Microsoft Flight Simulator Crosses 10 Million Players

Microsoft Flight Simulator has just crossed an important milestone: More than 10 million pilots have now played the game across Windows, Xbox, and Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft announced today.

After an impressive debut on PC back in 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator shipped on Xbox Series X|S consoles a year later and it has received 27 free content updates since launch. Last month, the 40th Anniversary Edition of the game introduced helicopters and gliders for the first time in the history of the franchise.

In addition to this 10 million players milestone, Microsoft shared the following stats highlighting what pilots accomplished since Microsoft Flight Simulator launched 2 years ago:

• 500 million flights
• 40 billion miles flown
• Equivalent of 10 million trips around the Earth
• Equivalent of 200 round trips from the Earth to the Sun

“We have exciting plans for 2023 and beyond,” teased Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator today. It may be difficult to top the Top Gun: Maverick expansion that was released alongside the movie back in May, but you never know. Microsoft and developer Asobo Studios previously said that this latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator would be supported for 10 years, which is quite rare for video games these days.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is still free to play with Game Pass, and it also remains a cool demo for Xbox Cloud Gaming. This is actually one of Microsoft’s first cloud-native games, and it uses the company’s Azure cloud and Bing Maps data to recreate the entire planet with real-time weather.