I originally posted this in the iniBuild A350 thread, but there’s a lot more in this interview than just the A350. Jorg goes into some more details on update plans and the general state of the sim and some of the feature requests.
It certainly sounds like Jorg is advocating for bug and stability fixes through SU3 before focusing on any major feature requests or changes.
I don’t believe a word he or his crew says. They have lost my trust.
56% of all time spent in MSFS 2024 is in Career Mode? I honestly expected that to be much lower.
The new LOD system was also essential because performance had become unpredictable. Some third-party airports required supercomputers to run smoothly—some of them weren’t optimized at all. We needed a way to ensure the sim remains playable for a broad range of hardware, including older PCs.
That explains the awful LOD then…
Jorg : That’s the goal. But, you know, I always ask this question—what’s more important, release date or stability?
Where was this thinking for the launch of 2024? I understand that there are always going to be updates and fixes to games, but launching games with the intent to have to push out bug fixes within days/weeks of launch seems a bit rushed. I also get that not every bug will be caught right away so it makes sense that over time, bug fixes will be implemented, but seems that every update comes with its own challenges of fixing old bugs while introducing new ones. Hopefully the team has learned their lesson, but its hard to say since even in 2020 they were doing the same things.
Wonder if those new career pilots will stick around after they complete their careers, or run out of career things to do?
Jorg : That’s the goal. But, you know, I always ask this question—what’s more important, release date or stability?
If only they dedicated a quarter of the time, attention and resources to the SDK, or whatever aspect of the sim in general, that they are allocating to the marketplace… Priorities. For the community, they said.
What a shame.
So what he is saying then is:
We lost control over our own creation and its open concept, so we decided to make the product so bad that every potato can run it.
This doesn’t make any sense because the explanation basically means that they must design their product around the inability of third party devs. Sorry I do not buy this.
Meanwhile they are praising MSFS24 for the oh-so-glorious 4000 times higher polygon count on terrain textures… yes the same terrain textures that are now worse then MSFS2020 ever was..
" Jorg: …
Even from the most critical feedback I’ve heard, almost everyone agrees that MSFS 2024 has massive potential. I haven’t met anyone who thinks it’s fundamentally the wrong direction."
Evidently he hasn’t read all the forum posts… 
The choice of streaming as it was made, I find it very questionable.
83% of that 56% is probably millions of Game Pass kiddies trying one or two missions, getting bored and never returning 
Nothing wrong with that per se, but I would imagine something like this could skew the statistics, if they are just looking at total time spent and not more closely at unique users.
“At a technical level, performance is definitely better in 2024. Visually, it looks better. But it comes down to individual needs and expectations.”
How can they still claim this?? It’s been extensively shown, both through extensive testing by publications like Tom’s Hardware and hundreds (if not thousands) of anecdotal reports, that performance is signicantly down in 2024 vs 2020.
Yes, they optimized CPU efficiency, but also made it about 30% GPU-heavier, which is especially terrible in VR. The only people who saw performance gains seem to be those who were previously CPU-limited. And as far as I know Xbox users are also seeing worse performance overall.
Making it sound like performance is better across the board is… highly misleading.
“The challenge is that every update has to go through certification. If an issue is found, we get an email saying, “Hey, something needs fixing,” and then we have to submit another build.”
This sounds like it’s a pain in the a.. to have to deliver something qualitatively ok.
“Certification is a rigorous process. If something comes up, we’ll spend another week to make sure everything is solid.”
So there was no certification process prior to launch?
“That’s the goal. But, you know, I always ask this question—what’s more important, release date or stability?”
Hahaha seems this was the case too before launch. Fool me once..
The one take away I get from this is that bush trips won’t be put into the sim until after SU3, since Jorg was saying no new content until then.
Bush trips were supposed to release at launch time. But this code wasn’t even far enough at that point to release it buggy. So it was removed from the Activities menu so people wouldn’t be asking about it. Now 4 months later, people consider bush trips “new content”.
This is disturbing since I only fly bush trips. When Mabel said the only addons that would have issues were “missions and scenery with biomes” I tried to clarify whether bush trips were included in 2024. The answer was “No mode from 2020 has been removed in 2024”. So I preordered. And it will be almost a year before I can use 2024.
The other disturbing thing is, I purchase lots of missions from the Marketplace. My 2020 addons are purposely disabled since bush trip functionality isn’t in 2024 yet. And my concern is, come SU4, are any of the current bush trip 3rd party developers even going to be around and making content at that point. Because this is cutting them off from any sales in 2024. 4 months would be a hardship. A full year? Not many developers would be able to sustain that.
I would be less angry about this situation if Microsoft had been forthcoming when I specifically ASKED if bush trips were going to be in 2024, based off the comment Mabel made at FlightSim Expo. Its not a situation where Microsoft can say “Oops, that slipped our mind”. I specifically PUSHED for an answer. You all knew in June that the likelihood of bush trips being in 2024 at release time was low.
The speculative numbers listed in this post are not at all accurate. Career Mode is very popular among players of all ages (not just “Game Pass kiddies”) and experience levels, ranging from those brand new to the flight simulation genre with MSFS 2024 to long-time core simmers as well. As Jorg stated in the interview, the full extent of its popularity surprised even the dev team and has exceeded our pre-release estimates for how much simmers would be using that mode.
Thanks,
MSFS Team
I still truly believe that the poor performance is down to trying build a simulator for both console and PC.
It should be a separate build for console
Vasco: Looking at long-term support for MSFS 2024, do you anticipate supporting it for longer than MSFS 2020?
Jorg: Well, I’m not sure about that—we’re still supporting MSFS 2020 even now.
Jorg : Honestly, at this moment, I don’t spend a single minute thinking about a Flight Simulator 2028.
Is this an admission FS2024 with its full streaming approach is a failure and will be ditched soon?
Well how about making some even basic things work like allowing me to buy a Daher TBM930 in career mode for my company.
I haven’t logged in for months but they seemed to have fixed a couple of things:
Those are good things, but even then I feel like I have to be grateful for what was basically zero testing.
But
This still has a long way to go, sadly have to hibernate for another couple of months then. This is such a pity as I had such high hopes.
Hello @KevinSull,
There already are separate builds for PCs and consoles. They have near-parity in terms of features, but the builds themselves are compiled separately, and each has various different settings and optimizations for their respective platforms.
Thanks,
MSFS Team
If they have different code bases with specific optimizations there might be some small hope left in the future for more serious simmers on PC that spend thousands of dollars for their setup and do not want to see 240p terrain textures in 2025 like they do now in SU1 beta. 
Still platforms share some infrastructure and features for streaming/caching I guess.
