Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 dev apologizes for 'what can only be described as an awful launch experience'

A plane leaning on its nose in a field while someone looks at it — (Image credit: Microsoft)

Just as Path of Exile 2 is struggling to get its servers working today, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 couldn't get off the ground on launch day back in November. Despite running tests that simulated 200,000 users, MSFS 2024 devs admitted they "completely underestimated" how many players wanted to dive into the sim on day one, which led to an enthusiastic playerbase staring at an unchanging queue and loading screens showing 0% progress for hours.

Today, the MSFS 2024 dev team hosted a livestream where head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann addressed and explained that frustrating first day.

Neumann explained that it wasn't an issue with the server or the client, but "problems with the layer in between, called the CDN," which stands for Content Delivery Network. It's the same network used for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 to stream world data to players, but it was simply overwhelmed by traffic at launch. "Someone told me we had 100 billion package requests on the first day," Neumann said. "The infrastructure simply could not handle the amount of requests and started to fail."

A issue where airport and nighttime lightning are unrealistically bright
Live weather not being separate from the date of the flight selected
Mouse freelook being overly sensitive
A possible issue with VRAM impacting fps performance

Here's one bug request I definitely agree with: "Wind and turbulence in Career Mode is ridiculous," a bug that I'm happy to see labeled as "fixed" on the spreadsheet and will be part of next week's patch. Great! I'm a bad enough pilot as it is without being subjected to unreasonable amounts of wind while I'm trying to take some doofus sightseeing over Billings, Montana.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.