On November 19, 2024, Microsoft Flight Simulator was released. The game had massive startup difficulties, which is now also reflected in the number of players and ratings on Steam.
Why is Flight Simulator losing players? Since its release, Flight Simulator has struggled with severe performance problems. There are long loading times and other bugs that prevent players from even getting into the game.
Gamers are annoyed by these problems and although the game was able to reach a number of over 24,000 simultaneous players (via SteamDB), these have now fallen to around 9,900. That’s around 40% within two days.
You can get a first impression of Flight Simulator with this trailer:
High in the sky in the trailer for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2024
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Flight Simulator new frontrunner as a poorly rated AAA title
Why is the performance so bad? The developers revealed that they had simply underestimated how many players actually wanted to play the video game. They had simulated the game with 200,000 players, but there were far more.
That’s why it had to be limited how many players could come into the game: the rush of players is said to be to blame for the failure of a new game from Microsoft on Steam
These are the consequences: The poor performance frustrates players. Flight Simulator 2024 now has over 4,000 user reviews on Steam, of which only 26% are positive, giving the game a “Mostly Negative” stamp from Steam (via Steam).
And the simulator gets something else: the title for the worst-rated AAA title on Steam. The game thus replaces Overwatch 2, which had a similar start when it was released on Steam in August 2023.
It can be assumed that Flight Simulator will catch on again in the next updates and patches and will get better player numbers and ratings again. Sometimes developers also respond to negative reviews on Steam, as this example shows: Player writes negative review on Steam – gets the worst possible response from the developer