I cancelled my Flight Simulator pre-order!

[Kalo]

I have not decided if I will use Steam or the Microsoft store yet, but I think I'm leaning toward the Microsoft store. I did quite a bit of beta testing for Sea of Thieves which was a Microsoft Store exclusive until very recently when it was released on Steam. I don't have any complaints with the store in my experience with Sea of Thieves. What WAS bad was the pc xbox app you had to use to invite/join other players. It seems the new Steam version has to use the same pc xbox app so there is no escaping that app. I assume Flight Simulator will be using this same app for both Steam and Microsoft Store versions. I have not played Sea of Thieves (fantastic game btw) lately so maybe they have fixed a lot of the past problems with the xbox app. I did notice they are working on a new beta xbox app which seems much more promising.

I'm not partial towards Steam (but do like it's ease of use), and since I already have Sea of Thieves on the Microsoft Store I may as well purchase another game there. The % some of these companies including Steam take from developers is quite alarming. I do recognize that Steam (and other app stores) are so huge that this is the price (extortion rates?) developers are forced to pay if they want large exposure. Games that are released on Steam sell much better, no ifs ands or buts. I'm glad Flight Simulator will be released on Steam because it will bring in tons of simmers that would probably not try it otherwise, but I will probably let Microsoft get a larger cut as a thank you for developing a new flight simulator.

It's funny because after that rant about app stores, I hope developers will choose to primarily sell aircraft/add ons in the Microsoft Store. I hope Microsoft will not charge developers anywhere near the 30% range. The reason I say this is because if Microsoft gets a cut from add on sales it will give them reason to continue development/patches instead of abandoning the sim a year from now. It will also help developers by cutting down on piracy, especially if I assume the simulator validates any add ons when the sim is online. I can say for myself I most likely won't purchase any 3rd party aircraft outside of the in game store (unless Microsoft charges extortion rates) because of my FSX add on weariness. I'm so tired of buying and keeping track of and installing add ons from 100 different websites (please don't screw this up Microsoft). I'd say 10% is a reasonable/healthy rate to charge developers, but with Google/Apple/Steam and others setting a bad precedent, lets hope Microsoft will have more foresight.

[ak416]

While I agree Steam's cut is on the hefty side, it also includes Steamworks API which basically takes care of everything on the back end. Multiplayer servers, matchmaking, currency conversion, update pipeline, even things like a community hub and forums. It also only costs $100 to put your game on Steam and have that access. With tens of millions of unique users a day, the exposure alone is probably worth it to most developers. I would also imagine large publishers like Microsoft would have their own unique contracts in place.

I'm curious to see whether Microsoft will even put the DLC on the Steam store, or sell it exclusively in the in-game store. Would the potential extra cost of putting them on Steam be made up in volume of sales? How does it work with FSX:SE, is Microsoft getting a cut of all the DLC that available on Steam? I don't believe you can publish DLC for games that are not "yours" on Steam, anything on Steam would have to be approved by Microsoft and they will surely want their cut.

The only reason I like Steam as much as I do is because it has consistently been the best place for me to play the games I own. I can still download and install Flight 2012 because that's where I "purchased" the free version and some of the DLC. The Games for Windows Live Marketplace is completely dead. I have used Uplay, Origin, Epic Games Store, various Microsoft marketplaces over the years and none of them are as good as Steam. If Microsoft were some small indie developer or publisher my feelings would be very different, but if my choice is one company that basically said "sorry, it's not working out because we made poor decisions. we're shutting our game down and oh by the way, GFWL is also shutting down so you won't be able to access any of the content you paid for" and a company that hasn't done that, I know which one I'm more comfortable supporting.

[Wingman]

various Microsoft marketplaces

This.