I don’t think they’ll give up on it. Going by what I’ve experienced so far the sim has massive potential. I’ve been lucky and mostly had a positive experience and it get gets better with each new patch, update.
For me on Xbox it’s an interesting one I jumped in early after release and played a lot got over level 200 in the career then started doing a mod to my joystick to mount it to my sim rig and bought rudder pedals
Came back after su1 and had a decent experience so thought jump in betas help find the issues
Things I like
Lighting
EFB functionality
The UI is easier than 2020
GA flying is great
Things I’m disliking
The bloody marketplace and upgrade costs on shovelware
Airlines only just usable if a small one on Xbox
Lack of manuals for planes (even just a reference card for speeds)
Photogrammetry trees (ugly green blobs)
The model matching never working
But I do believe it will get there, in the beta I’m finally getting to fly small airlines with less issues
The future is obvious if you’ve ever been on a death march with a broken product.
But first, some history. In 2021, Asobo sold 38% of itself to an investor group, which is what you do to get funds and assistance for an IPO.
IN 2021, the future looked great for game developers, thanks to COVID. In 2025, the future looks bleak, entering the 3rd year of layoffs.
As Zuckerberg pointed out, the half-life of a software engineer is 7 years. So anyone who started their career with Asobo, even if it was their first job in the industry, is getting ripe for dropping out. And those who have been there longer, or who worked prior to working with Asobo, are also closer to the end than the beginning of their careers.
When a project is an ongoing failure, you don’t want to go back to work Monday morning. The idea of having to return Monday ruins your ability to relax on the weekend. So you’re always under stress.
In normal times, many would quit and work elsewhers.
These are not normal times. 3rd year of layoffs, and having MSFS2024 on your resume is a serious negative.
So the people actually doing the code are under significant stress. If you’ve ever worked in such an environment, it’s harmful to both your physical and mental health.* Cohesion breaks down between individuals and teams. It’s ugly.
It took 4 years to get 2020 mostly okay - though there are still bugs and promised features that we now know will never be tended to.
So what does all this mean for 2024? The initial design was overly ambitious, and flawed. It can’t be fixed in a reasonable time without serious pruning of “features”, which wonn’t happen.
As for Asobo, the magic 8-ball says “Outlook not good.” Would any investor want a piece of the business in this environment?
Predictions:
- There won’t be an MSFS2028 in line with the current form. More likely it will be an arcade game if it ever happens;
- The sim needs serious optimization. It won’t get it. When all you’re doing is bug fixes you don’t have time to do a deep inspection and optimize.
- Neither Sony nor Nintendo want anything to do with such a bugfest.
For myself, I stopped using 2020 back in January because this whole mess is depressing. I’ve continued with hardware upgrades, and will probably try to get back into it next month, but the hardware upgrades are compatible with other sims. The time will come when the servers get shut down, because, unlike other sim developers who only sell sims, Microsoft doesn’t NEED a flight simulator to survive.
- If you doubt the toll of working on a failing project, look at the posters who continually express their frustration with how broken the sim AND the bug reporting process are. Insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting different results. By that definition, the sim is insane - works one day, doesn’t the next. Same computer, same user, same internet, different results.
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I dont agree with your assessment. I do think that yeah, right now it hasn’t been a fun beginning of the year working on the sim, but slowly people are getting back into it. You see the momentum rising.
People would have predicted the same future for Cyberpunk 2077, but you notice they DID turn that one around. Flight simulators are a different breed in the entertainment software. Users tend to be very faithful. P3D STILL has a large following, and there are still addons being developed for it. I’m actually surprised how many have been released for P3D on SimMarket lately.
VR users are all happy that quad views has been introduced in 2024, which was an unexpected feature. Stability is getting better, and the last month, more and more posters on these forums are finally starting to say they will now try the experience. PMDG just made the announcement this week that their future aircraft such as the 747 will be 2024 only. (Yes, they did say that before launch, but then after the release of 2024, they were very cautious and hedging their bets and staying pretty quiet on the subject. Now, they are back firmly stating their position).
I just dont see it quite as bleak as you are presenting.
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I did a lot of testing on the download issue. I noticed that when I launch a flight that gets stuck, the data download for a few seconds fluctuates very quickly and goes up to 500 Mbps. Then the data transfer goes to 0, and the sim loads forever. You wait and wait and nothing happens. You feel so bad that you must kill the app and restart, and the same happens again.
So, it seems we are having a technology and/or architecture that is a complete failure here. It could be a load balancing software that is failing, and no one can recognize this as a bug.
As I mentioned in my initial post, I have been into software for over 25 years. The discussion forum we are using, https://www.discourse.org/ implemented by Asobo, is good for discussion, but it does not provide a proper support incident management system. What is striking is how Asobo, with its supposedly large commitment and investment, did not implement a proper support incident management system, which is a part of a CRM system to track cases.
Asobo, do you have a support incident management system so when a user struggles for hours reporting an incident, you can create an incident record with a number, and the user can track that until the case is closed?
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Great Post. I’m definitely a huge fan of MS2024 just like the most of us here. I honestly think they drop the ball at launch and they know it. With that being said, I see they are working very hard to correct this mistake. Pretty much MSFS2020 is a thing in the pass which I don’t know why they did it this way. All the hours they spent to fix the bugs just to trash it and move on to something else. From a marketing perspective, this is poor management at its best. 2020 could have just had a major update and included Career mode, and updated the marketplace. So like you said, why have two marketplaces, why have two flight sims four years apart is just strange. Anyways, the future of MSFS2024 is just starting. At the end of the day, the payoff was huge for them and we got stuck with the bill. I think the fans of MSFS will stay loyal no matter what because the game is freaking awesome when its working.
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True. the game is freaking awesome when it works. this is a highly technical domain and if same unqualified employees continue we will always have the same issues.
I am talking near 5 months from the software being released and the software does not even run. I suspect serious architectural changes need to be made and Asobo does not want to recognize the mess we are in. in software business marketing people never fix issues but rather qualified software design architects.
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This is obvious as MSFS is a platform. Imagine a phone OS without apps.
Here let be bring to your attention, a platform need to provide synergies for it to be successful. The marketplace is another huge problem as a model. I can write a book on that topic. You allow apps to be installed from outside the marketplace. This decision as it seems consumer friendly is in fact just a source of serious flaws. MSFS is like iOS or Android not Windows or Mac OS. Anyway this is another matter which will limit the potential of the platform to grow rather than a fully technical manner. The marketplace should be the main revenue source for Asobo not the software itself which could even be free.
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Hello @imadch,
What you are describing above is our Zendesk ticketing system for customer support requests. You can submit a support ticket at this link:
https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Thanks,
MSFS Team
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My feedback as someone who is into the software industry is that MSFS 2024 is a complete product not Alpha or Beta. BUT it lacks quality at both the architectural and technical levels. This is what makes it hard to fix. The vision is great and we highly appreciate it and will continue to support it.
First time I know you use Zendesk. I checked ZenDesk and noticed the first post on known issues is about Sim Updates 2 Beta. Wait??? Why is the future development of a product in front of what is supposed to be a customer service system? This shows the disconnection as ZenDesk is being used to track bugs in future releases, not the existing software users use (LTS).
Your setup between Zendesk and Discourse may not be ideal, as the two do not integrate. Perhaps the biggest problem is the implementation and the internal workflow after capturing incidents. I clicked on known issues and found some text. There is no list of issues as if they do not exist. Your internal customer support system, including the KM is another discussion.
The problems in Asobo, I see, involve a large collection of management, strategic, operational, technical, and control issues.
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Yes. technology is like magic. For sometime, I feel I am lucky to live and witness such inedible experience and on many other times just sitting for hours with complete disappoint.
But let me assure you today, it needs moderate efforts assuming the knowlege is there to develop reliable software. The problems are with Asobo. It seems marketing personnel are managing technology architecture and we see the results.
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True 2020 is more reliable overall than 2024. Now it seems there are serious Nvidia driver issues leading to crashes and inability to quit the software. But what is strange is that none of my other 100s AAA apps and other graphically demanding applications like iRacing run so solid with a single issue. I have two software programs on my PC that are crashing these days. MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024.
If you have a product with good architecture but with bugs, you can fix the bugs overtime like Cyberpunk 2077. If MSFS 2024 has serious architectural issues then It will not be fixable. I suspect the entire API architecture is not reliable and that is used at the launch of every single flight.
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Off topic: Cool to have 5090. I am still on 4090 as I could not find the 5090 I want. I am planning for VR as well. I already use VR in iRacing. I enjoy flying an aircraft in the sim as it represents the pinnacle of human-machine coherence. I recently got the Inbuilt A350 and love it. It has some issues, but it works. Enjoy 
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The problem with MSFS was that it was released too early. In March of 2024, Jorge laid out the timeline of when things were going to happen starting in July. None of that happened until 3 weeks before launch. If their original schedule in March of 2024 said that it was going to be 4 months of work starting in July to get a release, and it was going to be tight even then for a beta, you know you aren’t going to fit 4 months of work into 3 weeks.
So while yes, you have 25+ years in software, I have 40+ years. I’m sorry, I don’t evaluate what is going on as faulty architecture but as rushed and incomplete code. You are trying to get everyone to buy into this product is doomed, that there is no way possible to fix it, yet a majority of the users are admitting that it is steadily getting better. PMDG after being silent for quite a while re-committed to the 747 will be 2024 only this week. More 2024 YouTube videos are starting to appear. From all indications, it seems that there is a momentum shift starting to happen and people are getting more comfortable with 2024. I just don’t see the bleak destiny that is being presented.
And if you think this is coming from a biased user, read above in the thread. I am not currently using either sim, so that would put me as pretty much a impartial judge as you can get.
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I too fear that it is an architectural problem and as I have already said in other posts I see no way out.
Focusing on streaming was a failed gamble. If in the area where you live the Internet services have a limited quality you are doomed and this is simply not acceptable or solvable.
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Could not disagree more. Part of the reason the Flight Simulator series has been as successful as it has been is because it is an open platform. People can take it and extend it in ways that Microsoft would never be willing to do. FSX was used by people to build highly-functional replica cockpits with multi-projector display systems. FSX/ESP became P3D which is designed for exactly that purpose, and that only happened because FSX was an open platform.
To close it up into a walled garden now would exclude those people and those applications. Gatekeeping is the last thing we as a community need.
My concern with 2024, as with 2020, is that it seems to take forever to fix relatively small issues, and small changes that would improve the quality of life for particular groups rarely if ever happen. If that’s a result of prioritisation of fixes vs features, then I would respectfully submit that those priorities are wrong. Fixing quality of life issues drives increased customer satisfaction which improves word of mouth.
Earlier you suggested that a wholesale redesign might be necessary to ‘fix’ 2024. I obviously don’t have an overview of the design or code of MSFS, but as someone who’s worked in the software business for 25 years, I know that a ground-up redesign and re-write of a product of this size is not going to happen. I think 2024 is probably as close to that as we were ever going to get, and look at the issues we ended up with as a result. Incremental change would have been better, because 2020 - for all it still has faults - was and is a much more solid product.
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No offense mate, but to me it sounds like you should have invested more in real life travel and geo/culture studies instead of prematurely throwing all that money at something that in it’s core does not interest you at all and is just virtual. This just feels off to me tbh.
@FlyerOneZero
It seems we are not on the same page when it comes to defining what a software platform is. So, you assume the flight simulator series is successful because it is an open platform, and hence iOS and Android are unsuccessful because they are closed platforms. Please reconsider what you are saying.
A platform should be extendable while providing control. The most beneficial aspect of a platform is the synergy it provides to the stakeholders. (Platform owners, vendors, and users).
Asobo missed a large opportunity, as it seems they did not want to take responsibility for managing MSFS and controlling MSFS as a platform, but rather a game that supports mods. Please explore a large business concept called the platform business model, as only a small percentage of people fully understand that.
My PhD in business is in organizational design models and organizational alignment.
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