12 minutes ago, JonathanC said:

? Who did that? Relabelling, I mean. 
 

MSFS 2024 is not a beta - people call it all sorts of things, but it is most certainly a full release (a bad one, a broken one, you can say all that if you like, but it’s not a beta release because, quite simply, the developer says it’s not)  

And XP 12 released as a beta release (again, the developers says it’s beta, so it’s beta) it wasn’t relabelled after release. I bought it on release day and I knew it was Early Access / Beta.  

Not relabelling …. Re used as in regard to. No mention of relabeling 2024 as a beta or calling 2024 a beta. Simply mentioning why MS does not call the initial release a beta like XP does as indicated by UrgentSiesta.

3 minutes ago, The Flight Level said:

Not relabelling …. Re used as in regard to. No mention of relabeling 2024 as a beta or calling 2024 a beta. Simply mentioning why MS does not call the initial release a beta like XP does as indicated by UrgentSiesta.

And Win 10 has been in beta for how many years??  I guess the term beta has little meaning these days.

dd 

37 minutes ago, The Flight Level said:

Simply mentioning why MS does not call the initial release a beta

Because they say it’s a full release, is all. It’s not the best release ever, totally agree. But then many games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk has pretty bad launches but went on to be awesome games. And I don’t think the MSFs launch (after the first three days that were simply horrible and no one can excuse) is as bad as these two games. 
 

Things are generally looking up and it’s only Jan. I bet that in 60 days we will have all the major issues sorted - this is a much faster cadence than 2020 which took about two years before it started being decent. 

7 hours ago, The Flight Level said:

@UrgentSiesta Interesting, re labeling a release as beta. I don’t think MS has labeled any previous release version as a beta and I assume there are strong reasons, one way or the other, that relates to sales projections and customer impressions of the beta label or state.

Oh, I agree. My idea is really along the lines of managing customer expectations in re: "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object...?"

I am confident that Jorg & Seb (and everyone up/down the chain) knew full well that v2024 wasn't ready for Prime Time. They and their team are obviously extremely smart people, well experienced in game development.

No, there was clearly a decision made from Jorg's bosses (and/or whoever's compensation plan depended on it) to release v24 in time for the v24 holiday rush:

"Dam* the torpedoes! Full Steam Ahead!!!" 

And, well, the torpedoes have made their effects...

Whereas Laminar Research, instead of taking one right on the chin, made the Akido move and simply sidestepped from between the rock & hard place.

Same result as MSFS v24 without the PR debacle and royally word not allowed off customers: software released, revenue generated, final development continues apace. All with two straight forward decisions.

On 1/24/2025 at 3:48 PM, Huascar said:

The future of the franchise looks fantastically bleak. MSFS is a broken platform, plagued with software and performance issues. Your average simmer may not be willing to wait months/years for the current software problems to be resolved. And then you have the issue of how poorly even the best hardware tend to perform on MSFS 2020 and 2024. In a match with the best hardware in existence, MSFS would always win. I have a $4500 computer and MSFS brings my GPU to its knees in most instances. To put it mildly, it’s the game from hell. I get so frustrated that I abandon the game for months, even years at a time. I suspect that MSFS will become cost prohibitive at some point, especially with the numbers posted by OP.

If you think MSFS runs poorly, I can't imagine what you'd make of X-Plane's performance!

(not a knock against XP - it's improved over time).

On 1/24/2025 at 4:23 PM, Huascar said:

[INSERT SOFTWARE NAME HERE] was released [n] years ago, and it still has a bunch of issues. I simple don’t think it’s sustainable to maintain a platform in such state. Updates will go on forever. 

[INSERT DEVELOPER COMPANY HERE] should have focused on improving [PREVIOUS VERSION DESIGNATION], instead of launching a remarkably failed product. 

 

7 hours ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

And Win 10 has been in beta for how many years??  I guess the term beta has little meaning these days.

dd 

Precisely this, I've been around gaming long enough to know what a v1.0 Release should look like and MSFS24 was nowhere near that, whether or not it was labelled a beta as such it doesn't really matter, to me it's obvious it's a beta product and will be until SU2 or SU3 at the earliest.

Meanwhile titles released as beta (Early Access) get more respect because the developers state what is is from the very start, so you know you're going to get broken features, bugs etc.

I think consumerism has reached the point where people will buy all sorts of over-hyped stuff as long as its shiny and new and then convince themselves it is fantastic.

I call it the Cult of the Compliant Consumer

10 hours ago, filou said:

The number of fps is not too important in our time. What interests us is the fluidity in all circumstances. You can also redo your flight at the same place as on your video and the fluidity will be different. MSFS is mostly closely linked to the computer server not too much to the hardware. You can't even imagine the difference in smoothness performance I get between weekend and weekday flights.

Totally agree. I've been very aware of a major difference in streaming efficiency most weekends here in the UK from day one of 2020. There have been plenty of occasions in the past where I've just abandoned MSFS for the weekend and gone back to XP (or read a book). Actually finding that less of an issue with 2024, but maybe that's just down to all the refuseniks not being online <grin>

1 hour ago, Rusty Spanner said:

call it the Cult of the Compliant Consumer

There is already a term for it called FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. Tragic indictment of the modern human being honestly. 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fomo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

 

On 1/24/2025 at 3:28 AM, AnkH said:

And "thin client": I still do not get why this was a thing anyway. SSD storage was never more cheap and those 150GB which are "saved" compared to MSFS2020 result in more issues than benefits. 

 

Invoking a little bit of Mark Twain regarding the OPs stats;  'lies, damned lies, and statistics'. We can argue all day over MSFS stats but you could do a doctorate on worldwide gaming stats and still be the subject of considerable misrepresentation in some areas, so complex and huge are the numbers and of course competitive information is not always available to give fair and reasonable balance. 

But we can take the OP's stats as shedding some actual light on what is  possibly occurring and it is not as promising as perhaps many of us hoped it would be.  There was some suggestion that MSFS 2024 XBox games pass users and PC users who are not using Steam haven't been taken into account in the OPS stats. But then again, neither have the MSFS 2020 users in those categories and so I see no reason why we can't simply assume a similar picture ie one which shows the uptake of MS2024 simply not as high as MS would have hoped for.

This forum has discussed ad infinitum what the reasons for that might be but I also wonder if scant regard is being given to worldwide users who simply can't stream MS2024 with any reasonable prospect of a good user experience. Let alone poorly served VR users and many who simply can't afford the upgrade in video cards or other hardware, which worked fine in MSFS2020 but offer no benefit on 2024 and especially so if suitable streaming cannot be achieved. 

 

Cheers

Terry 

 

4 hours ago, Lord Farringdon said:

There was some suggestion that MSFS 2024 XBox games pass users and PC users who are not using Steam haven't been taken into account in the OPS stats. But then again, neither have the MSFS 2020 users in those categories and so I see no reason why we can't simply assume a similar picture ie one which shows the uptake of MS2024 simply not as high as MS would have hoped for.

This forum has discussed ad infinitum what the reasons for that might be but I also wonder if scant regard is being given to worldwide users who simply can't stream MS2024 with any reasonable prospect of a good user experience. Let alone poorly served VR users and many who simply can't afford the upgrade in video cards or other hardware, which worked fine in MSFS2020 but offer no benefit on 2024 and especially so if suitable streaming cannot be achieved. 

I've offered the opinion that before MSFS v2020, there was simply no simulator that offered the wondrous photographically realistic experience of the world. FSX, Prepar3D, and X-Plane were all various degrees of overwhelmingly fake-looking versions of the real world.

And THAT jump in out-of-the-box visual fidelity was the true reason for the massive success of v2020.

Before, in X-Plane, sure, you could make your way around, from representative looking airports, then out onto streets & highways, and you could VFR across entire countries by following geographic features, highways, towns and roads. If you're familiar enough with the view from on high, you could many times even find your way to your actual house! Well...you could find a house-like building that sits where your house does.

FSX & Prepar3D offered significantly less accurate socio-geographic fidelity, unless bolstered by the likes of the very expensive Orbx True Earth, et al. And even then, not much of even the First World nations were covered...

Then came MSFS v2020, and what we now take for granted - photorealistic scenery of large swaths of the planet, including a realistic representation of your neighborhood & house (and probably grandmas town in the old country, too!) - and v2020 was a literally revolutionary experience in gaming.

So much so that it was frequently featured in consumer news around the world, like no other game I've seen in my entire lifetime.

Now, 4 years later, it's the new baseline. The new expectation. The new BORING.

And with so many issues in the new version of the simulator, is it really any wonder the uptake hasn't been as rapid or as high as the original version...? No, it's entirely expected.

People are satisfied with v2020 - which is ALSO a streaming game (you just gotta do it in big monthly chunks), and many of their aircraft addons don't work in v24. Heck, there's a BUNCH of highly experienced simmers right here in AvSim who clearly have no idea what's going on upstream of their computer...

As to hardware and stuff - POPPYCOCK! I run Il2 Sturmovik, X-Plane, Prepar3D, DCS World, MSFS v2020 and v2024 on a 6 year old but good spec and somewhat-upgraded gaming rig.

Guess which simulator delivers the highest visual fidelity / photo-realism with the highest FPS/lowest stutters on my rig...?

MSFS v2024 followed by DCS World.

This "Common Sense" belief that v2024 requires a new video card or CPU is simply unfounded. If you had at least decent performance on v2020, you should have at least decent performance in v2024. In my case, v2024 is MORE performant than v2020, even though there is way more going on in the code than in v2020.

Edited January 26, 20251 yr by UrgentSiesta

4 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Now, 4 years later, it's the new baseline. The new expectation. The new BORING.

That's a pretty good point. The flip side is that a lot of people upgrade regardless of the iterations. Someone earlier, maybe in this thread, compared MSFS to Farming Simulator. That game hasn't materially changed much since FS2015. Sure, they've added new crops and equipment, but nothing the modding community hadn't come up with for earlier games. The graphic progression in particular is pathetic. We whine about the LOD radius in this sim - in the Farming Sim games, the high res LOD wouldn't make it halfway down the runway. A significant percentage of players say if you have FS19, there's no need to upgrade to 22 or 25. And yet people do, because the new games are new, and people want new.

I also think there are some significant improvements under the hood for FS2024 that should drive adoption. Yes, it's deeply flawed and yes, MS/Asobo really screwed up releasing it so half-baked, but on the other hand, the first time I hopped in that Cessna and took it for a spin, the difference in feeling between it and its 2020 counterpart was very blatant. 2024 planes feel much more like you're flying a plane through non-uniform air than 2020 planes do.

 

16 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

 

This "Common Sense" belief that v2024 requires a new video card or CPU is simply unfounded. If you had at least decent performance on v2020, you should have at least decent performance in v2024. In my case, v2024 is MORE performant than v2020, even though there is way more going on in the code than in v2020.

People are satisfied with v2020 - which is ALSO a streaming game (you just gotta do it in big monthly chunks),

Heck, there's a BUNCH of highly experienced simmers right here in AvSim who clearly have no idea what's going on upstream of their computer...

Nah, that sounds like , as you say,  'POPPYCOCK'.  Either that or MS don't know what the min/recommended and ideal specs for their programs actually are and that of course is very unlikely. What you are proffering is that if someone  is running recommended specs in 2020, and having "at least decent performance"  (which they most likely are) then without needing to upgrade they would now be running on min specs for 2024 (ignoring the fact that a CPU upgrade would be required to actually meet that min spec) and they "should have at least decent performance in v2024". Sorry but I don't subscribe to that theory. Min specs are always bad for user experience and if you have to dial things back in 2024 where you didn't in 2020, it is not the same experience is it?  But hey, I dont have the program so can't reasonably make a comment about that except I would have thought there would have been plenty of hoopla if FS 2024 recommended specs were the same as 2020's!! 

In any case my comment was primarily related to address the access issue which occurs because many users around the world simply can't meet the recommended streaming speeds let alone the ideal speeds, on a consistent basis if at all, and my point was that this may have affected MS2024 uptake. To write that off by simply stating that MS2020 is ALSO a streaming game suggests you severely misunderstand the different approach now being taken in FS 2024. But then, you did say "a BUNCH of highly experienced simmers right here in AvSim... clearly have no idea what's going on upstream of their computer..." 😄.

 

Cheers

Terry    

 

 

 

 

 

MSFS2024 reminds me a little of Cities II. Cities 1 was THE game, brilliant, especially with all the mods. Then came along Cities II and for over 1 year it's been a disaster. Still ongoing. The similarities are there. 

 

Anyway, CIV VII is out soon 😄 I wonder if that's in a beta state when released. Nothing would surprise me anymore. 

Edited January 27, 20251 yr by Ianrivaldosmith