Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — peak rate equivalent to 81GB of data per hour
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If they turn this into a future monthly payment I’m out.
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That’s what I’m wondering. Doesn’t seem like a money maker unless they profit from it in some way. 2020 was obviously not supporting itself.
This was my first thought after 2024 was announced , and to have streaming. Baby steps to subscription. I believe it will happen.
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no please. this is the last thing i want from ms.
They take I believe 30% for each third-party add-on sale in the Marketplace. That’s a big moneymaker for them. The career mode will likely be expanded for add-on sales at some point too.
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For quick clarification, there has never been any official wording or mention of implementing any form of subscription model by the Microsoft Flight Simulator team. Any discussion of this has been via community rumours.
Thanks
The MSFS Team
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I’m sure the Marketplace isn’t a sustainable model for Microsoft to make enough money to legitimize this kind of expenditure.
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I suspect MSFS runs on the lowest availability tier for their CDN, which may allow MS to accept whatever internal costs there are. The downside is potential for availability issues and higher latency, naturally.
I’d actually welcome a subscription option that would guarantee higher availability and lower latencies for those of us who value it and can accept the additional cost.
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Rumors thrive when so little information is being shared by the development team.
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It’s arguable about a guarantee, given the current state of these two sims.
That may be exactly what they’re planning. Free lousy bandwidth, pay for what you really need.
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When the game launched I got flamed for suggesting this. The cost of the game is static, but the cost of streaming is not. It’s an unsustainable model.
I think, in the end, there will be a sub model and there will be a free tier with something like medium resolution streaming. Then people will have to pay for everything else.
The other theory I had was that the design of career mode is such that it is ripe to see credits, boosters, liveries, and other such things sold on the marketplace. It’s plausible they could pay for this infrastructure in that way. They encrypt first party planes now to prevent modded planes in career for example. This is for the express purpose of controlling credits. They originally did not intend for sim rate to be able to be used in career mode. They have confirmed this. The entire design around career mode is to control credit flow so it seems at least plausible they would sell credits. boosters, or other such things.
Only time will tell how they cover the infrastructure costs. They obviously get a first party discount, but I am an azure dev, and I can tell you the costs are not inconsequential lol. Many people think they have already started throttling data flow to control costs.
I think they have a plan for this, it simply hasn’t been revealed yet because doing so would affect initial sales.
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If we had a subscription now we could just cancel it for the duration of their bugfixing or whenever we think the sim is not working good enough. That’s why I don’t believe they make it a subscription.
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They made their bed, now they must lie in it. I’d like to think that this push to leverage the cloud was researched before hand, and they thought about the amount of traffic this is likely to generate for them.
Then I think of the launch day, and I feel sad.
Multiply how many copies have sold at an avg price of $100.00 (factoring the different versions), then the marketplace, you approach $50M in weeks. Its not a stretch to see the gross sales near $75M over 4 years.
Also, think server cost is spread over games, not one server dedicated just to MSFS
The objective is load balancing at a net profit. (The xbox subscription model)
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You’ve already paid the upfront money. It’s the hook to get you to commit.
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So you are talking about 200 bucks upfront and then a subscription in addition? That’s insane!
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Without a doubt, they thought of this ahead of schedule. My guess is why it was launched prematurely.