Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has failed to lift off at launch after a flood of negative Steam reviews left the title with an “overwhelming negative score” following significant server issues on launch day.
Released on Nov. 19, Flight Simulator 2024 is the successor to the 2020 title of the same name. It promised shorter download times and more content streamed from the cloud, but this appears to have overwhelmed the servers, alongside a huge influx of players.
SteamDB recorded a 24-hour peak of almost 25,000 players on Steam, numbers that don’t take into consideration the Xbox playerbase and those playing off the Xbox app on PC, which led to major turbulence for those attempting to take off.
The community Discord and Reddit were flooded with disgruntled players who encountered everything from a frozen loading screen to game crashes. Server overload then led to a queue, which some players on Discord said they waited in for hours.
Unsurprisingly, the discourse in the community quickly resulted in an influx of negative reviews on Steam. At the time of writing, only 15 percent of over 2,500 reviews have been positive, resulting in an “overwhelmingly negative” score for the game.
It’s a similar situation on Xbox platforms, where Flight Simulator 2024 is available with a Game Pass subscription, as user scores currently sit at just two stars. Of the 745 reviews submitted, a whopping 73 percent are negative—and the few five-star reviews come from those asking about errors they’ve encountered or from reviews submitted in advance.
Steam players are particularly concerned by the server issues preventing them from playing. The platform’s rules state refunds are unavailable if you have played for more than two hours, though the server issues may be considered, given the circumstances.
Flight Simulator 2024 is certainly not the first game to be review-bombed following a troublesome launch, but it now faces an uphill battle to get players back on side.
