According to an article on the Flight Sim.Com web site and an interview with some guy named Josh from Aces Studio's , the entire team of Aces has been let go, laid off, and Microsoft is NOT intersteaded in pursuing anything Flight Simulator related now, or in the distant future. If they choose to do so, it will be in the very Distant future, and most likely we'll all be dead, blind, in a wheel chair and or simply not breathing any longer . So, it looks like as I stated last summer in a somewhat long post on the SURCLARO.COM flight sim forum, that unless microsoft gets its act together and quits all the nonsense, their going to run people off from this flight sim community in record numbers , I know I left for 4 years, after having FS2002 Pro edition all Amped out, then later FSX came out, but, you had to have some ridlicious Super Computer to run the darn thing to get just decent graphics, and drop a lotta money back then in 2006 to get really good graphics, people weren't ready for that and computer parts were still fairly expensive , compared to now tho.  I know the Height of Flight simming reached its peak between 2002 and 2006 basically, after FSX was released , lotta simmers, Aircraft and scenery developers gave up and quit, because of the NEW hard to understand file format, that being DDS Files, which meant developers & designers dropping more money to make the stuff and tons of time trying to figure out how to make it work, so they could give us FREEWARE to use in the sim, and it made a lot madd. can't say I blame them either, thats why I left for 4 years.  Also, I think there needs to be some sort of Standard for designing and making Aircraft & scenery , a standard format as well as a standard way to upload files, right now theres too many loosely made mistaken aircraft & scenery files Floating around out there, that simply have a lotta mistakes in them from Newbies or those who just want to ASSUME its ready for uploading for FSX or 2004, tho they never checked or TESTED it out before uploading to a flight sim web site, the veteran and seasoned developers and designers out there know better, but some of these newbies on the block are just NOT checking or TESTING things out before uploading, yet some of what I've seen have been TITLED as FSX, and are NOT even close to being FSX material or Qualified to be true FSX aircraft or scenery.  I've got a hold of quite a few aircraft lately, that appear to be FS 98  or FS2000 that somebody has ported over kinda sorta, and never changed the gauges either in the panel folder so it'd work properly !  What do you think that does to somebody or new comers who really wan to get into flight simming, when they spend hours of frustration on forum boards asking for help, instead of flying ??? very frustrating, when all they had to do was TEST & Check before uploading the files to a site, which clearly isn't being done in some cases ! Don't Assume or guess - know ! Would ya want an Airline pilot to just assume there was enough Fuel to make it from Australia to Seattle without checking or looking ?? ::) ::) anyway, I said back in March or April that FLIGHT would be dead by August or September, and , we see what happened !!! It died a firey death of a fireball, down in flames, and exploded, all over the Taxi Way , don't bother to call Rescue tho, nobody really cares !!! :o :o ;D ;D