Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has "overwhelmingly negative" Steam reviews due to launch issues, including endless load times caused by server issues.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what’s provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.
Reminds me of Amazon Games’ disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at launch.
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Hey you! You with your logic and reasoning and reading the issue notes from developers. You aren’t a real gamer, get out of here with that! We’re here to dogpile on a new game here!
From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn’t able to deliver what was promised in exchange.
Doesn’t mean I’m not a forgiving person who understands problems happen. At this point, if you expect a game to work perfectly you can’t buy day 1. Software is too complex to not expect any bugs day 1.
I’d say it’s more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.
The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don’t let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft’s systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.
If anything this reflects badly upon Microsoft’s cloud business. Dynamically spinning up enough servers shouldn’t be an issue nowadays.
It’s a consistent issue for Microsoft releases. You would think a company that sells cloud services would be capable of having a smooth launch.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what’s provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.
That’s the problem then, they should have hired some cloud experts if they’re selling a cloud-first service as a “game”.
When your game is a streaming service, you better put some cloud experts on the dev team.
One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is “the cloud”.
Reminds me of Amazon Games’ disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at launch.
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Hey you! You with your logic and reasoning and reading the issue notes from developers. You aren’t a real gamer, get out of here with that! We’re here to dogpile on a new game here!
From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn’t able to deliver what was promised in exchange.
Doesn’t mean I’m not a forgiving person who understands problems happen. At this point, if you expect a game to work perfectly you can’t buy day 1. Software is too complex to not expect any bugs day 1.
the cloud services are probably fine, their willingness to actually use the resources for a game may not be.
I bet the beancounters don’t like keeping excess capacity ready to go
Scaling capacity up and down in real time should be Microsoft’s core business now.
I’d say it’s more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.
The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don’t let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft’s systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.