I have a friend who plays, and they suggested that maybe putting it right onto gamepass -- allowing Johnbro McFuck to download it, get lost in a cloud, crash into the ocean and never play again -- during the launch window might not have been a great idea.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Flight simulator needed a better people simulator.
Why does a flight simulator of all things need to be a live service game?
Because it uses an extremely detailed 3d map of literally the entire planet, which can't (yet) be stored on a modern gaming pc offline.
I don't see why it can't download each map individually. Like say you only fly in los angeles, it downloads only los angeles. Maybe it will still be a lot of data and you got a point.
I've been told it caches that data for areas you have been. But that doesn't make it offline friendly, obviously.
Also what you're suggesting is more dev work to make it not a live service with the associated benefits for the publisher, so they're not gonna do that. :(
Do we know how big the file is?
It was over 2 petabytes in 2020 so at least that big.
Google earth
Bullshit, you own a cloud service and know how to scale a service to meet demand, you just fucked up.
You know Microsoft isn’t, like, one individual dude right?
Bill Microsoft
A new Flight Sim is out already? God dammit, I barely had time to play FS2020... Less than 10 hours.
The peak concurrent users for the game thus far has been less than 1/10th of that (EDIT: slightly more than 1/10th of that). They were well within the bounds of what they simulated. They just screwed up.
Where are you getting that number?
Likely the public Steam statistics that show the all-time peak player count is little over 24k players.
I’m not sure I’d trust the Steam statistics here given this game is free on gamepass. I’d reckon a LARGE majority are playing on that, not to mention console players.
Yeah from what I hear, they kept the shitty self-downloader of the first one that is obscenely slow and counts as "playtime" because the game is open while downloading.
This is on Microsoft, they can make as many excuses as they want, but they fucked it up.
It's ok tho they're making server complexes out of wood now!
/s
Didn't account for the initial interest peak.
No, that's what I'm saying. That peak is well under what they claimed they simulated.
Peak concurrent was marred by the game not being playable. It's not really a good indicator here.
It is, because everyone trying to download assets from the game servers were doing so from the executable that Steam tracks as running.
You don't have to buy it from steam, might've been more users from gamepass and xbox than steam?
It is a flight simulator, somehow I doubt it has more console than PC users. Consoles are just too limited to satisfy that particular demographic. Can't even connect half a dozen different input devices to a console.
In classic Microsoft style, "Xbox" doesn't necessarily mean the console. It's also the name of their gaming service and the store you can use to buy games on Windows.
Dunno what the sales for the new one are like, but the 2020 ms flight sim had a lot more mass appeal than any older flight sims, but maybe a lot of xbox players were put off by the pre download requirements?
Also when it's on game pass the barrier to entry is a lot lower, as a lot of people might install it with the intention of only playing it for like 5 minutes to see if they can see thier house or something, which they probably wouldn't pay full price on steam to do 😅
But yeah it definitely sounds like thier test for 200k players probably had bigger instances provisioned than what they ended up using in the production release 😅
You'd think they'd be able to do some sort of auto scaling when demand goes up though... 😅
Perhaps, but 10x as many? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think it's likely.
It's not, because downloading assets was not working, and with it not working eventually the user will shut it down thus having an effect on peak concurrent. It's not even that complex. If people can play your game they will stay on it increasing the count, if people cannot play your game they will not, thus decreasing the count.
Exactly. The peak number of people trying to download it simultaneously was about 24k. They didn't all stick around because it wasn't working, even though that's about 1/10th of what the devs expected and prepared for the demand to be. They didn't get anywhere close to 200k people all hitting that server at once.
Sounds like a fake humblebrag.
The devs of MS are fairly incompetent - look at all the first party games they’ve released, including ones from purchased studios.
The devs of MS are fairly incompetent
Or corporate executives push unrealistic expectations onto them
With Microsoft it can sometimes be really hard to tell if it was the devs, management, or both tbh.
Al the Age of Empires games, apart from AoE1 DE, are excellent.
There’s no cloud, just someone else’s (underspecced) computer.
Woah woah woah buddy did you even take a second to think about the profits? Selfish.
I thought about the profits and now I totally get it. Why are so many people trying to hurt the innocent money???
No play, only buy! dog frisbee meme
Does it really add that much more than the terrain we had 20 years ago?
With mods you can get FSX looking pretty good
If it's the version I'm thinking of, that's circa 2007, yeah? I remember the fully 3D interior panels being a little crunchy looking but using it mostly to practice instrument stuff with the traditional 2D panel overlays at ERAU. For which it was perfectly adequate.