Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is struggling right now. In the two days since it launched on Steam, it’s attracted more than 4,000 user reviews – but only a small number of those are favorable. Principally, players have complained of long loading times when first starting the new Flight Sim. In other cases, people haven’t been able to get into the game at all. Developer Asobo has released a video explaining the problem. There are signs of recovery. But the initial fervor for the new Flight Simulator seems to have been stiffly curtailed, as Steam player figures have dropped by 45% in 24 hours.
“We’ve been struggling for a few hours with one of our services,” Asobo CEO and co-founder Sebastian Wloch explains. “In Flight Simulator 2024, there are a few new systems…and when players start, they are asking for some data from a server, and that server is going to cache it in a database. It’s a pretty big database and it’s a cache, and that cache is currently getting saturated.” Wloch explains that Asobo previously stress tested the cache with 200,000 simulated users, but also says that on Flight Sim 2024’s launch day, it became “completely overwhelmed.
“We’ve taken measures to throttle the number of people who can come in at the same time,” Wloch continues. “At some point, it started working pretty well, so we increased the queue speed by five times, and it worked well for maybe half an hour or so, and then the cache collapsed again. When that service fails, it retries and retries, which creates the extremely long initial loading.” Wloch says that the queuing screen that players have encountered so far will “go away” as soon as this issue with the simulation game is fixed.
On release day, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s concurrent Steam player count peaked at 24,863. One day later, on Wednesday November 20, the daily concurrent peak dropped to 13,282, a decrease of some 45%. As of this writing, on Thursday November 21, around 8,000 people are playing the new Flight Sim at the same time. Its user reviews, however, have gotten better. At launch, only 19% of user responses were favorable, which meant Flight Simulator 2024 had the dreaded ‘overwhelmingly negative’ rating on Steam. Right now, they’re at 27% and ‘mostly negative.’
Between Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy 14, No Man’s Sky, and others, we’ve seen plenty of comeback stories in recent years. As the initial launch issues are resolved, Flight Sim 2024 will also hopefully recover from its release-day woes. Let’s see.
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