8mo ago

Despite running load tests that simulated 200,000 users, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 devs admit that they 'completely underestimated' how many players would actually want to play their game

www.pcgamer.com

They had no problems taking everyone’s money. Maybe companies should limit the number of sales when deploying a product tied to services they operate and need to scale.

53 comments

The peak concurrent users for the game thus far has been less than 1/10th of that. They were well within the bounds of what they simulated. They just screwed up.
- Yeah from what I hear, they kept the shitty self-downloader of the first one that is obscenely slow and counts as "playtime" because the game is open while downloading.
  This is on Microsoft, they can make as many excuses as they want, but they fucked it up.
  
  It's ok tho they're making server complexes out of wood now!
  /s
- Where are you getting that number?
  
  Likely the public Steam statistics that show the all-time peak player count is little over 24k players.
- Didn't account for the initial interest peak.
  
  No, that's what I'm saying. That peak is well under what they claimed they simulated.
Bullshit, you own a cloud service and know how to scale a service to meet demand, you just fucked up.
- You know Microsoft isn’t, like, one individual dude right?
  
  No, it's a multinational 3.1 trillion dollar company that has many in house resources it could pull on for a project like this. If they're gonna sell a product with this kind of server reliance built in, it's on them to actually hold up their end of the bargain instead of "oh oops looks like the game is just too much of a success guys".
  
  I think their point is that Microsoft literally had all the information they needed to prevent this from happening and they just didn't because they were incompetent or some other human reason that had nothing to do with server capacity or or a missing Ethernet cable. There was nothing "unknown" here.
  Scaling to meet demand is literally their job. Supposedly best, which is why they have been awarded military contracts.
  They lost situational awareness, or they never had it.
I have a friend who plays, and they suggested that maybe putting it right onto gamepass -- allowing Johnbro McFuck to download it, get lost in a cloud, crash into the ocean and never play again -- during the launch window might not have been a great idea.
Why does a flight simulator of all things need to be a live service game?
- Because it uses an extremely detailed 3d map of literally the entire planet, which can't (yet) be stored on a modern gaming pc offline.
  
  I don't see why it can't download each map individually. Like say you only fly in los angeles, it downloads only los angeles. Maybe it will still be a lot of data and you got a point.
  
  Do we know how big the file is?
The devs of MS are fairly incompetent - look at all the first party games they’ve released, including ones from purchased studios.
- The devs of MS are fairly incompetent
  Or corporate executives push unrealistic expectations onto them
- With Microsoft it can sometimes be really hard to tell if it was the devs, management, or both tbh.
- Al the Age of Empires games, apart from AoE1 DE, are excellent.
Sounds like a fake humblebrag.
There’s no cloud, just someone else’s (underspecced) computer.
Woah woah woah buddy did you even take a second to think about the profits? Selfish.
- I thought about the profits and now I totally get it. Why are so many people trying to hurt the innocent money???
  
  No play, only buy! dog frisbee meme
A new Flight Sim is out already? God dammit, I barely had time to play FS2020... Less than 10 hours.
Flight simulator is pretty. X-plane is good.
And with some addons X-plane is nearly as pretty. FS is all about VFR visuals. X-plane is about getting as close to real flying as possible in a home setting.
Does it really add that much more than the terrain we had 20 years ago?
- With mods you can get FSX looking pretty good
  
  If it's the version I'm thinking of, that's circa 2007, yeah? I remember the fully 3D interior panels being a little crunchy looking but using it mostly to practice instrument stuff with the traditional 2D panel overlays at ERAU. For which it was perfectly adequate.
Flight simulator needed a better people simulator.
- I, for one, couldn't care less about people. It's a flight (That's why I use X-plane) simulator. Spend your resources on giving me a plane and environment that works as close as real life ones. This is not airport lounge simulator.
Almost every major release ever f’s up the server demand. Whether it be downloading the content or players looking to join games.
They know the bitching will happen, buy everyone’s already handed over the cash, so too bad. They budget enough servers to just keep the complaints from lasting too long. Then everyone forgets and finds some other facet of the game to call “unplayable”.

53 comments