By SimDispatch.de | May 2026
In September 2024, 24 content creators and media outlets were flown to the Grand Canyon by Microsoft. Accommodation paid. Helicopter rides included. Sixty minutes of hands-on time with a pre-release build on a curated machine, in a room full of other people who had also just been flown to the Grand Canyon by Microsoft.
Two months later, MSFS 2024 launched to “Overwhelmingly Negative” reviews on Steam.
Nobody really saw it coming. Or at least, nobody said anything.
FSElite published their hands-on the same day as the event. “It is time to go hands-on with Microsoft’s most ambitious simulator yet.” Loading times were fast. The UI was snappy. “Going from world map to simulator in less than 30 seconds was great.”
Simulation Daily went with: “Massive, Complex, Gorgeous, and Yet Accessible.”
Both disclosed the trip. FSElite noted Microsoft covered travel. Simulation Daily mentioned it at the bottom. So technically, the box was ticked.
But disclosure at the bottom of a glowing preview is not the same thing as critical coverage. It just means you mentioned it. Well done.
The Thin Client was the big one. The feature that would make everything faster, leaner, less storage-hungry. It was called “revolutionary” in multiple preview pieces.
It was also the thing that collapsed on launch day. Servers could not handle the load. Players stared at 0% loading screens for hours. Jorg Neumann, the head of the simulator, came out and called it “what can only be described as an awful launch experience.”
None of the preview coverage flagged the obvious risk. Twenty-five machines sharing one router at the preview event. Streaming architecture with no offline fallback. A feature entirely dependent on server capacity that had never been tested at scale. These were not hidden issues. They were sitting there.
To be fair, none of the people at that event were lying. The sim looked good on the day. Sixty minutes on a curated build in a controlled room is not enough time to stress-test a cloud streaming architecture. That’s not a defence of the coverage. That’s the whole problem with the format.
You’re not going to bite the hand that flew you to Arizona.
No outlet wants to file the negative preview and lose the invite next time.
Anyway. This stopped being about MSFS 2024 a while ago.
This is just how the sim community works now. FlightSimExpo has sponsors. YouTube channels run affiliate links for the products they review. Review copies come with embargo conditions. Creators who cover a developer positively get early access. Creators who do not, do not.
None of this is unique to flight simulation. But the community is small enough that the relationships are tight, the access is controlled, and the audience is passionate enough to spend $80 on a product sight unseen because someone they trusted said it was going to be great.
The MSFS 2024 launch is not old news. It is a demonstration of where things end up when the preview circuit is a paid trip and the review is what you write on the plane home.
FSElite published their Top 5 Features article on launch day itself, before the servers fell over. “We are super excited about this new chapter in digital aviation, and can’t wait to share more of it with you.”
A few hours later the Steam reviews were coming in.
On the official Microsoft Flight Simulator forums, the reaction was immediate. User SharpWave posted within hours of launch: “The only launch that I can think of in the same LEAGUE as this is SimCity 2013, and they handed out free games in the weeks afterwards because it was so embarrassing.” Another user, hhelikopter4891, was less measured: “This is just the beginning. It won’t get better later. The servers won’t be able to serve the users because everything is loaded from the servers. Jorg is also just pushing stupid empty marketing text, there’s nothing behind it.” brunovoid86 kept it simple: “This is not supposed to happen, it’s not an indie game, it’s a blockbuster made by a big tech.”
These were not fringe voices. These were the people who had read every preview, watched every dev stream, and pre-ordered anyway because the coverage told them to.
That gap is not an accident. It’s just what happens when the people with the most access have the most to lose by saying something honest.
None of this means those outlets are bad. Most of them are run by people who genuinely love this hobby. The problem isn’t bad people. It’s a setup that makes honesty inconvenient.
And nobody’s really talking about it.
