While Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has finally arrived on PS5, the game’s developers – Asobo Studio – had apparently pitched a PlayStation release of the game when its current incarnation was still early in its development. Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann, in an interview with XDA, revealed this, and noted that Xbox’s leadership had responded by saying “no”.
Neumann went into detail about how Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 was originally released on PC back in August 2020. At the time, however, the title had fairly hefty storage requirements even in its first year. With 2023 seeing more content released for the game and ballooning its size up to 300 GB, Neumann noted that “we need to do something,” which ultimately gave rise to the cloud-oriented nature of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 that only has an 8 GB client and streams data through the cloud as needed.
“That made it possible to go to other platforms, so I proposed, probably two and a half years ago, to go to PlayStation,” said Neumann. “It was probably a little bit before its time because I was told no. Then, somebody from Sony who grew up with flight simulation thought it would be a great addition to the Sony portfolio. They reached out proactively to our President, who then came back to me and said, ‘Hey, remember when we talked about the PlayStation thing a year ago? Sony is also interested.’”
He credits this discussion between Sony and Xbox with sparking what would eventually become a larger movement across Xbox Game Studios to release games on PlayStation as well. As for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, however, Neumann acknowledges that the PlayStation port took time owing to the optimisation it required, especially when it comes to compatibility with the DualSense controller as well as PlayStation VR2. The latter, he noted, is still in the works.
“I think that really kicked off a whole avalanche of Xbox titles coming to PlayStation,” he said. “Then, we worked on it. It took a while, as we had to obviously finish Flight Simulator 2024, which came out about a year ago. After that, we spent a lot of time optimizing for PS5 and making sure the controller works great. We also worked on the VR execution; it’s not quite there yet, but it’s coming.”
Neumann also confirmed that Asobo Studios worked with Climax Studios to develop the PS5 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. He said that his prior experience in working with the studio on titles like Crackdown, as well as Climax Studios’ own experience in working on titles for PS5 made it a good fit.
“I hired a company I’ve worked with in the past called Climax Studios. I worked with them on Crackdown and some other games back in the day. I’ve been at Microsoft for a long time. I talked to the head of Climax, and they have a lot of experience doing PS5 work, so they did a lot of the work.”
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is now available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review of the PS5 release. As for how it stacks up against other versions, check out our graphics analysis.
