I was moved to write this after reading an article on another flightsim site that stated that the flight sim market was in decline. It urged simmers to get more involved, create more scenery, aircraft etc. After I thought about this for a while I realised that the article was really in error and focussed narrowly upon one part of the community. Across the world flight simming is in growth in terms of users. The real problems are more involved with hardware and software. All the most popular flight sims are based on software engines that are decades old and cannot take advantage of modern computers. Hardware, even at the simple joystick level is becoming too expensive or unobtainable. Those factors along with the rumours of new software on the distant horizon does not encourage creativity. However the real world flying market has changed a lot in the past 10 years, most of the world uses aircraft other than Cessna for training, navigation systems are becoming more sophisticated even at the PPL level. This gives a new lift to existing and future flight sim software. Here at simviation with its great crowd of members there is an opportunity to move this forward by lots of small steps rather than big leaps. I believe that the future of simming is stronger than ever. We just have to work towards embracing a larger community and maintain our sense of humour.
To Simviation I ask please make it easier to receive payments from East Asia. Emsisoft seem to be the only company that understand how to do this.