The future of MSFS 2024

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Hello everybody. The objectives of this post are to discuss with the community the likely future of MSFS 2024, whether it would be possible for the software to be fixed, or perhaps Microsoft will phase it out gradually. I want this discussion to be as objective as possible while sharing real experiences and facts about what is happening with the software.

I want to moderate this discussion, so I am sharing some relevant background here. I have 25 years of experience in the software industry and have worked at Microsoft for 6+ years. I have an MS in computer science, an MBA, and Phd in business administration.

MSFS is an exciting platform that connects vendors and multiple types of users with varying interests in aspects related to the aviation industry. So, let’s focus on the fact that MSFS is a platform; hence, the store/marketplace is a key element here.

Asobo launched MSFS 2024 on the 19th of November 2024 as a new software. As the launch was a disaster, per most reviewers, the core point is why a new software platform is needed: normally, platforms are upgraded. Having two platforms with two marketplaces is a source of confusion and problems.

I purchased the 2024 Aviator edition on day 1, and it never worked well. So, I left it until a few days back with the release of update one, which is nearly 5 months after the launch date. I decided to give it another try. So, I did a fresh install and purchased the new A350 from iniBuilds. Unfortunately, as of April 16, 2025, MSFS 2024 is still mostly not working. I tried 2020 and found it even less reliable, but that is not our subject.

Today we have two platforms for MSFS 2020 and 2024. None is working well. As per statistics from Steam, the number of active users of MSFS dropped by nearly 50%.

The key questions I would like to discuss in this post are:

What is the future of MSFS 2024? Is it fixable as an architecture, as downloading a lot of data from servers while launching any new flights is not working well? For example, I have 1 GBPS. My Steam downloads are a solid 900 Mbps. I suspect many flights do not launch in MSFS because the service API stops responding, and the design did not even track any time out or error handling, leaving the simulator hanging until the user kills the app.

What about respecting that this belongs to the gaming and entertainment industry, and users’ time and experiences should be respected? Like today, I wasted 3 hours trying to make the flight trainer work, but nothing works—no email or ticketing system for support. Yesterday and the day before, many more hours were wasted.

All the above involve two types of issues. Technical and strategic. Technical issues include bugs and serious architectural issues. Strategic issues include the platform and the marketplace, i.e, the vendors.

Can somebody please share insights on the above? I am giving MSFS time to discuss its future because I care about it as a simulator. I hope it deserves our time, as that would depend on the responses of the people in charge, i.e, Asobo’s team.

I hope the above makes sense.

Best Regards,

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Don’t think anyone in this forum will have anything else to offer but idle speculation since MS and Asobo usually run a tight ship.
And since the likelihood is high that this thread will be ending up as another rant on how bad everything is and that MS and Asobo should get their stuff together etc, I would like to spread some positivety:

  • I love MSFS2024 (been with MSFS2020 from day one)
  • far from perfect
  • but bugs being reduced day by day
  • lovely graphics
  • performing significantly more smoothly than MSFS2020
  • feels better than MSFS2020 in many planes
  • great support from MS and Asobo (still you can’t make everyone happy)

And a few remarks about my personal philosophy:

  • be happy with what you have once in a while instead of pursuing what you don’t have
  • whining has never made anything better (unless maybe you’re a toddler begging for sweets or toys)
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I agree with what you mentioned and share the same feelings. MSFS 2024 has huge potential, and this is why we are here. However, I get the opposite feeling when I see responses to users reporting issues being handled as a kind of surprise, and in the same post, many people reply and say I have the same issue.

All software is complex, but I wonder why only MSFS software lacks quality. For example, I use iRacing as a simulator. iRacing runs for months without a single glitch, and the company provides its users with emails for support. You report an issue and get a response in just a few hours. I am here to reach a conclusion, either to continue to use MSFS anytime soon or leave for good.

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i think it should be
 eventually, but it will be a long road
the stream-of-everything model launched to a bumpy start but it’s kinda working now.. more or less
 eventually it should get there if given enough time
but then again, there’s the problem
 who’s time are we talking about? our time?
well
 in that case i dont know.. i payed for a working product, not an early peek to an upcoming product

Let me clarify that this is not an attack on your post. In here, sometimes its not easy to tell the difference, so, please, dont take it that way, but, hear me out
one of the problems here is the vast difference in expectations from one user to the next, for example i myself
 I tried to like it, i really did, i even went as far as to upgrade hardware just to be able to run the darn thing, but the magic didn’t happen for me.. it just didnt.. now i’ve given up. way.. WAY too many things that dont work and/or are worse than in 2020, im getting worse performance than 2020 and worse scenery than 2020, subject to opinion of course, but that’s how i see it

i agree with that as a general life principle, but not when i purchased something and, lets face it, they sold us a lemon
 that changes things

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Software can be reliable. For example, now there is a bug in 2020 and Nvidia latest drivers. iI you do not click optimize the sim in Nvidia App, the sim will crash while loading. Also the sim 2020 refuses to quit and you have to kill the process in the task manager to quit it.

My question to Asobo is why my 100+ AAA games on steam are all working perfectly and do not have any incompatibility issues with Nvidia drivers and only MSFS 2020 has such issues. Also note that installing MSFS 2020 took two days while installing the Last of Us part 2 from Steam yesterday took 20 minutes on my 1 gbps connection. MSFS installer downloads compressed files and decompress each one after its downloaded. that does not work well and the installer does multiple stops during the installation which takes two days to install the software. Speed of the download fluctuates between 10 to 100 mbps. If the installer speed is unreliable how come 2024 was designed to be fully online. I am questioning such choices and looking for answers as a user.

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I honestly was super super excited for 2024. I upgraded my hardware, going to a 9800X3D, 4TB Gen 5 NVME, 2 X 8TB Gen 4 NVME in RAID0, 96 Gig 6400Mhz DDR5, Asus X870E-E Wifi motherboard, Lian Li Lambo case, Lian Li TL fans, strimers, originally a RTX 4080TI but upgraded to a RTX 5090. I prepurchased a MeganeX VR headset, purchased the DOF Reality H3, bought force feedback peripherals. I mean, I laid out serious money. All excited for now being able to do bush trips with seriously upgraded visuals.

With the promise of streaming, and the promise there would be no more limits on the number of addons, I went and invested in addons I wouldn’t have normally purchased, and even purchased some I had already purchased externally but now it was only via streaming I could keep them all loaded. hey, now everything would be streamed. No more limits. I would be so nice to have everything loaded and sent from the server.

I think everyone has noticed the one fatal flaw in that plan. I do only bush trips in MSFS. Thats it. I like to explore. So yes, I was so stoked to be able to do it with all that was promised. And then release, once I finally DID get in, I discovered that bush trips weren’t included. And worse, I still have about at least 6 months to wait if not more before I can use the sim.

All that excitement and energy invested. All that money invested. To find out it will be a year or more before I can even use the sim. You might say “Hey, you can use all that equipment in 2020.” You would be right, I could. But frankly, I built myself up so much on what trips would be like with the new sim, it actually bothers me seeing the trees in the old sim. I have tried, but I am not motivated to do bush trips in the old sim, but I can’t use the new sim yet for bush trips. So I have been playing games I bought but never got through. Meanwhile all this equipment sits collecting dust until SU4 or SU5.

And yes, people might say “Why would you have spent all that money before release”. Well, I trusted the word I was given. I’m in my 60’s. I’m at the point where I have health issues and I am not going to physically get out and explore the world. Best I can do is virtually. I wanted it as smooth and as detailed as it could get. This was my one hobby, and that hobby has been on hold for 6 months now, with another 6 months or more yet to go.

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that’s one of the (among others) things that really baffles me about the decision makers in msfs

one would have thought that 2024 would be ALL about bush trips, with all those new trees, and animals, and flowers and whatnot
 i mean.. seriously? drop the bush trips? like
 i dont know.. that’s kinda weird


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I for one like the enhanced graphics, but the other bugs definitely outweigh the positives. The time that it takes to get set up to fly is abysmal. I assume that this is due to the poor download speeds. (Regardless of your personal IP speed) Microsoft has garnered a well deserved reputation for rushing products out unfinished or incomplete, and both 2020 and 2020 were rushed out too soon. Like tgbushman I am also in my 60’s and have been flying virtually for years. I just wish that someone at Microsoft/Asobo could finally swallow their pride and admit that mistakes had been made and fix them, instead of stonewalling the community with silence.

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While I appreciate your sentiments and questions, I have a feeling that this thread is just going to be a rehash of things said on this forum and elsewhere many times over already.

That said, while I’m not a beta tester, it sounds like significant improvements are coming. In addition, significant improvements have already been made. There are also many people (myself included) who have relatively few issues with 2024. In my own case, I’ve now run the sim on two different GPUs (recent hardware swapout) and it honestly has done great on both (although markedly better on the 7900xt vs the 4060 lol) I also admit that i have a couple things in my favor in terms of the connection issues: I’m on fiber and I’m on the West Coast of the US, as opposed to Europe which seems to have had some major problems with connectivity, especially in the beginning.

While there are still many improvements to be made (Marketplace especially!), we are starting to get to the point where folks who continue to have issues will need to also consider whether or not it’s a problem with their own system, rather than the sim. Flight Sims in general are large, complicated pieces of software and so many variables can impact their performance. This is one reason whily I tend to add add-ons and peripherals slowly and one at a time, so I have the opportunity to test and tweak, rather than doing everything at once. We went through growing pains with 2020 and now we’re going through them with 2024 - many many folks warned about that possibility as we got closer to the launch date and it turned out to be true, and since then, things have been improving. 2024 is starting to shape up pretty darn good and we can see that by the number of people who are now switching solely to 2024 away from 2020.

tl;dr: There are teething issues but we’re getting through it. 2024 is here to stay.

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I believe that Microsoft will be slowly distancing itself from 3rd Party providers, either by intentionally limiting their SDK availability to those software creators they deem ‘partners,’ or by eliminating it altogether and continuing on their path of making the sim a closed platform, with fully encrypted code.

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I am not seeing that. One, they can’t possibly do all that themselves. Two, the community wouldn’t stand for it. Even when they try to do study level additions to the sim, they can’t match what 3rd party developers are able to do. And three, that kills a lot of the innovation. I don’t think the sim would have progressed as far as it did, or gone in the direction it did, if it were not for 3rd party developers.

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I completely agree. I don’t think they will do that. If they were to do that, we might as well shut the sim down now. The third party support and innovation is a huge part of what makes the sim fun!

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Hello folks,

There are absolutely no plans to reduce the vibrant mod/add-on ecosystem for MSFS (2020) and MSFS 2024. The dev team knows how essential the multitude of great products from third-party developers are to the overall flight sim experience to so many of you, and we do not intend to curtail that in any way.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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Ref FS2020 - other than stutters around airfields / airports, FS2020 is fantastic and on most days (servers permitting), I can enjoy a smooth and beautiful experience.

Ref FS2024 - MS and Asobo should be embarrassed that they released an Alpha version without proper testing. The major problems were evident in the technical weekend preview but they ignored comments and feedback. I like the fast load times (now) but the combination of server bandwidth (at times) and users internet speeds results in a huge amount of reported bugs. After many months since release, we still do not have a complete and working simulator. I still believe it will be another 12 months before we see the complete product.

The effect of this is that I will not initially buy the next release unless it is properly tested by the user community and it gets rave reviews.

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IMHO, the future of FS24 is going in three directions. Some will believe it’s improving, others will believe it’s stagnating, and others will believe it’s moving backward. How many threads do we see daily where someone states “Wow, this beta is great” and the next entry states “This beta is awful.”

I realize that we’ll all never be on the same page, but the problem with these types of threads is that the opinions and experiences of the end users vary so wildly that we’ll never come to a consensus and they devolve into a discussion about how I’m doing vs how everyone else is doing.

Add to that the fact that the servers seem to be fine one day and slow the next, any new product releases can be awesome or troublesome, and code changes can be great or cause problems.

My 2c

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Great idea for a thread. My take is that 2024 is slowly getting better, but still has a long way to go. It’s unfortunate that you are having issues with 2020 too, its been rock-solid and performant for me for a couple of years now (with monster hardware since I only fly VR, granted).

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You are obviously a lot closer to the “horses mouth” than we are Seedy and I can see that you would have no reason to doubt what MS is telling you. It’s quite possible that they are being straight with you (I certainly hope that is the case), however I think that @BegottenPoet228 has provided an all too believable scenario.

The problem is that MS is sending a number of signals that point to plans for the MSFS franchise becoming a fully locked down, MMO like application. The full streaming model, the amount of encryption, the career mode and the market place being the most obvious.

As I said I hope that I am wrong but I fear that I am not.

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Sorry but I’ve seen you mention this so often now that I need to ask: What is it about the bush trips that sets them apart so much from regular flying ans any other experience you can have in the sim, to the extent that the sim is “unusable” for you without them?

This is not supposed to be criticism, I’m genuinely curious.

Ans I’m very sorry to hear how much you invested only to be disappointed. To this day I’m very disappointed by FS24 too. I only fly VR and it was unusable for me (performance-wise) until I got a 5090 and they ironed out most of the most egregious VR bugs. And I’m still not fully on board even now!

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I don’t really like flying. I do like exploring though. Bush trips will as you go along tell you what it is you are traveling over. “Fly to a heading of 160, pass over the town of Livenshire, and at the Yuleflow river, turn south and follow the river”. If I was just flying by myself, I wouldn’t know what the town was I was flying over. I wouldn’t know what the river was. And that was just a simple example. Many bush trips give more information. Also, someone has picked the best route for you with the most scenery. Often times they will setup a condition so you have an “oh wow” moment. Like the Iceland bush trip, they had you take off in the dark. You flew south along the western coast of Iceland, and past the volcano that has gone off a few times recently. As you are just clearing the volcano, you find that the sun is rising, so suddenly you have a view of the sun just breaking over Iceland, and the light comes streaming into your cockpit. It was gorgeous and one of those “oh wow” moments. The world is a big place. People who are familiar with these places setup a bush trip like a story. You not only see the best sights, you get information about the places along the way, and you sometimes get a spectacular view that you yourself would never have come across.

The travel, the experience, the learning of the area, that is what I am after. Just flying from point A to point B to me is boring. I get it. Most people here like flying. It is a flight simulator after all. But I am one of those virtual tourists. I like American Truck Simulator for basically the same reason. I am not interested in driving semi trucks at all. But I like to see the difference between Oregon and Texas.

I dont know how else best to describe it. I’ve tried other modes. I just am not interested in them at all. Most airliner users, they don’t understand GA users. And most GA users get bored with airliners. Me, I get bored with both. But seeing the world in a way that has been laid out for me, to experience it how someone intended it to be as compelling as possible, that is what interests me.

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Ha, that’s exactly what we are. This is a $60 video game, a toy, and we are mass consumers. Might as well be in line at Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. You’re right that whining works here. It’s the growing din of angry villagers with pitchforks that spurs the devs into action, when the CMs have to intervene and Jorge gets on a livestream to calm the masses, that’s when issues get escalated to the top.

The sim will continue to get better. But at this rate, it will always look pretty similar to what we have now. And there’s a lot to enjoy in 2024 if you can make your type of flying work for you. I think folks are waiting for some magical paradigm shift when this software becomes something it never will. This is probably it. So my philosophy is get busy flying
 or get busy doing something else.

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