A long held accusation since 2020 was released, to be fair.
This also bugs me. As you said we have small charter planes in game, both first party and third party (208, 408, PC12, DO228) but we are using TBM930 and Hondajet (which belong to VIP) to do private charter?!
There’s a few essential air service routes that fly the PC12 on those route out of LAX, and there’s a bunch of essential air service Cessna 208 routes out of NY city and PA, they are also using the 408 to island hop in Hawaii
The regional aircraft missing from career mode that actually really helped or in NeoFly are the Beechcraft 99, CRJ 200 and dash 8 family, and the Boeing 717 200 was actually neofly gold in their career mode, so I’m hoping we get Beech 99, CRJ 200, ERJ 135, 717 200, 737 200 gravel, and 747 200 gets added career mode
I won’t buy any PMDG or Just flight products if I can’t enjoy them in fs2024’s default career mode
That is not correct. We only said our products have extra challenges to make them suitable for career mode in the sim.
In addition, contrary to this forum, our market research shows that only 9% of customers would ‘probably’ use it in career mode. Without any judgment, the highly simplified, gamified career mode in the sim is not why our existing customers buy the products.
Mathijs Kok
PMDG
Ok thanks for that info
That’s your choice.
Personally, I find that in free flight, you become a better sim pilot with the number of flying hours you put in, much as it is in real life. Taking a few weeks holiday from the sim can even make your flying skills a bit “rusty”.. that has to be the more realistic career model, even though it is the most time consuming, I prefer having a detailed flight model and systems that perform well in free flight and personally would rather the developers spend most of their valuable time developing their products for free flight rather than modifying them to work in career mode. PMDG and JF aircraft are some of the most rewarding to fly in the sim for a reason. Some aircraft are designed for mainly free flight and some mainly for career mode. I don’t think they have to be designed for both - it’s our choice after all…
How bout if I’ll fly both versions if there are two versions so I can fly the PMDG and fly something in career mode
To be honest, we’d love to see a serious, well-developed career mode in the simulator. The concept has enormous potential. Our concern is that the current implementation, let’s call it “gamification,” places considerable emphasis on parameters that, from our perspective as developers of highly detailed aircraft, do not necessarily reflect what makes a good pilot.
Take landing performance, for example. The simulator seems to place considerable importance on achieving a low vertical speed at touchdown. That is perfectly reasonable in ideal conditions, but in gusty crosswinds, on a contaminated or slippery runway, a firm, positive touchdown is often exactly what you want. A beautifully smooth landing can actually be a rather poor landing if it involves floating halfway down the runway. The same applies to taxi speeds. A considerable difference exists between taking a tight turn too fast and maintaining a reasonable speed along a straight taxiway that is a third of a mile long. Context matters.
Meanwhile, some of the things that genuinely distinguish a good airline pilot get remarkably little attention.
Fuel management is an obvious example. Loading the right amount of fuel, choosing the most economical cruising altitude rather than blindly accepting whatever SimBrief suggests, using single-engine taxi procedures intelligently, and managing fuel consumption throughout the flight are all important parts of airline operations.
Then there is decision-making. Knowing when to initiate a go-around, when to divert, or when continuing an approach is no longer sensible says far more about good airmanship than achieving an impressively low touchdown rate.
Even something as seemingly straightforward as passenger comfort becomes questionable when reduced to a simple score. Suppose you have to choose between arriving late and causing many passengers to miss their connections, or flying through ten minutes of moderate turbulence to arrive on schedule. Which is the better decision? There isn’t always a universally correct answer, and that’s what makes airline operations interesting.
I fully appreciate that modeling all these factors would be extraordinarily complex. However, consider the level of detail we already simulate in our aircraft. We even account for variations in fuel density depending on where the aircraft is refueled. That is a fairly serious level of simulation.
Against that background, being congratulated by the simulator for an acceptable landing after floating excessively and failing to put both main landing gear trucks on the runway at roughly the same time feels rather disconnected from the reality we are trying to reproduce. For me, that particular experience was the moment I stopped taking Career Mode seriously.
And that is a shame, because we absolutely understand the appeal of having a goal, a sense of progression, and some meaningful evaluation of your performance. We would welcome all of that.
However, we also feel that aircraft simulated to the complexity of our products pose a particular challenge for the current system.
Consider our upcoming 747 Classic. The Flight Engineer will have an enormous amount of work to do, managing systems fundamental to the aircraft’s safe, efficient operation. Getting that work right is just as important as what the pilots do in the cockpit. Yet, under the current scoring system, virtually all of it goes completely unnoticed.
That illustrates the underlying problem rather well. A career mode built around serious aircraft operations needs to recognize and reward the skills, judgment, and procedures that actually matter. Otherwise, we risk having an extremely sophisticated aircraft simulation evaluated by a scoring system that barely scratches the surface of what it takes to fly that aircraft properly.
We genuinely hope Career Mode evolves in that direction. The potential is certainly there, and we would love to see it become something that adds real value to operating complex aircraft, rather than simply awarding points for making the numbers look nice.
Mathijs Kok
PMDG
Wow! Matthijs for Asobo PM 
Same here 
Haven’t bought any aircraft that doesn’t support Career Mode since I migrated to MSFS 2024 and I intend to keep it that way. And be the 9%.
I even have the A380 from LVFR on my wishlist, instead of the iniBuilds one. TFDi Design also doesn’t mind supporting Career Mode with their MD-11.
Anyway, I prefer smaller aircraft and luckily we’re pretty well stocked on that nowadays, with much more to come. Just this week I bought the EMB-110 and I intend to use it in Career Mode to get lost in the Amazon 
I can also perform SAR in my Hughes 500 with much more integration and ease than I ever had with FS Economy or NeoFly.
Also, last time I checked this was still sold as a game, not a Level D simulator. I really don’t mind that the game is “gamified”, that more people can enjoy it on consoles using just controllers instead of expensive yokes. At the same time it still serves well to those that want to take it to more serious simulation levels, even build an airliner home cockpit.
Oh trust me, i have the TFDI MD11 and the FlightFX Citation X and these aircraft work perfectly 10/10 in career mode, the more aircraft that come the less need to buy the others
I’ve been simming since FSX, I’ve more than done enough free flight hours, and now I am hooked on this career mode and will open my wallet to career mode aircraft before ones that aren’t available.
And I can and still do free flight for those aircraft that aren’t available, but it’s an empty feeling, no purpose apart from landing, which is something I’m familiar with since FSX so that’s 20+yrs for free flight. Those FSX missions I also spent a lot of time on. Career mode is a new frontier and yes it’s poorly delivered, but it has so much potential and today that’s where most of my time is spent, despite the shortfalls and lack of aircraft, unlocking the map is dropping dopamine hits and the aircraft are coming, slowly. It’s only getting better tbh
Ok I’m curious, in free flight does this get rewarded?
100% of this thread, which has 5,100 posts is the 9%
Unfortunately it was highly gamified/simplified because they rushed the developement to release the sim to be able to call it 2024
I personaly only buy products on marketplace and career compatible, and there is actualy a lack of liners for passenger transport, the default airbus still have a lot of issue or missing features (not starting the mission cold and dark, the weight are not compatible with the efb etc…) because It’s not really followed by Ini (for obvious money reasons, they are not working for free)
I stopped using 2020 for 2 reasons:
-The loading time on startup was really too long, sometimes 9 to 13min to get in the plane on cold and dark
-The lack of objectives
I have now 1100hr on the sim, and I play 95% career mode, there is still absurd issue wich can makes some flight sessions really frustrating, and I destroyed few keyboards because of that, but sometimes everythings is working good, because of if you are lucky or not (choosing the good airport with the good plane on the good moment) and at that moment everything is so enjoyable and you can see what potential this mode has.
Just imagine this mode, stable and without issues, with multiplayer, with possibility to have your own hub, to create your own missions and route depending of the demand, to hire other pilots and assigns them on these scheduled route, to create your own livery style that you can apply on your plane with just a basic editor, with the possibility of buying/selling to others player’s used planes
Every of these features are feasible
So I hope PMDG will one day change their mind about career mode, of course MicrAsobo has to take their part of the job, but it has so much potential, even to make money, we want your planes in this mode 
This is what we are striving for, add to this liveries. I reckon career mode has suffered severe opportunity cost due to the issues and the main one lack of liveries, I can’t believe I have 800hrs in career mode with no liveries, but that’s how much I am enjoying it when it all comes together and works.
I’ve found the career mode path I enjoy the most, after unlocking the airliners and getting thru the grind and now FlightFX for the bizjets having a great time unlocking map, going places I’ve never been before like Vladisvostok and Urumqi… free flight has become an afterthought, because it’s not only purpose of career mode it’s the achievement of unlocking planes and map. Free flight is just “here you go child have everything”. No thanks I want to earn it
I’m also using career mode exactly the same as I would in free flight. Cold n dark, all assists off, HUD and visual assists off. Nothing is different. I start cold n dark, I ask for clearance, I take off, I don’t engage the ATC (which is poor in all modes) until approach. I land, I park. I turn off engines, but in career mode I get scored and paid. The gamification of using the quick steps and skip toos are completely optional
Hi,
I would like to mention that none of these gets rewarded in free flight, so what is the point of arguing that if it is not rewarded in career mode then it should not be available there. We just want to be able to enjoy a product we buy in any mode we prefer to fly in.
The arguments presented by the PMDG, Blacksquare, etc. does not hold anymore since we already have complex modules compatible with career mode. Take Hawker 800XP by FlightFX. It is a highly detailed module and we can enjoy it in whichever mode we prefer to fly in.
Seeing the word gamified in any argument tells me that its more a matter of ego than some technical issue. We like to call FS24 (or any other flightsim) a simulation, but if it is sold on Steam, Xbox or PlayStation, it is a game at the end of the day.
As for the 9% who would probably use it in Career mode, it is a question of how and where you conducted that study, If it is on a platform where all users obviously know that it is not going to be compatible, then you get the desired results from the study, instead of a real picture.
Career mode has a lot to improve, no discussion there. But if I buy a product I would like to be able to use it when and where I want to and as long as I can’t do that, it is not a full feature product and I will not spend money on it.
I understand that this might be too much for an airliner, but a 208 Professional or a Duke Professional which is not compatible with career mode!
Hawker 800XP and Phenom 300e are proof that these size and type of planes can be perfectly integrated in career mode.
I agree that Career mode could be much more realistic in many ways. But I would also argue that the current implementation, on a conceptual level, is great, and offers what I expected. The problem is not the concept, the problem is that it works in a glitchy way. Everything is thought out well but programmed terribly. From the ATC to the penalties that make no sense, to the missions that send us to way too small airports. The concept is great as it is, the execution is horrible. I wouldn’t want more complex mechanics in the evaluation and scoring system because the current systems don’t work properly either. I’d like the current Career mode concept fixed and polished.
And yes, I’m also reluctant to buy add-ons that don’t support Career mode, simply because it’s where I fly most. I’m actually happy that more and more high fidelity aircraft are available for this mode, like recent business jets for example. It’s the best of both worlds, a realistic aircraft and an engaging mode that rewards you and pushes you to places you wouldn’t necessarily go yourself.
Any aircraft not Career compatible feels half-complete to me. Sure, I know that it’s hard and overly complicated to implement Career support. That’s also something Asobo should’ve thought out better.