As Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Steam Reviews Collapse to ‘Overwhelmingly Negative,’ Dev Admits It ‘Completely Underestimated’ Excitement for the Game
As Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Steam reviews collapse to ‘Overwhelmingly Negative,’ its developer has admitted it "completely underestimated" the excitement for the game.
The world’s 1st most popular cloud infrastructure company was also unable to deploy their own software on their own cloud infrastructure. I remember just being in total disbelief when New World, the Amazon-developed MMORPG struggled for WEEKS (Months?) with server capacity issues. Like… you guys own ALL the servers, the main selling point of which are their ability to dynamically scale to demand.
I totally get the irony of how Amazon's own MMO struggled with server capacity issues, but that probably has way more to do with how the game was actually written/implemented, and less to do with Amazon's scalability features.
The inability to download from their servers means that players are eating up refund time sitting around waiting. So now there are players that haven’t even gotten to play yet and can’t get a refund through Steam.
I swear companies are just fucking trolling us at this point.
I had this exact same problem with the last MSFS. I bought it 4 months ago and never could download the content. The game crashed something like 5 times before I was able to actually get the loading screen to open. Then it was off to the races downloading 150gb of content from M$ servers at a blazing 320kbps.
Figured I’d cut my losses and refunded before my 2 hour window so I could use that money to purchase an actual flight simulator (XPlane 12)
If the servers can only handle a certain number of players, then they should only sell a certain number of licenses for the game.
Then, when concurrent player numbers drop over time, they can release more.
But no, they'll happily take the money from everyone on launch even though their servers can't handle the load.
Could you imagine the possibly equally as bad reception if a digital game was limited? Then add in that you’d get scalpers trying to sell steam keys for stupid money.
This is just another example of why you should wait a while before buying a new game, even sequels.
I vividly remember a downloaded game telling me they had run out of available licences, once. Can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty certain it was on Steam.
How you run out of numbers still rascals me, all these years later. And I say this as a software dev.
Maybe there's a middle ground, where instead of just letting a flood of people all download your game on day one, the publisher like pre-downloads it onto some sort of physical media, and then sell copies of that physical media. That way people could get into the game immediately when they receive their copy without having to wait on the same 6 hour download that a million other people are also waiting on, that download activity doesn't interfere with the bandwidth of people trying to play the game, and the physical availability puts a sort of temporary artificial limit on how many people can play at once.
True in theory but in the absence of regulation to that effect if you don't vote with your wallet either companies have literally no incentive to ensure that.
Patient gamers unite! I wait until that game I want hits AT LEAST -75% off.
The only exception I've had for that rule for myself in recent memory is for Monsterhunter games.
You look hard enough (or maybe not very hard at all) and you can see which developers and companies can't do launch days very well, or release too early. Blizzard/Activision, CDProject Red, Ubisoft, and Microsoft come to mind.
It's the smaller to mid-size companies that have something to prove that release something more polished. Not always the case, but you've gotta stand out somehow.
Remake and rebuy everything of course. Did you expect backwards compatibility? Where’s the money in that?
Edit: have a look at people in the game forums unable to have their community content (especially planes) not working in 2024, or only partially working (mismatched textures, missing liveries, flight model glitches). As of right now, there are lots of compatibility issues.
For any content you purchased outside of the simulator, the Community Folder will continue to work as it did in MSFS 2020. Any content in your MSFS 2020 Community Folder can simply be copied over to the new MSFS 2024 Community Folder, and the vast majority of that content should work in MSFS 2024.
For any content you purchased in the Marketplace in MSFS 2020, that content will show up as owned in the Content Manager (in MSFS 2024 called “My Library”) at launch for you to use in MSFS 2024, and the vast majority of that content should work in MSFS 2024. This availability does not require developers to sign off on their content.