So a studio owned by the company that also owns the azure infrastructure and has real time access to sales data was caught by surprise by the sales of their game and failed to boot up a couple more Vms to serve paying customers… Right, sounds totally legit and not penny pinching at all.
Hey man give them a break! Those poor megacorpos need those spare VMs for training their new AI! The customers already paid, what are they going to do other than wait in queue? Its not like they own their copy of completely online dependent game anyways.
Microsoft should rebrand to Tumorsoft. They have metastisised to an absolutely megalodon of a corporate structure with no redeeming qualities. Their position is justified by nothing other than their legacy of being the default bundled OS on almost every single computer. How this wasn’t already prosecuted to the ground is beyond me. They have “allegedly” bribed several government officials to stop the terrain Linux was making within the EU and suffered exactly 0 consequences.
Were they really caught by surprise when it happened last launch? I think not. Its intentional.
Wont buy it until its redesigned. I recommended those that have get a refund.
The annoying thing with MSFS 2020 was how much it downloaded in app, which chewed through your playtime counter in Steam. Didn’t make it impossible but made it so the auto approval would deny you.
and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure."
By underestimated excitement they meant player count straining their ridiculous approach of streaming massive amounts of data through the game instead of preinstalling.
I’m calling it now: for Flight Simulator 2025, they’re going to pull a Windows update “energy saver” and have it stream data peer-to-peer wherever possible.
I think they’ll go full terminal mode on the next iteration. You’ll download a 100MB launcher and then just do cloud gaming from there.
A Bittorrent based game you say?
Its almost as if they plan for this experience. Theyve done it multiple times now, you can only assume its intentional.
I purchased MSFS several months ago. I was excited to fly the entire world. The game kept crashing (i5 13600k and RTX 4070 Super). After maybe 5 attempts I got past opening the .exe, only to find that the game required 150 gb of updates. No worries, I’ve got fast internet.
But guess what? You’re limited to Microsoft’s server speeds, which appeared to be capped at 320 kbps. I would have run through my refund window ages before I’d even have the game downloaded. Do I risk $90 CAD on the hopes that an already struggling to run game actually works? Or do I refund? Tough choice it was for me. Hah.
Also special fuck you to Thrustmaster. NEVER waste your money on their absolute garbage. I bought the Boeing 787 yoke and it worked for 3 months before the roll sensor gave out, making it impossible to fly straight because the yoke is detecting random spastic motions all over the place, making the entire thing unusable. If you search this issue online you’ll find tons of people with the same issue. They use a first gen cheap hall sensor for the roll axis that keeps picking up interference from everything (especially the left throttle axis)
Wouldn’t that be covered by warranty though? 3 months is a pretty short period.
It is! And they want me to pay shipping costs to mail it to them in Florida, where they will send me a brand new one (maybe) and I will encounter the same issue in maybe 3 months? 6 months? The fault lies with the actual sensor they use so I’m kind of boned regardless. It’s a design flaw.
As a fellow simmer, all I can say is: please try X-Plane. It needs support and is the best way to make sure the MSFS approach does not become the norm.
XPlane is fantastic but I play in VR and that is where XPlane downright sucks. XPlane is bound to single core performance on a cpu. It doesn’t matter how good your graphics card is because if you play in vr, your frame rate is capped at single core performance so it is absolutely unplayable (with ASW enabled and all graphics set to low).
For VR, Aerofly FS4 is phenomenal. But the tradeoff there is that Aerofly doesn’t have weather or live ATC. Aerofly actually uses a similar technology as Microsoft (if you enable global coverage). The difference here is that they don’t have access to high resolution orthographic scenery so it’s pretty low res. Performance though is absolutely unbeatable. The full simulator can be run on an iPhone or a Nintendo switch.
Yeah, agreed X-Plane is behind in VR. That specific use case gives MSFS an edge.
Is VR even playable in MSFS? I could never get it to open properly for me in pancake mode.
A completely ridiculous lie on their part. What sane person would give /Microsoft/ any benefit of the doubt whatsoever? (nobody here so far, just saying in general) Microsoft owns insane cloud infrastructure and are also the publishers of the game. If there’s a problem, it’s one they chose not to address, not one that was simply “underestimated”.
Games as services aren’t popular – with a particular demographic. The disconnect here might be that people who tend to play flight sims are decidedly not in the games as a service group.
One reason why I play X-Plane is to avoid this silliness with streaming everything from servers (that, plus the flight and lighting models are better).
If you consider X-Plane
nasnapproaches infinity, it becomes indistinguishable from a subscription model.Except that you can continue to play whatever version you want without issue. X-Plane 12 is the current, but many people are still on X-Plane 11. You can remain on old versions indefinitely – because they aren’t games as a service. They’re local installs.
