There surely can’t be many that haven’t been seduced by Flight Simulator’s promise of a whole, beautiful world to explore whenever and wherever they choose. Developer Asobo’s astonishing work at recreating the planet on a 1:1 scale has transcended the usual simming niche to present a proposition – a sort of virtual holiday on a harddrive – with genuine mass appeal. But there remains a key sticking point: hardware. Flight Simulator on PC is an absolute hog, even at its more modest settings, and the secondary route – namely Xbox Series X/S – has its own cost and availability barriers to contend with. There is, then, a whole untapped audience Asobo believes is eager to take to the skies – and that’s where Flight Simulator’s newly released Xbox Cloud Gaming edition comes in, making the experience available to anyone with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription and an internet connection.
Watching head of Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann pick up his phone over webcam and, within 30 seconds, be soaring majestically over Flight Simulator’s breathtaking rendition of central London elicits almost as much of a giddy thrill as seeing those first glorious trailers all those years ago – particularly from the perspective of a PC player like me whose mid-range GPU has never quite been up to the challenge of running the sim, even after contending with its 200GB+ footprint and tortuously long install and load times. Up until now, Asobo has only really talked about Flight Simulator’s cloud support in terms of Microsoft’s last-gen console, Xbox One, but it’s a proposition likely to be welcomed by anyone looking for a simpler, smoother, faster way to experience the sim and its World Updates, whether on Xbox, PC, or mobile.
It’s certainly impressive to see Flight Simulator’s rich rendition of the world running on a device the size of someone’s hand – and at a solid 1080p/30fps too – and it’s a technological feat borne of Asobo work on Flight Simulator’s acclaimed Xbox Series X/S port last year. “We launched in 2020 on PC and I think people were pretty impressed with what it looked like,” explains Neumann. “But it was a 150GB download, it was 30GB in memory, and it took us a while to get that over to Xbox Series X and S simply because of the amount of data – many people thought it was impossible – and then when you look at Xbox One, or even further down the tech stack, there’s just no memory for anything. So what we did on Series X and S was we started to put more and more stuff into the cloud [and] once that worked, we had basically won the battle, because what we have in the data centres in Azure is Xbox Series X and S machines, so now you have the entire game essentially streaming ready.” From that point, Neumann says it took “one dev and half of a UI guy” just a few months to get the cloud version ready for release today.
And the end result, says Neumann, has the power to be transformative. “Flight simming seemed so far away for so many people for so long,” he says. “It was basically a genre that was dedicated to the PC only and typically required a really beefy PC to even run…But I think you just need to have an entry point to fall in love with something, and I think what we’ve done on Xbox is we found a very large, interested audience. I was kind of not sure how long were they going to stick around – are they just going to visit the house and get out? – but I would say…hundreds of thousands if not millions, actually stuck around. I wouldn’t call them core simmers yet, but I think they have at least fallen in love, tasted the thing. So what cloud gaming does really is democratise this…because it works on the machines you already own.”