I wish Microsoft would be up-front with PC users

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We’re almost a full year after FS2024s release. I would long ago have assumed that MSFS2024 would currently be outperforming 2020, even if only by a slight margin. But I’m glad I didn’t place my bets! MSFS2020 is still out-performing 2024 in terms of Steam usage. Even after the Sim Update 16 fiasco. Long live the King.

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Yes, I know that Steam charts only represent PC users, and not those on consoles (who may very well outnumber the PC users). But this does mean that a larger margin of PC users feel 2020 suits them better than 2024 does. This makes me worry that MS have essentially “given up” on PC users and have begun favoring console and PS5 users even more than they have previously (see SU16, Chapter 2).

Regretfully, it seems PC users will be left on the wayside. MSFS2024 clearly was made to appeal more to the casual side of the flightsim industry, and there is nothing wrong with that.

But let’s call a spade a spade: if MSFS2024 is not a sim, then it’s a game. A game that has no dangerous-weather simulation. A game that has severely-limited weather radar. A game that includes an absolute mess of ATC and traffic, and the devs aren’t even ashamed of that. Sure, it has a beautiful world with plenty of eye-candy, but that’s where a game ends and a sim begins. And Microsoft has clearly prioritized the eye-candy aspect over fidelity.

So this leads me to wonder: will PC users continue getting what they ask for? Will the marketing team concede “hey, you know what, the PC market is a great one to have”? Or will we be given vague terms like “…support until 2028…” “…wishlist…” “…we never said that…”? There are multitudes of WishList entries requesting simple “toggle” buttons for certain limitations that PC users would like to remove. They have hundreds of votes and yet are still not implemented.

But my question is: will Microsoft give us information on their plans for PC? Will they be giving us just as much support as they do today? Or will they continue kicking the can down the road as we invest ever more into a franchise whose future suddenly doesn’t look as clear. I think I know the answer already, but it’s not set in stone.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time with MSFS and would be greatly disappointed to have to close the door. Even with the few (or not so few) oddities, MSFS has been a great sim to use and I would hate to drop out now, when it’s looking so promising. But I also don’t want to keep packing money into it while I’m clueless about the immediate future. For all I know, next March they may decide to terminate PC support as handling 3 different platforms is just too much.

Microsoft appears to have chosen a direction. Now it’s up to us to decide if we’d like to keep our necks buried in the sand or just make the jump to the competitor, which, for all its shortcomings, is purely dedicated to their PC simmers, and also immune to random corporate decisions that are motivated by greed.

Or maybe I ought to go buy a PS5 while they’re still cheap.

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Sadly, an inevitable consequence of today’s market driven trends - I mean $600-$700 Vs. $2000 and up. There are definite signs emerging that PC users are getting side-lined as the big post SU16 thread indicates…

No doubt smart competitors will seek to capitalise on this!

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Look at the trend of that chart though. 2020 is descending, and 2024 is ascending. Give it time, and 2024 will pass it.

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“Sim gets optimised for consoles” doesn’t equate to “Sim will be shut down for PC”.

Microsoft make money from the PC marketplace, and the additional third party addon ecosystem that doesn’t exist on console helps drive PC sim use. Why are so many people seeing this as an “either/or” situation? Why would Microsoft chop out the entire customer base of everyone who doesn’t use a console? That makes no business sense whatsoever.

Your comment of “$600-$700 Vs $2000” doesn’t really make sense either, because you’re assuming that people are going “Hmmm, I want to play Flight Simulator, but I don’t have any hardware to run it on. I know, I will buy an X-Box!” And sure, maybe there are a small number of people who do think that way, but the reality is that most people who want to play video games already have some sort of hardware in their home, and they will buy software to match that, not the other way around. If you already have a good enough PC, a PS5 and an X-box, and you want to buy a copy of Flight Simulator, which platform will you choose? Nine times out of ten, it will be PC because of the sheer flexibility of options you have - more ability to modify the game, more control over parameters, better range of hardware to do all sorts of things, etc.

So I don’t believe for a minute that Microsoft are intending to shut down the PC platform, because there are many reasons why that would be ludicrous.

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From where I site, and it is a very narrow field of vision I admit, one of the significant reasons for the persistence of 2020 is the need for a ‘decent’ broadband connection for 2024. I am in the UK but I choose not to live in an overcrowded, polluted and soulless urban sprawl. The price that I pay for making that choice is an inconsistent internet connection via 4G, which will give me 50 - 70mbps most of the time but it is traffic dependent and in the evening time that can drop to 20ish and occasionally drop out altogether. Sure I can get a landline connection - at max 13mbps. I have watched plenty of You Tube vids of GA flights in 2024 and it does look good but I am told that at less the 50mbps it doesn’t look quite so impressive. So I am really in no position to switch just yet and not in the foreseeable future either if British Telecom are to be believed.

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There is no conspiracy against PC users. Usually it’s the console users claiming to be the victims of this “…they prefer PC users to console users” conspiracy.

What does it matter if FS20 is currently outperforming FS24 in PC player numbers? Just play the game you prefer (and yes, I call both FS20 and FS24 GAMES, as to me that is what they are).

It’s ridiculous to claim that PC users will be left by the wayside.

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This is spot on. UK internet provision is mostly terrible outside of big towns. That certainly puts me off a bit. However, I have around 40Mb/s on my connection and when I tried FS2024 I wasn’t really experiencing many issues from that low connection speed. I was pleasantly surprised. Given the number of people with hyperhuge fibre connections still reporting long lag, I suspect that most of the speed issues are from Microsobo throttling the output at their end during busy periods.

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I understand completely. I live in rural East Devon. I have BT’s standard ‘we secretly hate you’ broadband. This means 70mbps on a good day, sub 50 on a bad one.
Don’t let that put you off 2024 though…

:saluting_face:

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I think the real issue isn’t PC vs console - it’s marketing vs development status. They over promised, and are still playing catch up - for all platforms.

It has taken a full year for Asobo just to flesh out the progressive LOD system that makes MSFS 2024 possible and is just starting to work somewhat acceptably in SU4 in the published specs.

Meanwhile, the fast growing fleet of 130+ 1st party aircraft are still waiting for desperately needed bug fixes for previously existing bugs, new LOD optimization, and artwork to work as expected in 2024. Jorg promised 70 of those are coming, but unsure when, and what about the rest? And services like ATC and Traffic … almost feel abandoned (I’m betting the next announcement is a new ATC / Traffic upgrade).

I think marketing knowingly took a calculated risk of overpromising, and put the whole 1st party team and ‘dev/partners’ in a terrible position. And I really hope the marketing team felt the result and learned a few lessons. I’m guessing a few people expected “AI” to do the heavy lifting on the code side and it didn’t go as planned. Regardless, PC and console users have all been waiting together for what was promised.

Until most aircraft and services are brought up to a more consistent level of quality and enjoyability (across PC and console), the marketing is more click-bait than reality, in my opinion.

A larger concern for me is that the ever expanding fleet of aircraft, plus career mode, and expansion to Playstation, has created a huge “surface” that needs to be actively maintained as the SDK evolves. Jorg did explain he wanted to serve core simmers, and casual simmers, and mission/career simmers. I worry about the technical debt of this growing surface, resources being spread too thin, and too much being neglected or mediocre as a result.

I also have this sense that Microsoft has a somewhat adversarial / competitive stance with developers - you can catch glimpses of it in the comments about marketplace updates, navdata, and so on. This bothers me a lot.

I moved from Xbox to PC, so that I would have some freedom from Microsoft’s decision making, and have choices for better 3rd party options for aircraft and services like ATC - as well as choices of other simulators. I hope marketing hears that too.

I want the MSFS franchise to work well on all platforms, for a long time. I hope Microsoft can keep the focus more on quality and depth going forward. It has the potential, if they can just keep the marketing department in check.

PS, as a PC user, I do hope to see some improvement for things like multi-monitor setup and configuration, user-controllable options for lighting (night was too dark, now is too bright, etc), force-feedback support for peripherals, home cockpit mode, etc. Even though MS is focussed on things that work across platforms, and things like multi monitor and FFB don’t currently work on console, it really would signal appreciation for this group.

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I would think that makers of peripherals that are only compatible with PC (Virpil etc) would be concerned with Microsoft trending away from PC and lobby against it. Peripheral manufacturing is a huge business.

And those of us with these peripherals are pretty much going to stay with PC. I’m at the stage where money isn’t so much a factor as quality.

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When the attention isn’t on you, it’s easy to think you’re now the redheaded stepchild. It’s not that they have a new favorite, but instead that their attention is always focused on “the next big thing”. X-Box, VR, and now 2024 users have all said similar things. And the PS5 users with outstanding issues that remain probably will too once Microsoft announces 2028 or whatever is next. Hopefully there is a next.

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I don’t think they are likely to give up on PC, and I don’t think the logic extension of ‘I perceive an absence of a PC plan’ is ‘they intend not to continue’ -

  • Microsoft’s angle with Xbox particularly recently is an agnostic delivery service play (not a vertically integrated hardware/software play). They are looking for horizontal coverage.
  • Asobo’s team is considerably bigger now (post private equity investment) than it was circa MSFS2020, so there is actually more resource to cover the new workstreams (assuming they didn’t just hire a few dozen accountants…).
  • Asobo isn’t just MSFS, they have developers that are experienced in console delivery for other games.
  • While they run separate workstreams (at least that’s what I think I saw in one of the dev transcripts) I very much doubt this applies to all of the codebase - huge chunks will be common, porting is an exercise of dealing with the API differences and optimising for platform nowadays. PS4 and XBox One both converged on x86-64 CPU/GPU models like PC for exactly this reason, it reduced the difficulty to develop games. Before that the PS3 and Xbox360 were really very different. PS3 cell processor particularly - that required deliberate management of data movement between its processing cores - completely different programming patterns and algorithms (rather than just recompilation) that would only work on the PS3.

Given they have invested heavily, modern platform shares so much, and Microsoft as an overall publisher is looking for horizontal delivery, it doesn’t fit strategically or financially to cull.

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I strongly believe that dip on 2020’s side is because of SU16. I don’t think those simmers are keen on switching to 2024 anytime soon.

That’s what I was saying: there are countless things that we’re waiting a long time for, and they’re only focused on the road ahead, which doesn’t necessarily include all these things. A recipe for a lot of unhappy customers.

As we all know, failing to plan means planning to fail. It’s hard to believe Microsoft’s long-term plans for MSFS are still pending; I would wager that they’ve already pointed to a certain direction and those who are not in that spectrum can still use MSFS, but with several compromises. And with the upcoming PS5 release, they are going to realize yet again that promising the world for 3 different platforms may be a bit much. This is just one of a few signs I have noticed over the last few months that have further strengthened my hunch here.

Again, folks, I don’t wish for this to happen, and I may have gone a bit overboard in my original post by claiming that PC support will end, and I retract that. I think that a more realistic scenario is for MS to cluck their tongues at us in all of these wishlist topics and say “well, well, I understand that MSFS isn’t doing all the things it’s capable of, and I also sympathize that our team is focused on other things. The psychologist is down the hall”, essentially keeping the PC spectrum but ending technical support. Kind of the way FS2020 is now: it exists, but don’t imagine any new patches for a long time.

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Hello @davegranstrom16,

Steam usage numbers do not accurately reflect the entire MSFS (2020) and MSFS 2024 userbases, even if you are only interested in PC players and don’t include console players in the total. In addition to not including Xbox Series X|S players, the Steam chart you referenced also does not include PC simmers who purchased MSFS 2024 via the Microsoft Store, anyone who plays via a Game Pass subscription (either PC Game Pass or Xbox Game Pass), or uses cloud streaming services such as Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now.

Jorg has stated multiple times in previous developer livestreams there are currently more people playing the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise (2020 + 2024 combined) than ever before, and of the two versions, MSFS 2024 has more total users.

As for your speculation that PC simmers will be left behind or that the team doesn’t value PC players, there is absolutely no truth to that statement. We care deeply about the sim experience for everyone regardless of their chosen platform. We don’t elevate console users above PC or VR users or vice versa. There are absolutely no plans to terminate PC support for MSFS.

As for why the team is expanding to new platforms such as PS5, I hope most people realize how critical it is for everyone to grow the flight simming hobby overall by increasing the number of players. Expanding the number of simmers across all platforms benefits everybody, including PC simmers, because a larger MSFS userbase means more hardware peripheral makers and software add-on developers will be motivated to create great new innovative products for the flight sim player community. There can be absolutely no doubt that many of the very high-quality add-on products and hardware peripherals released in recent years were made financially viable to their respective creators because of the large influx of brand new simmers following the release of MSFS on Xbox in July 2021. We are optimistic the upcoming PS5 release of MSFS 2024 will further that trend, and even more great products will be released (including ones that will be exciting to PC simmers) because of growth to the flight sim hobby thanks to many new PS5 players joining the flight sim community.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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My Personal Comment & Observation

Agreed - I would be very surprised if the MSFS executive team is not already working on (i.e. planning for, thinking about) the next iteration of MSFS. I would be even more surprised if we are told anything about it anytime soon - say, for example, before July 2027!

In the short term, I’d expect to see the MSFS 2024 roadmap for CY 2026 discussed in either the next developer livestream or perhaps the one after that (Note: no date has been announced yet for when the next one will be).

What is planned for the future of MSFS 2020 was discussed by Jorg in the October development stream here.

2020 Roadmap
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As for the future of MSFS on PCs - I simply see no evidence at all that MSFS will not be supported on PC in the future.

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the logic extension of ‘I perceive an absence of a PC plan’ is ‘they intend not to continue’

I should be clearer here. I think there’s reasonable evidence that a long-term plan exists (given we have seen shorter term snapshots of it as a userbase). I think that you have taken these short-term extracts and read that as the sum total, that there is no plan past that point. That’s the bit I’m suggesting isn’t necessarily a logical extension. It may be true - that what they have shared IS all there is but that would be a bit odd.

The counter to the idea that they would give up on the PC version, is that developing a game across three platforms is not like it used to be - there’s a massive chunk that is common across all platforms so the ‘it’s going to be hard to deliver 3 platforms’ is I don’t think true. A lot of the design clearly has generalised/modular aspects already, so I don’t share the view that they will have to make any compromises of significance to the entire experience to suit consoles.

I think the contrary is more true - console versions won’t exist without development strength in the PC version and given a fair number of wishlist and bugs will impact/improve all versions together (not just one platform) the extra user count is surely a good thing.

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For sure, I’m not advocating for a purge of the Xbox or PS5 market, that would be pointless. What you are saying makes sense, but corporations like Microsoft don’t operate on logic – they follow the money.

What’s left is for me to continue doing what I’ve been doing since Sim Update 16: wait and try to stay optimistic, but hold back on the money because I may regret it later.

I will continue using MSFS as long as I’m able to, and I hope that’s a long time still, but I was just wondering if anyone else has wondered similarly.

All the best, Dave

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Thanks folks for the insight into your experiences, interesting. I’m in NW Wales (Anglesey). There is (secretly) another reason that I have paused moving onwards and upwards. I’m now 80yrs young and I’m not sure that I want to revisit 2020’s growing pains all over again. Don’t get me wrong, I have learned a huge amount since August 2020, from being a fairly average PC user to building my own PC for 2020 and dealing with those growing pains as they occurred. I think that, realistically, the PC from 3years ago would be due for an upgrade alongside any move 2024 and, being on AMD’s AM4 based system would almost certainly need an almost completely new rig (the GPU might survive) and I am unwilling to commit to that level of expenditure. Still, never say never :blush: . Thanks again.

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That’s exactly what I am going to do.

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Micro-soft…Micro computer Software. They are not giving up on the PC. They are IMO trying to push MSFS to MSFS as a service. Of course it wont work.