Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched yesterday to immediate trouble, as some players were stuck on hours-long loading screens and unable to play the game at all. On Steam, it currently has a Mostly Negative player rating, and reviews are littered with reports of it being completely broken and inaccessible.
In a swiftly-delivered developer update, Asobo Studio has now acknowledged these challenges, while explaining a simple reason for the trouble: it didn’t expect so many players on launch day, and the excitement has “overwhelmed” the company’s infrastructure.
According to Sebastian Wloch, Asobo Studio CEO and co-founder, a simulation estimating 200,000 concurrent players would jump into the game on launch proved wildly inaccurate, with these tests not being enough to stress the game’s server infrastructure ahead of launch.
“In Flight Sim 2024, there are a few new systems in the sim. People have noticed in the career mode there’s all sorts of missions, and when players at the very beginning when they start, they’re asking a server for some data, and that server is going to cache it in a database,” Wloch said. “It’s a pretty big database and there is a cache, and that cache is currently getting saturated.”
“We’ve done load tests simulating 200,000 users, and tonight it’s just completely overwhelmed.”
Read: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Preview: Aligned with the sun and stars
Asobo Studio has been working extensively since launch to address these issues, but as Wloch said, restarting the service isn’t the quick fix the studio had hoped for – the cache still isn’t holding up to player demand. To address this challenge, the studio did implement a throttle for the number of people who could jump into the game at any one time, but this only worked well temporarily.
“We’re restarting, we’re trying to investigate, doing our best and going as fast as we can to make sure everybody can go in,” Wloch said. “The issue that causes this is pretty much, when that service fails it restarts, it retries, it retries. First of all, that creates extremely long initial loading, which is not supposed to be as long. And after a certain time it will fail.”
An added issue is that even if players are able to get into the game, some content will be missing, leading to visual glitches and some missing planes.
“We know a lot of people are frustrated,” Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator said. “We’re really sorry. We want to apologise. We have some problems today. The team is on it, and we will keep going.”
In the coming days, we expect to see significant improvements for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with these hopefully addressing the ongoing challenges with service capacity. At the very least, those having trouble getting into the game can rest assured that Asobo Studio is well across the issue, and there should be a fix shortly.
