Flight Simulator flies unfriendly skies with disastrous launch

Xbox takes a reputation hit as Flight Simulator 2024 nosedives at launch.

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Flight Simulator 2024 is being described as one of the worst game launches in recent memory. The game has been plagued by a myriad of frustrating issues at release, the most notorious of which freezes loading at 97% while another forces players to wait in login queues for an undetermined period of time. People simply can't get into the game they paid money for and they're making it known across multiple corners of the internet.

In a recent video, Asobo Studio, the developer behind Flight Simulator 2024, explains what went wrong. Quite simply, there were more people trying to play FS 2024 than Asobo had anticipated. The game's servers--which stream data from a huge asset database directly to consoles and PCs--were crushed under the collective weight of what could have been millions of people logging in at once.

Asobo had only tested for around 200,000 simultaneous users during FS 2024's alpha stage. As for a fix, well, there isn't one just yet.

"We knew the excitement was high for Microsoft flights in 2024 but frankly we completely underestimated how high and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure," said head of Microsoft Flight Sim Jorg Neumann.

Asobo CEO and co-founder Sebastia Wloch explains what went wrong, and how the studio is trying to fix the problems:

The game is asking a server for some data and that server is going to cache it in a database. It's a very big database and there is a cache and that cache currently getting saturated.

It's a cache that has been thoroughly tested in during the whole Tech Alpha. We've done low tests simulating 200,000 users and tonight it's just completely overwhelmed.

We've tried to restart the services. We've taken measures to throttle the number of people who can come in at the same time. At some point it worked pretty well so we increased the throttling, basically the queue sized by the speed by 5x.

It worked well during maybe half an hour or so and then all of a sudden the cache collapsed again.