I have been enjoying MSFS2024 since it was released, but I think it is almost similar to MSFS 2020 except for a few convenience features. Elements that were not present or inconvenient in MSFS 2020 were added to 2024, but there are many errors and I cannot play properly. Therefore, I am in a situation where I cannot play MSFS. The elements added in 2024 should have been added to MSFS 2020, which has already been updated several times and has improved and has no server problems. I think
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My feeling is that if they had done it, they wouldn’t have done it for free because they would have had to pay for iniBuilds to make the planes and for Gaya Simulations to overhaul some airports, anyway. So it would have been fine as DLC, but not free, from a business point of view.
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We need to understand here that game devs are expensive and a team has a few tens if not hundreds of people. For some games, the live game provides enough revenue (e.g. Fornite) and they don’t need to release a new game, being better off to milk the existing community via microtransactions and whatnot. For the rest, a new game is a major way to raise the funds needed to keep the projects going once the live revenue starts going down.
So I understand both points of view here, but I am fine paying MS/Asobo every 4 years for a new game where there’s some new planes and some incremental improvements. Maybe it shouldn’t have had a higher price point though, 60$ for the base version is fair enough given that much of the features are reused from the old version.
What I don’t understand is releasing a game that is a regression in many ways to the old one + the buggy state that it is in right now for any serious simming.
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I mean, and I want a pony. No way this could have all been free from MS’s perspective. This is a mega corp we’re talking about. It needs to not only earn revenue, that revenue ideally needs to grow year over year. If Asobo wanted to do all of this for free, it would have been killed in the planning stages. This isn’t meant to sound bitter, either. I paid $120 for Premium Deluxe just as I did for FS2020 because I believe in Flight Simulator and I know that money makes the world go round.
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I think it would be more suitable as a paid DLC for MSFS2020
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Right… Or better still: everything should be for free.
We should maybe re-explore Communism while we are at it.
Sorry, but that’s the most ridiculous topic I’ve read since I quit Facebook and Twitter 7 years ago …
The whole point was that MSFS2020 could no longer deal with many technological advances and the increasing demand for disk space needed a new solution as well. So they redesigned the whole way data is being stored and integrated a new engine that is supposed to make use of DX12 features and deliver more stable performance. The fact that there still are some massive bugs shows that their release date was too optimistic, but I expect most of the problems to go away over the next few months
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I’m actually starting to like it.
It’s buggier than heck but there’s some things I like about it like the EFB…once I figured it out it was pretty cool.
Still lotsa probs with the streaming thing.
My advice…bring a book
Wages have to be paid, buildings have to be rented and heated. Server space has to be hired.
It is impossible to do such a large undertaking for free.
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And I think we should have world peace.
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I would’ve gladly paid for this, but I agree that it should’ve been an expansion to 2020. The only thing it really added was a career mode (which I wished 2020 had from the beginning) and a few planes while simultaneously getting rid of a lot of other planes.
I’m upset I paid $200 for this. I was expecting more scripted/varied missions like in FSX. They also took away a bunch of native aircraft from 2020 while messing up the control bindings for some reason. I’m hoping the addons I purchased from the marketplace are able to be downloaded again soon, because I sunk a decent amount of money into content with the expectation it’d be available in 2024 (as was promised). The flight physics seem upgraded, and more buttons work in the cockpits, but the graphics feel like a downgrade with the decision to stream (again, hopefully it improves as they figure out how to do this).
All in all, it doesn’t even feel like it was rushed, moreso just plain laziness on the developers’ part. I think AI was used heavily in developing the game, not just in how it operates. Point in case, the text in these images are most likely AI generated which begs the question of how much else was done by AI? I didn’t pay $200 for AI to tweak the code of msfs 2020.
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Exactly the problem. Regression. FS2020’s functionality should have been the minimum starting point for FS 2024, but they failed in that basic task.
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I do not mind paying for the game. I always play standard anyway since if I want a plane, I instead buy it; the same goes for the airports. What I have a problem with is that they did not Beta test this new version at all. I understand you do not have a public beta version, but the same people who were giving access to Alpha should have received the Beta version for at least three months so they could test the platform. Also, why developers did not have access to the platform is creating significant issues since a lot of the products are not ready for 2024.
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I totally agree. I use the PMDG 737-800 and cant get it to totally work. Im going back to 2020. I dont this was ready for release. Release of 2020 had issues but not like this!
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Totally different sim. Would have happily paid twice as much. RIP 2020.
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Although I understand what you are saying, don’t forget that it is a new sim because the team had reached the limit of what was possible in the 2020 engine.
They had to iterate on the existing design to continue development on the platform—they could not incorporate all the tech as it is now in the existing engine.
Next few months? As far as I remember I didn’t pay for early access…
Which non-marketplace 2020 planes are not available in 2024 besides the Darkstar and the Ornithopter?
Do you expect that the 1st-party Marketplace planes which have still not arrived in 2024 will never arrive?
And brick 2020 even worse than it already has? Yikes
And how exactly will whining and moaning help you?
It’s a highly complex piece of software and a lot of it is new, so MS and Asobo would want money for that work - especially after releasing about 50 (!) FREE updates for MSFS2020 - more than half of which with DLC.
Probably it’s the most complex computer game ever developed. That’s not something you can just throw a switch and it will be perfect. This will take time. That’s the reality. And we can either accept reality or get a refund.
Ok, and all that’s annoying as hell - I agree.
They had a fixed release date and they didn’t get it ready as well as was expected (it was the same with MSFS2020 by the way). And expectations with MSFS are always through the roof.
MS will not make FS2024 a free DLC just because some people are angry. That’s not how a business plan of a leading software company works. 
And I can assure you the people complaining online are NOT the majority either. Complainers are just louder than happy people because happy people play and don’t spend their time in the forum complaining. 
The facts are:
- we have a working MSFS2024 with lots of bugs
- they borked the release but are on track for setting things right. We already have one hotfix and the second is coming in a week or so.
- we still have MSFS2020 as a fallback
- Asobo and MS have done tremendous work improving MSFS over the past 4+ years and communicate better than any software studio and publisher I have ever come across in about 40 years in front of the gaming screen.
- Most games are fire-and-forget operations and will be abondoned after a few weeks or months. This will not happen here!
- other complex software often never leaves the Beta stage because it’s constantly changing and evolving and when a new version comes out there are almost always teething problems. Take SAP: basically every new customer has been a beta tester for the past 20 years
- MSFS will never be complete. There will always be some missing feature or something not working perfectly. But even that is realistic because last time I checked a lot of stuff in the real world doesn’t work either.
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