How does it compare w/ the new MSFS, or the other big names w/ commercial "gaming" development efforts behind them, i.e. Xplane, DCS, etc?
Due to its long history of development it has some of the most well received third party aircraft add-ons, but be warned, these will cost more than the sim itself.
If you want a video game, you should get the new MSFS. If you want something more realistic you should get P3D + third party aircraft for airliners or XPlane for GA aircraft (+ setup ortho scenery for XPlane), but much of the ecosystem is slowly releasing MSFS ports too.
I am a little worried for what will happen to hobbyist flight sims after MSFS though. A large part of its appeal is the bing maps powered streaming of good terrain and other map features, and I suspect Microsoft won't maintain that forever. If they lose interest for a similar length as between FSX and Microsoft Flight or between Microsoft Flight and MSFS, that could be a bad time for the flight sim world if they've gotten too used to MSFS.
---
If you do get into the P3D third party ecosystem, be warned that many of the developers are older hobbyists turned devs which have been in their own universe and so can have weird ideas from time to time. Like a support system that is a public forum where you must manually sign your real name at the end of each post or get banned (PMDG), or uploading the chrome username/password DB of suspected hackers based on a check for username (FlightSimLabs).
None of the rest of Looking Glass' flight sims used the first game's fluid dynamics model.
There's a mod that makes it use Google Maps instead. In many places, it is better by leaps and bounds.
I think when it comes to simulation fidelity, it still has a nice edge over the Microsoft ecosystem. Though that did improve with their latest version. In terms of third party aircraft, there are interesting products for both simulators. Probably more for MS; but there are a few nice ones for X-plane as well.
P3D seems like it has served its purpose. It was a nice upgrade before MSFS 2020 became a thing for users stuck in the MS ecosystem without meaningful updates to their simulator for a decade or so. Now that they have released (and given how great it is), there probably still is a niche market for people with older setups that are happy to keep on using that; especially those that invested in third party aircraft. Of course, most relevant aircraft are probably also available for MSFS 2020 at this point and possibly in an improved or nicer version.
Other than that, I don't see any good reasons for new users to want or need this. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I imagine a ship, train sim would go over quite well. Would be great if they were all in the same in game session.
Can also picture tycoon and enterprise type games doing well here.
And of course eventually there will be weapons, it is bound to happen.
Unless every street in the world is scanned quarterly, or more frequently, the data would be laughably stale. That said, people would still flock to GTA World, or even GTA USA if it got made.
> uploading the chrome username/password DB of suspected hackers
Yes, I'm aware they mistook these add-ons as being web applications, that's why I described the difference.
MSFS X is, like a lot of games, a warmed-over version of a previous game engine, with improved directx support and tweaked to run on the latest (at the time) version of windows. I forget if it has it's roots in MSFS 3.0, 4.0 or 2002, but it was a pretty old engine in 2006 and has gotten a few updates over the last decade but is pretty crufty and when you play it, unless you have $300 of after-market add-ons, is very obvious it's old, especially compared to x-plane etc
As the other guy said, the people still heavily invested and running the modding scene for a 20 year old video game are... esoteric.
Playing MSFS X as a newcomer at this point in time is mostly to inspect a historical artifact, but it's a very detailed simulator if you want to take off in a 747 from LAX and fly it to London or Moscow non-stop.