I'm an avid flight simulator enthusiast with marginal internet and I think this is a great gesture by Microsoft.
I live in "rural" Canada, approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) from a municipality of 160,000 people, and internet access for me is a mix of LTE and Satellite, and unlikely to improve (maybe Starlink!). Even limiting myself to focusing on a single flight simulator platform, Digital Combat Simulator, downloading and keeping the simulator updated requires planning and timing to work around my bandwidth cap.
I've been following the development of Microsoft's new Flight simulator, but as soon as the download size was announced it seemed like a non-starter for me. But the announcement of a physical DVD changes this, and I'm now quite interested in their simulator.
Assuming the box will be about the same size, it's likely that the DVDs are simply still cheaper.
An interesting lament is that disk media did not really evolve past DVDs to blue-rays or multi-layer to the mass consumer market, as 100GB blu-ray discs are actually available (still more expensive per-GB than DVDs!)
https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-100GB-White-Inkjet-Printable...
I live in "rural" Canada, approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) from a municipality of 160,000 people, and internet access for me is a mix of LTE and Satellite, and unlikely to improve (maybe Starlink!). Even limiting myself to focusing on a single flight simulator platform, Digital Combat Simulator, downloading and keeping the simulator updated requires planning and timing to work around my bandwidth cap.
I've been following the development of Microsoft's new Flight simulator, but as soon as the download size was announced it seemed like a non-starter for me. But the announcement of a physical DVD changes this, and I'm now quite interested in their simulator.