Flight Simulator and how good things never die

Recently, I dug up my old copy of Flight Simulator X and decided to try to play it. I spent about an hour setting things up (widescreen is waaaaaay harder than you'd think to achieve), and sat down for a flight. After flying around a Washington Harbor for a while, I decided to look for addons to improve my flying experience.

That's when I found Avsim.

Avsim is a forum dedicated to all things flight simulators, from Flight Sim 98 (which I have yet to try, I really should find a way to get it running), all the way to MSFS2020. I was amazed to say the least that I found a forum for flight simulators with a dedicated userbase, and I was speechless when I found that the forums were almost 10 years old!

The first question that came to mind was simple: How has this stayed alive for so long?

Flight Simulator X was released in 2006 for Windows XP (which you can probably tell I am a bit of a fan of) and Windows Vista. It didn't get a Steam Release until 2014, most likely due to the Multiplayer being killed off thanks to GameSpy. These forums have been covering Flight Simulator topics for a while now.

It's much like the Half-Life multiplayer. At any time of day, any day of the week, you can open the game browser and find an available server with real people (my favorite is Place of Frags, if you ever feel the urge to play Quake Deathmatch with Half-Life guns).

I think the lifespan of a game comes down to 2 things: Developer support and moddability.

FSX seems to still be supported in some capacity, with development hands changing a few times throughout the years. That certainly could leave a large player base almost 15 years after release, in a similar situation to Payday 2. Half-Life's support obviously isn't there, but that brings us to the second part.

FSX is super moddable. I've seen tons of mods, addons, and expansions for this game. (Hell, I own a few on disk!) The amount of user-created content for FSX is unreal. If you have the game yourself, I'd greatly recommend flyawaysimulation.com. There's so much content, it's absolutely unreal.

To summarize, a game's support can keep it alive for years.

-Lily