Update! – In a short statement on the company’s forums, Captain Sim admitted the mistake, apologized for all the “mess”, and promised to allow all freeware deliveries to be freely distributed. A repaint kit will also be made available starting this Monday, May 24th. An honest apology, or damage control after the massive negative feedback?
Captain Sim’s arrival to the new Microsoft Flight Simulator is turning into an absolute disaster. And it’s not like the studio has anyone to blame but itself. After releasing a half-baked recreation of the Boeing 777, which was disappointingly received by simmers, Captain Sim is now going after livery creators who have shared their work outside of the in-house ACE utility, claiming that their work is actually owned by Captain Sim, according to their copyright policy. How crazy is that?
Flightsim.to, the popular repository of addons and mods for MSFS, even got a legal takedown from CaptainSim urging the platform to remove all freeware liveries that were made available there. Then, astonishingly, Captain Sim picked up on those liveries, somehow “reworking” them in order to “fix them”, and posted them on ACE without any credit to the original creators. Captain Sim even went ahead and blamed creators for “posting their defective art all over the Internet”. Ouch.
So, at this point in time, we have a once-respected third-party developer making community-created liveries available through its own tools, without crediting the original creators, claiming that those liveries are actually owned by Captain Sim. The irony here is uncanny, since Captain Sim has just released an aircraft that is mostly Asobo’s code (the 747 systems) wrapped in a 777 external model.
Clearly, Captain Sim is working really hard to kill its reputation in the flight simulation world. So far, in just a few days, they are nearly accomplishing that goal with great success! They seem oblivious to the problem and have yet to respond to all the backlash. What we are getting is some nasty back-and-forths on Captain Sim’s forums, in a thread where they explain the thought process behind their decisions. That thread has since been cleansed from many critical posts.
In the meantime, there is now a poop livery for the 777. A hilariously immature creation that perfectly symbolizes what is going on here, and how many users are reacting to such a hostile behavior from Captain Sim.
