I wonder how good that looks though?
No worse than FSX i suppose. 
Yes… exactly. The George Santayana quote germane. 
Business School Thesis Idea
If anyone is in business school, a good thesis project might be to interview ACES developers to discover how much of their design ideas were directed by the marketing aspects of the MSFS franchise as opposed to leveraging technology improvements.
I am specifically talking about the “need” for backwards compatibility which, IMHO, is what eventually led to the demise of the line. I recall in the 2004-2006 timeframe, when FSX had or was about to come out, comparing the terrain graphics in Il-2 with MSFS 2002 and 2004. True, Il-2 was a much smaller area but the difference was immense. FSX wasn’t much better until ORBX stepped in.
At various times there were discussions in various forums about throwing out the legacy engine parts that made it backwards compatible and just “starting clean”…then there would be an outcry…“But I love my FS2002 Ford Tri-Motor! …out of my cold dead hands…etc.”
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ok its not somebody well known in major flight sim magazine
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Apparently it was forbidden to publicate pictures of the game UI at the event, but some did find its way into the wild.
From what I read the worldmap where you select plan your flight is a 3d model of earth which you can zoom in and plot your flight which sounds awesome.
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When has that stopped anyone before. 
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The most pressing question for me is the bandwidth requirements if you want to fly with it looking as good as the videos we have seen so far.
The thing is, if this uses streaming, you need servers to house the data, and that costs money to operate today, tomorrow, next year…and potentially for a decade to come. A single purchase per person just isn’t going to cut it. I have poured a fair amount of cash into my X-Plane experience, but at the end of the day, I paid Laminar $60 nearly 3 years ago. In that time they have added many features but they didn’t see one extra cent from me. 3rd party devs have seen far more of my cash in that time, but I have to say that doesn’t seem fair when I think about it. So, I think a subscription, be it monthly or annually, isn’t a bad thing. It is just convincing the customer base of that.
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There are definitely problems with a subscription model, no doubt about it, but I wonder how many people would buy in with a single payment of say $500. That would be prohibitive for most players, and yet even $100 might be insufficient. Once again, we run into a situation where we want a product but are possibly not willing to pay what it will cost to produce and sustain it. I’m not sure how we get around that. It’s a Catch 22 situation really.
Oh, and no, I don’t work in finance, which is probably a good thing. I would be a complete disaster in that field. 
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Well, an idea (not saying this would work but it’s a thought) could be a reasonable entry price of $100-$150 with FSX like scenery. High quality scenery streaming is a relatively cheap 5-15$/mo optional extra.
I would go for that. You wouldn’t actually be paying a subscription for the product, just the streaming. Of course, there will still be a lot of people who wouldn’t like it.
Office 365 is SaaS (Software as a Service), it’s quite successful. I use it. It means I always have the latest version of office. Am fully supported and never have to buy yet another version of Office. I do the same with Adobe Photoshop, again for the same reason.
Both pieces of software are quite an outlay/investment, yet for a relatively small monthly fee, I always have the latest version.
Yes, I do. It’s a lease. (PCH -Personal Contract Hire in the UK). Again I do not have the large capital available to outlay on a new car. Yet I can have, for a monthly fee a new vehicle that I couldn’t buy right now.
There is a vast service successful industry built around satisfying the demand for all sorts of things. This isn’t something that is going to happen, it’s something that is already here today and has been for at least a decade.
Going back on topic, if MS decide to do this as a SaaS, a lot will depend on the price.
I think it’s an interesting step MS are taking (if they do), mirroring what they do with their business software. But if it means I get everything in one package, without having to buy yet another version of Active Sky/ or WorldTraffic add on, or Navigraph subscription etc, then I would be interested.
Apologies for the length of waffle.
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I’m also ok with the subscription model. Remember that it cuts both ways; assuming we can cancel any time (lots of subs work this way), that puts constant pressure on MS to be delivering value on the platform. In fact, I would LOVE if MSFS 2020 became the Netflix of Flight sims: just as with netflix they’d need to keep churning out content -both original and third party- to warrant their monthly fee. Otherwise, user subs drop off, and they lose cash flow.
Plus, just like with Netflix, I don’t need to keep a massive library of add ons stored on my hard drive.
On top of all of that, if the “On-Demand” flight sim experiment that is FS2020 doesn’t pan out, we can always fall back to P3D, X-Plane, and maybe even DCS, as ED has signaled their intent to move into the civvie space.
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That would indeed be a paradigm shift in flight sims. 
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In a way it’s kind of funny. For years it seemed that MSFS was always pushing PC hardware to its limits. Even my penultimate computer, purchased over a decade since FSX was released, couldn’t run FSX with all the sliders maxed out. And now, when I finally have a machine that can run it, I’m not going to have enough fast bandwidth 
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Even with the fastest monster machine of today and on minimum settings FSX runs pretty badly in some situations, it is a limitation of the engine and sometimes of the coding of modules as well.
I hope they (MS and third parties) learned something from that and provide some way to achieve decent performance. At least with future hardware.
Edit: huh. My phone swallowed half a sentence it seems. Corrected.
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Yesterday’s news but reassuring nevertheless 
and the full interview
https://www.dropbox.com/s/npflp15dzg40o2b/AVSim_Interview_AUDIO.mp3
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New Insider Update
They created pretty amazing tech for the new Flight Simulator…
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