Late last week, Microsoft and Asobo got together for their monthly Q&A developer stream. In it we got some good insights into how MSFS 2024 is progressing and how things are looking for the immediate future. There were a few stand-out items covered in the Q&A that I wanted to relay to everyone who hasn’t had a chance to watch the complete 2-hour presentation. So … let’s go!

The stream

As with past streams, Microsoft have made the whole presentation available as a recap on YouTube. The 2-hour presentation covers an absolutely huge variety of topics from bugs and bug fixes to some interesting stats on usage with the new sim and we get a bit of information on what’s coming next. Let’s have a look!

Interesting stats from Jorg

One of the most interesting pieces of the Q&A sessions is when Flight Simulation Head, Jorg Neumann, gives us some overview information on how the sim is doing. Obviously these are chosen to paint a generally positive picture but they still give us some interesting insights into how the sim is doing.

One of those is the MAU (Monthly Active Users) which Jorg reports has seen a franchise record. Millions of active players playing the franchise as a whole. No specific numbers but still that tends to paint a positive overall picture (despite the issues that MSFS 2024 has had at launch).

We’ve also learned that their numbers show two-thirds are on MSFS 2024 while the remaining one-third are on MSFS 2020. Of those on 2024, Jorg reports too that there are more people playing career mode than free-flight. Again, this despite the obvious and significant bugs that you can see scattered all over the career mode. Its still drawing players to engage in that mode over the others.

Lessons learned from launch

Sticking with Jorg’s comments for this section and here we had some interesting commentary from him over how the launch went. He reports that they did go back at the launch and go through what went well and what didn’t.

They had 90 testers working on the product with about 800 people overall contributing content and code to the project. The testers found and were able to help fix 32,000 bugs but Jorg ultimately says that just too many bugs shipped at launch and that it has affected the product.

In the future he reports that the lesson learned is to not ship without a lengthier tech alpha, beta test and finalizing test before officially launching. Here I jump in with just a bit of editorial that these comments make me suspect that they anticipated a smoother roll out and that 2024 would follow on technologically from 2020 so well that they didn’t need the prolonged test. I don’t know if that’s what actually happened but it sounds like that is what happened.

The introspection is useful and I suspect MSFS as a series continues to show a lot of promise and that it will likely spawn another sequel at some point – let’s call it MSFS 2028. Lessons will hopefully be learned from this roll out for that one.

Highlights from the Q&A

After those two segments, the team comprising of Jorg, Sebastian and Martial (our usual trio) plus community manager Jayne and Chris Burnett, a guest presenter from Working Title, were on hand to do the Q&A.

It’s a 2-hour long segment and they go step by step through many of the bugs reported by the community and upvoted in terms of importance.

One of the top issues is FPS performance and potential VRAM issues. Long story short, the way that VRAM and memory in general seems to be working is ok but some assets need further refinement. Reportedly, scenery maker Gaia whom Microsoft contracts out a lot of airports and points of interest, is working to fix airports and is doing so using telemetry data to determine which are the most popular and fix them first.

Sim updates, Marketplace, World Updates and new airplanes

Another interesting segment was where Jorg talked about a rhythm of updates for MSFS 2024. Their goal is to do approximately four big updates a year or roughly one sim update every three months with a little bit of flexibility in the mix.

Sim Update 1 is coming while Sim Update 2 is likely to be bigger and come in April. Sim Update 3 is expected to be a “playable gift” at FSExpo 2025.

Meanwhile they also reports that they are going to try and get the Marketplace out by February 18. Jorg says that its a complex system that the team has been working hard on to help ensure that it all works when they launch. There’s an acknowledgement that Marketplace also represents the livelihoods of some creators so they really want to make sure its solid at launch.

And in related news they report that World Update Brazil is awaiting the Marketplace as that’s the method for which everyone will get the update. So the update there is waiting on Marketplace to launch. It sounds like they intend to launch, if all of it works, on March 8. It will launch together with the iniBuilds created CAP-4 Paulistinha.

The other aircraft in the pipeline is Famous Flyer 11 Cessna 185F Skywagon by Carenado. We got to see a trailer which confirms standard wheels, skis and float version too.

There was so much more

The Q&A session on the whole ran for over 2-hours so there were tons of details that I wasn’t able to capture in this summary. Did anything stand out to you? Let me know in the comments!