This is a rather surprising development in the world of flight simulation.
Just recently, Dovetail Games has announced via an official forum post that its fledgling simulator Flight Sim World will be permanently grounded on May 24th, 2018. That is to say, it will no longer be offered for sale after that date. So, anyone who still wants to play it has a month to obtain a copy. If you already have a copy, then you’ll be able to keep it even after May 24.
Here’s what Dovetail staff member Cryss had to say about the situation:
“It is with great sadness that we announce the future closure of Flight Sim World.
As you know, we always had a strong ambition to bring a new experience into the established world of flight simulation, one that deliberately overhauled both the flying experience and the graphical fidelity, offering new ways to fly. Unfortunately, after many detailed discussions, we regrettably don’t see a clear direction that will allow us to keep to the development time we’d want, alongside the player numbers we need.
So, slightly before a year since we first launched into Early Access, we have made the intensely difficult decision to fully scale back all future development on Flight Sim World and remove it from sale on 24th May.
We’re sure you have lots of questions, we hope we’ve answered a few here.”
Flight Sim World has not had a very long life at all. It was birthed from another project called Dovetail Games Flight School, which essentially served as a small test of the new-and-improved version of the FSX engine that both these simulators were built on top of. Flight Sim World was a more robust release. It came out in May 2017 under the Steam Early Access program and was fully released just a few months ago. Within that time, Dovetail has been promoting FSW heavily, and after its full release a few months ago, numerous payware add-ons began piling in.
The explanation that was given for this sudden cancellation makes sense, although it is a little ambiguous. But, there’s probably some corporate reasons for that (and the decision of the cancellation itself). Although Flight Sim World is now effectively dead, the flight simulation community still has other options to turn to like X-Plane and the ancient classic that refuses to die Flight Simulator X.
[VIA]
