GamesSimMicrosoft Flight Simulator 2024Despite running load tests that simulated 200,000 users, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 devs admit that they ‘completely underestimated’ how many players would actually want to play their gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesSimMicrosoft Flight Simulator 2024Despite running load tests that simulated 200,000 users, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 devs admit that they ‘completely underestimated’ how many players would actually want to play their gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Asobo Studio)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 players are currently in a bit of a whirlwind as thousands of users have review bombed the game due to itbeing practically unplayable.So, to try to quell the unrest, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann, and Asobo CEO and co-founder Sebastian Wlochsat down and explained everythingthat had gone wrong and how the devs were trying to resolve it.
Currently, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s Steam reviews are satat a 24%, mostly negativerating, with players complaining about missing planes, clunky controls, or getting thrown out mid-game and being unable to rejoin. “I cannot recommend this game to anyone right now,” onereview says. “Default aircraft are streamed from the internet, and textures can take several minutes to load. This means that the buttons in your cockpit are white with no text until they’re downloaded in real time.” There’s also a common issue that prevents players from starting the game, as it’ll freeze at 97% and then crash and restart.
“We’ve been struggling for a few hours with our services,” Wloch says. “At the very beginning, when players start, they’re asking a server for some data, and that server is going to catch it in a database. It’s a very big database, and there’s a cache, and that cache is currently getting saturated.
(Image credit: Asobo Studio)

Unlike past Microsoft Flight Simulator games, the latest version streams its assets from the cloud. This decreases the size of the game (it’s only around 50GB) and means that a few ofits PC requirementsare lower than some predecessors. But it’s also caused all this instability as the game constantly streams from the cloud, and it just can’t keep up with the high demand of players flooding into the game right now, so the connection is pretty unstable.
“When the server fails, it restarts, it retries and retries, which creates an extremely long initial loading that is not supposed to be that long,” Wloch says. “After a certain time, it will fail if the missing data is blocking, so you will not finish the loading and will stop at 97% and get a message, which means that you just have to restart. And if the data wasn’t blocking, you may enter the sim, but there may be a few planes missing and some other content missing. It’s all due to the same problem with that server.”
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Luckily, it’slooking like the queue screen has disappearedas more players are able to log into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 straight away. An admin on the game’s Discord even confirmed this late last night.
“We’re really sorry,” Neumann says. “We want to apologise. We made this video because we’re always here, and we want to be as transparent and as honest as possible. So we have some problems today, the team is on it and then we will keep going.”
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