as "windows Live".
To play some of these new web based "games" you may have to pay for the priveledge of connecting to the game site with another monthly fee.

WLP

I hadn't heard of Flight running off a cloud environment either. In either case below is from their FAQ section.

Based on the previous webisode, we’ve heard, “This doesn’t look any different from FSX!”

As we said in the introduction, we’re still early in the development cycle, so the fact that you comment on the similarity to FSX is great! This comment alone should ease some of the arcade concerns. Please follow along with our progress as we continue to release more webisodes, screenshots, and additional information. In the end, we hope that you’ll have a great time looking back at these early samples and being part of the evolution. Thank you for all your enthusiasm and support!

Judging from all the comments here it looks like they are intending to make additional $$$ by selling you different versions of the same game. i.e. PC , smart phone and XboX versions of the same game where you can keep your so-called achievements and rewards across platforms and play from wherever you want. Not a bad idea business-wise I guess...

Jeff Jett wrote:

Theodore Martin wrote:It appears to be the same thing MS is doing with their other applications - they are taking them to "the cloud" (and that's the network cloud and not flight clouds). MS is heavily pushing networked (or cloud based) applications and it seems no different for Flight sim. Simply a hosted version of flight sim. Will be interesting to see how they change it to look and feel different.

Sorry Ted, looks like your cloud theory isn't on the agenda

Well, not really. It looks like they are going to provide both - online as well as offline. But you did notice they said the experience online will be more enjoyable and immersive. Translation, lots of "goodies" while online to entice the user.

Think MS "Steam". I bought Civ V and to my disgust it was "Steam'd". If I want to play offline, why should I ever have to connect?

My concern with the next gen of MS Steam'd flight sim is if they require you to connect through them ONLY - to Vatsim, other servers (FSHost and Teamspeak for example), etc.