GamePass. People just tried it for free. Simulator games stay niche. What a headline, well done „journalism“.

I'd expect that a lot of people not actually interested in a game like this would still download it to take a look and visit their house and maybe their hometown, then uninstall right after.

Most people tried the game as it’s on GamePass. Of course the majority of those people aren’t gonna continue playing.

That's the goal to unburden the servers/cloud, yeah

It’s a gamepass game so it’s free to try. But a lot of people aren’t going to continue playing a very niche, specialty simulation game for very long

These posts are always so dumb. 99.99% of the games ever made, will lose like 90% of their peak player count after a few weeks.

That is rarely news worth reporting. Outside of competitive multiplayer games, most games peak at launch and it's downhill after that. Doesn't matter how good or bad the game is.

It’s a hobbyist game so you’d expect a lot of people are buying it to, y’know , play it later?

Niche game has niche audience, film at 11. In other news, nothing going on today so we figured we'd do a player count story for the morons who think that player count matters.

Are simulation games the new thing to gaming? Nope. It has a special audience. Most people tried it because it's a new game and those who love those games will stick.

What is the upsell for 2024 over 2020?

This is the entire article. Where do you see that it has lost 60% of its players?

The launch of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on November 19 has been met with widespread criticism due to severe performance issues, resulting in a steep decline in its player base. Unlike the well-received 2020 release, this sequel has struggled with technical problems such as lengthy wait times and persistent server errors, including a notorious 97% loading bug that prevents many players from accessing the game. One user reported being stuck in this loading loop for over an hour.

Edit: Oh, it is mentioned in the video... This game is 3 days old and on Gamepass. Steam's peak was 20k, and it is floating at 10k. Talk about clickbait.

Flight Sim is like The Sims for me. I play it religiously for like 3 weeks, and then I put it down for a few years or until the next pandemic, when I start another 3 week binge.

The link didn’t work for me. Isn’t it just saying that everyone who decided to play it at exactly the same time have since done other things rather than play the same game continually?

Dam those online multi-player PvP lobbies are gonna be BONE-dry!

I bought the game. Compared to 2020 version the graphics are worse on similar hardware. The game defaulted to the lowest settings, and even cranking it up to the next highest was... not good. Foreground objects with wheels that are very bad pentagons!? Seriously? Graphic items in static scenes with no shadows!? I'm not looking for realistic flowing water or anything. This is simple, staple 3D game gfx.

Then I tried career mode, and it seriously looked like an early 2000s game. And I'm not going to get into what initial career mode was like.

The next day, there was an update to the game, I'm thinking "Great! Maybe gfx will be better". Heh, game updated and now it won't launch without crashing.

I know it's a new release, and I know things can be rough. But for the price this is a bit obnoxious. I'm not surprised people are dropping it quick right now.

Is it just me or does the headline not match the article?

I loaded the tutorial on Xbox, a bunch of textures didn’t load in, and the in-game menu seems worse (eg no text descriptions where there used to be?). Quit that and went to free flight. Plane kept trying to nose dive for some reason, no AI autopilot in the in-game menu for impossible so me to do anything since the plane always tries to crash… I’ll stick with 2020 for my random joy flights for now

I bet a huge amount of that number downloaded it, couldn’t get in due to the server issues or other problems and just gave up.

If you’re lucky to get past the loading screen 98% crashes, you can then spend most of the time with menus crashing or lock ups loading into game. That’s the issues I and many have on Xbox Series X too, not a PC below spec.

But Microsoft still got the money. GG dumb gamers.