Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 lost 45% of its Steam players in one day

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is in trouble right now. In the two days since it launched on Steam, it has garnered over 4,000 user reviews, but only a small number of them are favorable. Mainly, players have complained about long loading times when first starting up the new Flight Sim. In other cases, people were unable to enter the game at all. Developer Asobo released a video explaining the problem. There are signs of recovery. But the initial fervor for the new Flight Simulator appears to have been significantly reduced, as Steam player numbers dropped 45% in 24 hours.

“We have been experiencing difficulties with one of our services for a few hours,” explains Sebastian Wloch, CEO and co-founder of Asobo. “In Flight Simulator 2024, there are some new systems… and when players start, they request data from a server, and that server will cache it in a database. This is a fairly large database and cache, and this cache is currently becoming full. Wloch explains that Asobo has already tested the cache with 200,000 simulated users, but also says that on Flight Sim 2024’s launch day it was “completely overwhelmed.”

“We have taken steps to limit the number of people who can enter at one time,” Wloch continues. “At one point it started working pretty well, so we increased the queue speed five times, and it worked fine for about half an hour, then the cache crashed again . When this service fails, it retries and retries, creating an extremely long initial load. Wloch says that the queue screen that players have encountered so far will “go away” as soon as this issue with the simulation game is resolved.

On release day, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s concurrent Steam player count peaked at 24,863. A day later, on Wednesday, November 20, the concurrent daily peak fell to 13,282, a drop of approximately 45%. . As of this writing, on Thursday, November 21, approximately 8,000 people are playing the new Flight Sim at the same time. Its user reviews have improved, however. At launch, only 19% of user responses were favorable, which meant Flight Simulator 2024 had the dreaded “extremely negative” rating on Steam. Right now, they are at 27% and “mostly negative.”

Between Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy 14, No Man’s Sky and others, we’ve seen many comebacks in recent years. Once 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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