MSFS 2024 Launch: Apologies Issued Amidst Stormy Debut

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s rough launch, its head acknowledged the issues surrounding the game. Read on to learn more about why these issues happened.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Head Acknowledged Day-One Launch IssuesToo Many Users Overwhelmed MSFS Servers

The highly anticipated launch of MSFS 2024 has been plagued by bugs, instability, and server issues. Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann and the Asobo Studio's CEO, Sebastian Wloch, released a video on YouTube addressing players' concerns about the game.

In the roughly 5-minute Developer Launch Day Update video, Neumann and Wloch explained the causes of the game's issues and how they plan to address them. Neumann admitted they knew excitement for the game was high but underestimated the number of players. "It really has overwhelmed our infrastructure," he said.

To further explain the issues, Neumann deferred to Wloch. "At the very beginning, when players start, they’re basically requesting data from a server, and that server retrieves it from a database," he said. This database has a cache and was tested with 200,000 simulated users, but the high number of players is still overwhelming it.

MSFS Login Queue and Missing Planes

Wloch and his team tried to resolve this issue by restarting the services and increasing the number of people logging into the game. They achieved this by increasing the queue size and speed by fivefold. However, "It worked well for maybe half an hour and then all of a sudden the cache collapsed again." said Wloch.

They soon discovered the reason behind the incomplete or long loading times. After becoming saturated, the service fails, forcing it to restart and retry repeatedly. "That creates extremely long initial loading, which is not supposed to be as long," he explained. Over time, the missing data causes the loading screen to pause at 97%, forcing players to restart the game.

Moreover, the missing planes issue reported by players is caused by incomplete or blocked content. Although some players successfully entered the game, a few planes or pieces of content might be missing after getting past the queue screen. "That’s totally not normal, and that’s due to the service and server not responding, and this cache being completely overflowed," Wloch claimed.

MSFS 2024 Struggles with Mostly Negative Steam Feedback

Due to the aforementioned issues, the game is getting a lot of flak from Steam players. Some have reported grave concerns, ranging from protracted login queues to absent planes. Currently, the game has been rated Predominantly Negative on the said platform.

Despite these grave day-one launch problems, the team has been actively working on resolving them. "We have solved the issues and are now bringing players in at a consistent pace," as stated on the game’s Steam page. "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your forbearance. We will keep you updated on our social channels, forums, and website. Thank you very much for all your feedback and support."