Microsoft only planned for 200,000 users for Flight Simulator launch, admits drastic underestimate led to database being overwhelmed
MSFS 2024 database is still overwhelmed, and Microsoft has no timeline for fixing it.
Microsoft revealed in a YouTube video Wednesday that it vastly underestimated how many players would jump into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 at launch. Despite Microsoft load testing the game's servers with 200,000 simulated users, the game suffered — and is still suffering — from overwhelmed backend services, which have been the main cause for game loading issues and crashes.
According to Microsoft engineers, the game's infrastructure was stress-tested with 200,000 simulated users to ensure the game would run smoothly at launch. However, despite this preparation, the mission service database cache became (and remains) saturated, causing problems for users who are trying to do missions in the game.
To combat this issue, Microsoft has implemented a throttling mechanism to limit the number of players entering the game at once. But even with throttling, the service has already crashed at least once, and restarting the service apparently takes a long time — causing even longer delays.
This service crash results in extremely long loading times for gamers. Microsoft says that if the game stops loading at 97% and an error message pops up, users need to restart the game and try again. (A lack of default planes appearing in user's libraries is another issue caused by Microsoft's service problems.)
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched yesterday at 8 am PST, to a whole host of problems that prevented users from being able to play or even install the game. And since Microsoft didn't offer pre-launch access, reviewers were also rushing to create content as soon as possible (resulting in, perhaps, a heavily-covered launch day fiasco).
Our editors at Tom's Hardware attempted to install the game yesterday — two of our editors managed to hit around 70% before the installation failed, and one editor managed to install the game but could only access the main menu. So, unfortunately, we'll have to postpone our review of MSFS 2024 until Microsoft's game services are actually working.
Microsoft did not give a timeframe for when it expects these issues to be resolved. It's obvious, though, that Microsoft did not expect over 200,000 people to play the game at once. We wouldn't be surprised if player counts are more than twice that, based on how extensive the backend issues still appear to be.
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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
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hotaru251 im curious if game still uses 81GB an hr of flying as if it does the typical US Datacap wont even last 15hrs of flying. (as most caps are 1TB-1.2TB)Reply -
NinoPino Microsoft...,Reply
they develop an enterprise grade SQL Server, the most used OS in the world, manage and deploy one of the top three cloud infrastructures, produce a game console, have a cloud gaming service, and they are not able to manage the launch of a game like this ? 200000 users makes their systems to crash ?
It is really scary, to think about Windows development and reliability after this. -
JamesJones44 200,000 seems insanely low considering the hyping that has been done and the fact that it's part of Xbox/PC Game Pass. I would think the number of pre-installs was higher than 200k. Even if only 1% of Game Pass users installed FS2024 that would still be 340,000 users (based on the 34 million subscribers it has).Reply -
kpluck hotaru251 said:im curious if game still uses 81GB an hr of flying as if it does the typical US Datacap wont even last 15hrs of flying. (as most caps are 1TB-1.2TB)
That was an unoptimized, alpha version of the game running at a worst case scenario. Typically, from what I have read, expect to use 4-5 GB per hour…that is, when its actually working.;) -
Alvar "Miles" Udell Example number 25349834598 of why you never pre-order or day 1 order a video game in 2024.Reply -
bill001g
Lots of people are playing it on game pass which makes microsofts low player estimate strange. You have people that would never pay money for the game but will try it out when they get it included for basically no extra cost.Alvar Miles Udell said:Example number 25349834598 of why you never pre-order or day 1 order a video game in 2024. -
TDRare
And yet, they obviously had way more pre-orders than that if more players were available to login. People who pre-order intend to play at launch - why is that a difficult concept fro game studios? They should be watching pre-order numbers and continuously planning server capacity for at least 25% more than that. Worst thing you can do is provide a lousy launch experience. Can you imagine paying $260 USD for Aviator pre-order, than failing to launch or receiving a server queue to wait? We should expect better.Admin said:In a YouTube video, Microsoft revealed that only stress-tested the MSFS 2024 database with 200,000 virtual users. This drastic underestimate led to the database being overwhelmed and crashing on launch day.
Microsoft only planned for 200,000 users for Flight Simulator launch, admits drastic underestimate led to database being overwhelmed : Read more -
doughillman kpluck said:That was an unoptimized, alpha version of the game running at a worst case scenario. Typically, from what I have read, expect to use 4-5 GB per hour…that is, when its actually working.;)
I've used about 3GB per hour today. That said, probably about half of my flying has been out of my home airport and in the surrounding area, so a lot of the terrain I've flown over today has likely only been downloaded once and remained in cache. -
Alvar "Miles" Udell bill001g said:Lots of people are playing it on game pass which makes microsofts low player estimate strange. You have people that would never pay money for the game but will try it out when they get it included for basically no extra cost.
True. Going by various Steam charts (Steamcharts and Steamdb) MFS 40th Anniversary had under 62,000 concurrent players at any given time, so one could see how a 200,000 stress test could be considered adequate, but with the drastically reduced download size and huge promoting of Gamepass Microsoft has been doing... -
DS426 One of the largest tech mega corps in the world and they botch it this bad... my only explanation is that Microsoft is just greedy at the end of the day -- too greedy to provide, oh I don't know, even average customer satisfaction and service for their markets.Reply
Lol game launches... glad I'm not a part of these frenzies. I pre-purchased Farm Sim 2025 and sure enough on day 1, it's crap from both performance problems and plenty of game bugs, so waiting two to four weeks for patching to improve things. No biggie -- got plenty of other games to play and more important, real life chores, right!?