All they had to do - to satisfy Board / Marketing / Game Pass subscription expectations - was to NOT market it as “ready” Nov 19th, but market it as “early access” beta testing. People would have still signed up, with expectations set accordingly.
Also, they could have focussed on core functionality for the release, and postponed the development and testing of the Careers for the winter after the core sim was tested and bug fixed, in the winter / spring. Something to look forward to while adjusting to the new sim.
Instead they tried to get everything almost finished with way too many bugs, and now my fear is there will be a heap of things that are never fixed, just like 2020.
Welcome to Microsoft. It’s bad enough in my day job having to raise issues with Visual Studio and Azure where they also pat themselves on the back rather than actually improving performance of those 2.
PSA: be aware that the unpredictable nature of MSFS (works well sometimes, doesn’t work other times) creates what is known in psychology as a “Variable Reward Schedule”. You can google that term, it simply means that when results are unpredictable it creates a pretty strong addiction to figuring out the pattern, figuring out the problem - and it’s bad for your mental health over time.
I think Microsoft very intentionally leans on this quirk of psychology as cover to release buggy software early to start revenue coming in, and then switch to bug fixing later with a calculated assumption that it won’t severly impact overall numbers - unless it’s really bad like this time.
But for customers it can have a negative impact. Besides the disappointment of it not working on launch - if it works well just once or twice, it keeps you trying for much longer than you would normally tolerate. I decided to take a break from 2020 for about 6 months when all the memory leaks and bandwidth errors were happening to save my sanity. And I’ve decided to not even turn on 2024 again until there have been more updates and more positive reports.
If you take it that they simply didn’t have the time to do everything, then they probably noticed, but decided that other things were more important to code/fix.
Maybe you are right but than it IS important in my opinion as thread about bad textures is one of the longest.
But, yes, I get the point but it is hard to believe they put it on low priority item
This is the only rational thing to do. This is also what I did after messing with it for a few days, realizing it’s broken, and then realizing I would be messing with it anyway for weeks to come without any hope of improving things until they patch it a few times. So getting a refund was the best course of action because then I CANT mess with it any more, saving time and respectable amounts of sanity.