For those who does not know, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launch a few days ago into a very rocky start!
The reason seem to be an “unexpected” server load as users are flocking to try out the new version. Since Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is sever based and only the client is downloaded to your computer, it heavily depends on a connection to the Microsoft Server to run. The physical program is installed on your computer, but the scenery, aircraft and everything else is stored on a server somewhere in order to keep the size of the program and the loading time as down as much as possible.
Apparently Microsoft did not anticipate the popularity of the title and on launch day the server that housed the data crashed! This forced them to throttle user logins which caused a lot of frustration as users who bought the title and could not run it. Currently Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is rated on Steam as “Mostly Negative” and it has forced a change in the Microsoft’s slogan from the sky to be the limit to the server being the limit!
Some are questioning Microsoft’s statement of not being able to anticipate the popularity of the Flight Simulator to how it is not possible for them to know based on the fact that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 has been around for four years… The good news is that Microsoft is working to fix this issue, so lets hope for the best.
Should you buy Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 right now if you have not done so yet? That is a question that only you can answer. It has a lot of issues at the moment, but as we have stated, Microsoft is working on it and we trust that those issues will be forgotten in time.
As for us, we will stick with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for now. We still have a lot of airports that needs to be updated to be compatible for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, so there is no hurry for us to jump and get Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 right this second. Maybe the price for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will drop by Christmas, but that is a big maybe! In the mean time, we will continue to update our airports to be compatible with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2025 until we close for the holidays on the 20th of December. Please note that these updates does not mean that the airports will stop working on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. They will continue to do so as it is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 scenery after all!
In January 2025, we will start with the conversion of our airports to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Hopefully by then all the issues that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is currently experiencing will be solved! At that point, we will stop designing scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and continue with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 scenery only. It is not that we don’t like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, it is just easier to concentrate on one version of the simulator at a time for design purposes than trying to work with two systems at the same time.
We still do not know if the new airports which will be for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 only will have an upgrade discount or not. Microsoft has hinted at that possibility to allow users to upgrade from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 purchased add-ons to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 add-ons via an upgrade discount, but nothing has been set in stone yet. It will be unfair for us to expect a full re-purchase of already owned airports just because it is a new version of flight simulator.
We can do upgrade discounts via our website, but doing it locally is useless while the build in Market Place does not allow it. We suppose that it is a matter of wait and see, but we will keep you posted on developments as we hear from Microsoft.