We should congratulate MS for extending the life of this flightsim fo some 20 years.
FSX still has many years of updates and inprovements. What MS gave us with FSX was a flightsim that could be expanded, coded without need for the source code. Just look at A2A and their excellent aircraft. Still lots of fun to be had with FSX.

Flight Simulator, be it 2002, 2004, X, whatever, was undoubtedly one of the best games that I have ever played. Many still play it, and make amazing creations, making their own updates.

I am lucky to still own FS2002, FS2004, and FSX Gold Edition, but I am unable to play it because I am on a mac. But FS will never be forgotten, and who knows, there might be an XBox version someday.

That is not the way I see it.

While plenty of software companies made COMBAT type simulators, FightSim was practically the only one that was simply flying, point A to B to C, in ordinary GA aircraft.

A strong niche community grew, and MS did the incredibly smart move of allowing 3ed person companies create aircraft models. Still, I once met a developer who complained how difficult it was to work with M$ to make products for the engine.

At one time FS was produced for Apple ][ and Macintosh, but M$ dropped it in the late 80’s, focusing only for DOS, then Win95 (not Win 3.1 IIRC).

One day a new company made a competing product, X-Plane by Laminar Research, for both Mac and Windows, and bit by bit grew in popularity and acclaim. A from nothing company successfully challenge THE behemoth?

So, the way I see it, FS was a Cash Cow for M$ because it had no real competition, so M$ did upgrades and charged large sums because the could. Later large upgrades seemed to impact the quality of FS, emphasis on eye candy over real world performance. M$started to get mediocre reviews, confidence lost, division canned.

That is my take on the fail.