It looks like the end of an era as Microsoft's longest-running product is having its development shut down as the company dismisses 5,000 workers. One of the groups most affected by the firings is Microsoft's ACES development studio, the team behind the Flight Simulator franchise.

The first release of Microsoft Flight Simulator was all the way back in 1982. There have been regular releases every few years since then, adding color graphics, 3D buildings, real-world terrain, and building up to the feature-rich Flight Simulator X, released in 2006. There's an extensive community of enthusiasts who design add-ons for the software, increasing the fleet of available airplane models, adding extra scenery options, and artificial intelligence scripts for modeling the behavior of computer-controlled planes.

Microsoft says that it's still committed to the Flight Simulator line, but laying off the development team is a funny way of showing it. Maybe it will come back under a new team's direction, or re-imagined as something else entirely.

It's not just Flight Simulator feeling the pinch; Microsoft's layoffs include up to 30% of its game testers, affecting 360 development as well as PC games. There's supposed to be some major restructuring going on within the upper ranks of the company's gaming divisions. Hopefully it will get its house in order quickly and appoint some managers to get the Flight Simulator team back together; it would be a shame to just let the franchise die after all these years.

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