Microsoft Flight Simulator developers admit that despite running load tests that simulate 200,000 users, they 'completely underestimated' how many players actually wanted to play the game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator players are currently in a whirlwind, as thousands of users have reviewed bombed the games due to it being virtually unplayable. To quell the unrest and calm the players, Jorg Neumann and Sebastian Wloch, CEO and co-founder of Asobo, sat down to explain what had gone wrong.

Neumann: "We are so excited to finally share Microsoft Flight Simulator with you." "We're really proud of the work we've done with the sim and all of our partners. We feel that we've done a great job for the hobby. "We knew that Microsoft Flight Simulator was going to be a big hit, but we underestimated the level of excitement. It has really overwhelmed our infrastructure."

Microsoft Flight Simulator's Steam reviews currently have a 24% rating. This is a mostly negative rating. Players complain about missing planes, clunky control, or being thrown out of the game mid-game. One reviewer said, "I cannot recommend this to anyone at this time." "Default aircraft are streamed over the internet and textures can take up to several minutes to load. The buttons in your cockpit will be white and without text until the real-time download is complete. The game will freeze at 97%, crash and restart.

"We've struggled with our services for a few minutes," Wloch says. "At first, when the players start, they ask a server for data and that server will catch it in a databases. It's an enormous database and there's also a cache. This cache is currently becoming saturated.

"It is a cache which has been thoroughly tested throughout the entire takeout file. We've run load tests simulating up to 200,000 users and tonight it's completely overwhelmed. We've tried restarting the services and taken measures to throttle the number of users who can enter simultaneously. We increased the queue size by five times and the speed of the service. It worked for about 30 minutes, but then the cache collapsed. We're trying to investigate and are doing our best to ensure everyone can get in.

The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator streams its assets directly from the cloud, unlike previous versions. This reduces the size of game (it is only 50GB), and also lowers some of the PC requirements. It's also caused this instability, as the game streams constantly from the cloud and can't keep pace with the high demand for players flooding into the games right now.

Wloch says that when the server fails it restarts and tries again and again, which causes an extremely long initial load that is not supposed be that long. "After a time, if the missing data blocks, it will fail. You will not be able to finish the loading, and you will get a message. If the data was not blocking, you can still enter the sim but some planes and other content may be missing. It's due to the same server problem."

It looks like the queue screen is gone, as more players can log in to Microsoft Flight Simulator immediately. This was confirmed by an admin on the Discord server of the game late last night.

Neumann says, "We're sorry." "We want an apology. We made this video to be transparent and honest. We have some problems today. The team is working on it, and then we'll keep going."