Microsoft Flight Sim has doubled its players twice – and there’s a plan to attract even more users

Xbox’s first-party games operation may be going through a painful period of “activation” from new development studios and acquisition integration, but while it’s moving more slowly in those areas, a key success has been the reliable humming in the background with impressive and enviable growth: Microsoft flight simulator.

At an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of Flight Simulator, a milestone reminding that this is MicrosoftThe oldest franchise, which surpassed both Windows and Office by a handful of years, the game’s developers highlighted their newfound success with one simple statistic: Flight Simulator’s player base has doubled. Twice.

To be specific, Flight Simulator has enjoyed a couple of releases. It first came to the PC and was met with critical acclaim and wide acceptance. Later, it was released on Xbox Series X/S, a move that doubled its player base. Then earlier this year the game was made xcloud compatible, making it playable on Xbox One, older spec PCs, and even mobile. This doubled the player base again.

That invites a natural question: where now? With Microsoft’s priority platforms now covered, how does Flight Simulator keep up that incredible momentum? We asked series boss Jorg Neumann.

“The vision that I love when Phil talks about it, and Satya talks about it now as well, is that we’re going to hit three billion players. Have we reached three billion players? No,” Neumann offers.

“So when you say we’ve maxed out, what do you mean? I’m on the journey with Microsoft here at Microsoft is going to go: Xboxes are where they are, PCs are everywhere, and then xcloud can bring you everywhere. And I think that journey has just begun.”

“So I’m very interested in, for example, places like India, where flight simulation doesn’t exist, but there are 1.4 billion people. And what’s cool is the Indian government, I mean, this totally geeky flight simulation stuff, but the Indian government, always (like Turkey and North Korea and some other countries), they don’t allow data to be exported. That’s just what it is, right? But India just changed that.”

India has just joined the open data initiative; something common in much of the rest of the world, and a scheme of which Microsoft is part. The Indian government has also announced plans to fund scanning of the country’s top 100 cities, creating exactly the kind of data needed to create Flight Simulator’s ‘digital twin’ of Earth.

“And then I get a phone call, as I often do, and a guy from India says, ‘We’re doing cities in India, are you interested in that?’ Yes! When you got them,” adds Neumann.

“So at some point, we’ll do an update on India and try to do justice to the country and speak to the heart.”

This, Neumann says, is a big focus of his work now: trying to understand the world and what makes people tick in each country, as well as what makes them proud. Flight Simulator has always been focused on aircraft preservation and aviation history, but now, with near-real fidelity, it’s even more so. With the addition of the scanned model of Earth, there is also something else being preserved: the planet itself. That’s where the idea of ​​’World Updates’ came from, which refines the digital version of the planet with more hand-crafted data.

“A country is just a concept, but it is also the story of a people, which can help us understand how we can make them feel connected to what we are doing,” reflects Neumann. This, he points out, is absolutely key to the future growth of Flight Simulator.

“What is your history with aviation, for example? Or what famous places should I depict that are a proper representation of the country as a whole. I spend a lot of time with it, and it’s important. So far, I would say the places we’ve been: there’s an explosion. An explosion of people playing.

“Japan was the first. There was no flight simulation. You didn’t even play PC games, did you? So flight simulation was not the thing at all. They had Ace Combat, which is totally different.

“And now in Japan there are, depending on the day, between 50 and 100,000 people a day. Still today, it’s been two years since we did this update, and now they’re on a simmer.”

Much of this international expansion depends not only on global updates, but also on xcloud. Neumann describes it in its current form as the “kid’s version” of what the service is capable of, seeing it as a key tool in bringing Flight Simulator, which has enormous casual appeal, to a broader audience. But the accessibility of the game will be mixed with other elements, including possible content related to other attractive brands and the irresistible lure of being able to fly over your home country, city or even building with amazing fidelity. That, Neumann says, is what will create new simmer flights and keep the player base growing.

“In my opinion, the value that xcloud offers to a non-superhardcore gamer is unmatched,” argues Neumann, citing examples of large numbers of gamers playing Flight Sim on mobile despite its complexity, or how idle PC gamers now they can jump into the flight simulator on an old laptop, via the cloud, without the expense of buying a high-end PC.

“But it takes time with that kind of thing. I believe that world updates are the way to the soul. That is the most important”.