For quite a long time, I have tried to give Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 the benefit of the doubt. The launch was bad; at this point, I find it difficult to describe it any other way. There were simply too many problems with stability, performance, navigation, controls, Career Mode, content loading and VR to dismiss it as merely a difficult launch.
Even so, I thought it was a matter of time. This is an enormous and technically ambitious simulator, and a platform of this scale inevitably needs work after release. So I waited for the first updates, then the next ones, later SU5, and now SU6. But there comes a point when looking at the calendar necessarily changes the conversation: MSFS 2024 launched in November 2024, and we are now at the end of August 2026. Almost two years later, we are still talking about stability, performance, navigation, Career, controls, VR, CTDs and regressions introduced by certain updates.
And perhaps even that language is too mild, because some of the problems still being discussed are not minor inconveniences or small defects waiting to be polished. For some users, certain parts of MSFS 2024 are currently unusable.
I am not using that word for dramatic effect. There are users who, after an update, have gone from a perfectly usable experience to performance that makes flying in VR effectively impossible. Others encounter reproducible CTDs with particular combinations of graphics settings or runtimes, while some cannot reliably start flights or find parts of Career so affected by freezes, performance problems or erratic behaviour that they effectively cannot use them normally.
This does not happen to everyone, of course. Other users with apparently similar configurations report that SU6 works correctly, or even better than previous versions. But that does not make the problem disappear. If anything, it highlights another issue that I find particularly important: almost two years after release, the experience still depends far too much on a combination of hardware, configuration, game mode and circumstances that users often cannot predict.
That is why I think simply talking about “bugs that still need fixing” can end up understating the situation. A bug is an anomaly within a product that, broadly speaking, fulfils its function. When an update takes a user from being able to fly to being unable to do so, when VR becomes impractical, or when an entire mode can no longer be used reliably, then for that user the product they bought has stopped fulfilling its basic purpose. That reality should carry considerably more weight when we discuss the state of MSFS 2024.
SU6 fixes many things, and that is positive, but it is also revealing. The fact that a Sim Update still needs, almost two years after release, an extensive list of fixes in fundamental areas does not merely demonstrate that the team is continuing to work on the simulator. It also shows how much remains to be stabilised in a product that was not sold as Early Access, but as a finished release.
In Career, for example, mechanisms have had to be introduced to avoid penalising players when the simulator itself detects that certain failures are not their fault. That is a welcome improvement, but it is also a striking indication of the extent to which the software needs to distinguish between a player’s mistake and a failure of the system itself. In VR, reports continue concerning performance, stability, DLSS and different runtime configurations, while navigation, stability and resource-management issues still appear and force part of the community to check after each update not only what has been fixed, but also what may have stopped working.
Not every one of these problems affects every user, and I am not suggesting that they do. But I also do not think “it works for me” is an adequate response when other customers cannot properly use significant parts of the same product. The relevant question is not whether somebody can run it successfully, but how many users need to be affected before an issue stops being merely a “known issue” and becomes a critical product priority.
When the customer becomes part of the development process
I also think we have normalised something else far too much: buying complex software now seems to mean participating in its maturation process for months or even years. We install betas, clear caches, change settings, reproduce bugs, submit reports, try different runtimes, change drivers and return after every update to see whether whatever prevented us from enjoying the simulator has finally been fixed. When it has not, we simply wait for the next one.
I have no problem with a community wanting to help improve the simulator. I follow the updates myself precisely because I want MSFS 2024 to succeed. But there is a considerable difference between helping to maintain and improve a product and having customers participate in a development, diagnostic and stabilisation phase that reasonably should have taken place before the product was sold as finished.
Betas can be extraordinarily useful, but the problem begins when the customer starts to feel that the commercial product itself is effectively operating as a permanent beta. When that feeling persists for almost two years, I think it is legitimate to ask where exactly the line lies between maintaining a simulator and finishing its development after it has already been sold.
Gamescom: the showcase and the reality
This is why Gamescom left me particularly uncomfortable.
Microsoft Flight Simulator went there to present new content, new activities, new aircraft and new updates. I have nothing against that. Gamescom is a commercial event, and I fully understand why Microsoft wants to showcase the best possible version of its product. What I find much harder to accept is that, after a launch like MSFS 2024’s and almost two years of fixes, the public conversation can remain focused primarily on what comes next while the state of what has already been sold is largely relegated to patch notes, forum threads and lists of known issues.
Before putting MSFS 2024 back under the spotlight to show us what is coming next, perhaps this would have been a good opportunity to speak openly about what has already happened. Not with another carefully worded statement about how hard the team is working, or another generic assurance that the community is being heard, but by doing something considerably more difficult: publicly acknowledging that MSFS 2024 launched in a state that fell short of what customers should reasonably expect from a product sold as finished, and explaining what went wrong, what was learned and which problems are still considered fundamental.
That, too, is part of presenting a product.
At a trade show, it is entirely reasonable to use systems prepared to demonstrate MSFS 2024 under the best possible conditions. Nobody expects Microsoft to deliberately configure a simulator badly in order to demonstrate its own crashes. But that is precisely why there is a distinction worth remembering: outside those carefully prepared demonstration systems is the version installed on users’ machines — the one that can suffer CTDs, lose acceptable VR performance, experience regressions after an update, encounter navigation problems or unexpected behaviour in Career and, for some customers, simply fail to operate reliably enough to be used normally.
Both are Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, but one appears under the spotlights while the other tends to remain in the forums.
I think both should be part of the same conversation, and that is precisely why I missed hearing some uncomfortable questions at Gamescom.
I would have liked to hear a clear explanation of what went wrong in November 2024 and why, almost two years later, major updates are still required to correct fundamental parts of the experience. It would also have been reasonable to ask which problems Microsoft considers genuinely structural, which it now considers acceptable, and what metrics it uses to determine whether MSFS 2024 is actually improving: CTD rates, affected users, performance, unresolved issues, Career mission completion rates, or some other measure that tells us more than the length of each Sim Update’s patch notes.
Another important question would be when Microsoft believes MSFS 2024 will cease to be in a stabilisation phase and can genuinely be considered a mature platform — or even whether there is a clear internal definition of that point. I also think it is legitimate to ask who took responsibility for deciding that the product was ready to launch in November 2024, whether a serious post-mortem of that launch was conducted, and whether its conclusions changed anything about quality assurance, testing or the criteria used to decide when a build is ready to reach customers.
But there is one question that I find particularly difficult to avoid:
If MSFS 2024 had not yet been on sale in November 2024, would Microsoft have considered it acceptable to release it in exactly the state in which it launched?
Either answer raises a problem. If the answer is no, then it would be reasonable to ask why releasing it became acceptable once a commercial date had been committed to. And if the answer is yes, then perhaps the problem runs even deeper, because it would mean that its condition at launch genuinely met the internal quality standards considered sufficient for selling a finished product.
I would also ask something more immediate:
If a customer buys MSFS 2024 today and discovers that VR does not work properly on their configuration, that Career has problems preventing them from playing normally, or that they cannot reliably start flights, does Microsoft consider that customer to have received the finished product they paid for?
I do not think that is an unfair question.
Responsibility also means priorities
There is another issue that is difficult to ignore while new content continues to be announced.
I am not suggesting that all development of new aircraft, activities, cities or features should stop until the last bug has disappeared. That would be unrealistic and probably would not make sense. But I do think Microsoft should explain much more clearly what priority fundamental problems have compared with the continued development of new content.
The familiar answer that “different teams work on different things” may be organisationally true, but it does not resolve the underlying question. Teams have sizes, budgets, objectives and priorities, and deciding how many resources are devoted to stabilisation, quality assurance, new functionality or content is itself a product decision.
So when there are customers for whom fundamental parts of the simulator remain unusable while the showcase continues to fill with new features and content, the question inevitably arises:
What is actually considered most urgent within the project?
Taking responsibility does not mean cancelling new content or appearing in public every few weeks to apologise. It means being able to explain clearly what went wrong, what caused it, which problems remain unresolved, what the current priorities are and what criteria will be used to determine whether those problems have genuinely been solved.
That would have done far more to restore my confidence in MSFS 2024 than any announcement at Gamescom. Yet that conversation was not on the stage, nor did I hear those questions being asked. Perhaps that is why every new announcement interests me a little less — not because I do not want new aircraft, new cities or new activities, but because before being shown what comes next, I would like to regain confidence in what I have already bought.
And after launch, what changes?
There is one final issue that I find increasingly difficult to ignore: incentives.
Microsoft has already launched the product. It has already been sold. The ecosystem continues to operate and new content continues to arrive. None of that proves that Microsoft or Asobo do not care about the state of the simulator. I cannot know that, and I am not going to attribute motives that I cannot demonstrate.
But one objective circumstance has changed: before launch, having a sufficiently finished product was a prerequisite for selling it. After launch, the customer has already paid.
That raises an uncomfortable but, I think, legitimate question:
What real pressure exists to resolve structural problems quickly once the product is already on the market and its ecosystem continues to operate and generate revenue?
I do not know the answer. As a customer, all I can do is look at the result, and the result is that, almost two years later, we are still waiting for certain updates to make stable, consistent and predictable something that was sold to us as finished, while for some users parts of the product still do not even reach that minimum standard: they simply cannot use them reliably.
I am becoming less interested in promises, roadmaps and long lists of fixes. Nor do I need to be told once again that the team is committed. What I need to see is something far less spectacular: several consecutive versions in which the simulator works reliably, fixing one problem does not introduce another equally significant one, and installing an update no longer feels like beginning another round of testing.
I want to be able to launch the simulator, enter VR, choose a flight and fly without first wondering what might have stopped working this time. Almost two years after release, I do not think that should be a particularly ambitious expectation.
When that happens consistently across several consecutive versions, I will start to believe that MSFS 2024 has finally reached the point it should have reached much earlier.
Until then, I find it increasingly difficult to trust it.
