FSX Demo Thoughts
Thankfully Mike Gilbert (aka TDragger) has been a blogging maniac to make up for all of us that haven't been able to keep up. He has been great at responding with really useful information and answers for people, and hopefully the increasing readership of his blog reflects the great info he is providing. I can't offer more than Mike has regarding how to make the demo run best or what the latest fixes going into the final product have been. I've been gone all weekend and it feels like I've been gone for two weeks, so I don't know what is going on either!
I have noticed a lot of posts about how some feel we made a huge marketing blunder releasing the demo in an unfinished state to traditional hardcore gamers. It seems that many believe our primary market goal was to get new users tapped from the gamer segment. This belief has been spurred on by support for the 360 controller which we have made a point to showcase.
The reality is that the gamer market is not our primary focus and isn't even our second or third focus. Although it is disheartening to be slammed by gamers on gamespot forums, it isn't unexpected. What matters most to us is that people who do own or have owned a recent version of FS will continue to purchase the product and grow with us. Without our existing market upgrading to FSX we will have an uphill course to navigate. Thankfully based on the response we are seeing from the demo, these people are able to see past the bugs and perf issues and see the real potential of FSX and the platform we are building for the future. Thanks to Mike's efforts people are also able to see that we are actually addressing the bugs and issues to make this a must have product.
As for the desire for new users, most of them will likely come from people that are simply fans of aviation and happen to have a modern PC capable of running FSX. Many of them will be people that go to museums and see FSX in a kiosk highlighting a historic aircraft visible in the musem gallery. Some may be attracted to FSX because of the living world concept. Whatever living world we provide out of the box the community will build upon and over time we will have a pretty interesting and cool world to watch and interact with (and you can fly airplanes too!).
Many of these potential users think FS is too complex and intimidating, and frankly it always has been just that. FSX is just as complex as ever, but we are trying to make it easier to get started.
When you look at it this way, it should make sense why we are using the mission system to build tutorials and help such new users be successful. Many of them may not even know how to use a joystick, or may not have one at all (but their kid may have an Xbox 360 and thus have a controller laying around which they could use). If they aren't too intimidated to go on-line, new users can get real-time flight instruction from experienced pilots and simmers using our re-built multi-player system and become proficient very quickly.
Having a demo may at a minimimum announce to all potential users that FSX is coming even if they don't ever install it! Combined with out other marketing efforts, we could see some great things happening.
There is a method to our madness...