In August this year, it’s been two years since the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, a flight simulation that takes your breath away not only by its graphics, but also the treatment of our entire planet Earth with thousands of detailed cities.
As it turns out, the game is in high demand. While we don’t have exact numbers, we know that the player base has doubled in two years. Twice.
The first double occurred a year after release, as Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived on the Xbox X|S Series platform.
The next doubling occurred earlier this year, as Microsoft released the game on the xCloud platform, giving it access to players on Xbox One, weaker PCs, as well as mobile phones. And it’s far from over, as franchise boss Jorg Neumann knows where to get more players.
He has revealed his plan in an interview with VG247, and it is something that has been going on in Flight Simulator for a long time – World updates.
These are updates of the planet state by state, where individual countries get a more detailed treatment.
The first such treatment was given to Japan. “Flight sims weren’t played in Japan. They don’t even play on computers there, right? So flight simulators didn’t mean anything there. They had Ace Combat, but that’s a whole different thing. And now, depending on the day, 50 to 100 thousand people play. In Japan! Right now, even though it’s been two years since this update was released. They’re flyers now,” Neumann revealed.
He says the key to success is to correctly identify not only which cities to hit in these updates, but to also look at the history and the general perception of aviation in that country. Simply to meet the local population.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is not just about aviation anymore, it becomes an archive of the whole Earth and its countries with the planet model.
And India will soon be joining in. Just like Turkey and North Korea, it does not provide data about its country, which the Indian government has decided to change, and even started a project to scan one hundred of India’s most important cities. This is an ideal opportunity for Microsoft.
“I got a call like this one day, like I have so many times, and some guy from India says, ‘We’re doing Indian cities, are you interested?’ When they are. So sometime in the future we’ll do an update of India and try to speak to the heart of its people,” Neumann said.
This will open up Microsoft’s access to 1.4 billion people in India, but also to more and more potential customers in other countries around the world that will gradually see its update.
No doubt, then, the current Microsoft Flight Simulator will be with us for a long time, maybe indeed forever, as the archive preserving not just aviation.
