MSFS 2024 Apologizes and Acknowledges Turbulent Launch, Cites Unexpected Excitement

Author: David Mar 31,2025

MSFS 2024 Apologizes and Acknowledges Turbulent Launch, Cites Unexpected Excitement

Following the challenging launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the game's head has openly acknowledged the issues that have affected players. Dive deeper to understand the reasons behind these launch problems.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Head Acknowledges Day-One Launch Issues

MSFS 2024 Apologizes and Acknowledges Turbulent Launch, Cites Unexpected Excitement

The much-anticipated release of MSFS 2024 has been marred by bugs, instability, and server issues. In response, Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann, along with Asobo Studio's CEO Sebastian Wloch, took to YouTube to address the community's concerns in a Developer Launch Day Update video lasting about 5 minutes.

Neumann and Wloch detailed the root causes of the game's issues and outlined their strategy to resolve them. Neumann admitted that while they anticipated high excitement for the game, they underestimated the sheer volume of players. "It really has overwhelmed our infrastructure," he confessed.

To delve deeper into the technical aspects, Neumann handed over to Wloch. "At the very beginning, when players start, they’re basically requesting data from a server, which retrieves it from a database," Wloch explained. This database uses a cache, which was tested with 200,000 simulated users, but the actual player count has exceeded this, causing significant strain.

MSFS Login Queue and Missing Planes

MSFS 2024 Apologizes and Acknowledges Turbulent Launch, Cites Unexpected Excitement

In an attempt to mitigate these issues, Wloch and his team restarted the services and increased the number of players able to log in by expanding the queue size and speed by five times. However, Wloch noted, "It worked well for maybe half an hour and then all of a sudden the cache collapsed again."

They identified that the prolonged or incomplete loading times were due to the service becoming saturated, leading to repeated restarts and retries. "That creates extremely long initial loading, which is not supposed to be as long," Wloch clarified. This saturation also causes the loading screen to stall at 97%, necessitating game restarts.

Additionally, the issue of missing planes, reported by several players, stems from incomplete or blocked content. Even after successfully navigating the login queue, some players found certain planes or content missing. "That’s totally not normal, and that’s due to the service and server not responding, and this cache being completely overflowed," Wloch explained.

MSFS 2024 Faces Mostly Negative Steam Feedback

MSFS 2024 Apologizes and Acknowledges Turbulent Launch, Cites Unexpected Excitement

The launch issues have led to a wave of negative feedback from Steam users, with complaints ranging from long login queues to missing planes. Currently, the game holds a Mostly Negative rating on the platform.

Despite these significant launch day challenges, the team has been diligently working to address them. "We have solved the issues and are now bringing players in at a steady pace," as stated on the game’s Steam page. "We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. We will keep you updated on our social channels, forums, and website. Thank you very much for all your feedback and support."