[Music] I'm ready for the danger zone, but we'll get to that in just a second. When Microsoft Flight Simulator launched last year on PC, reviewers and gamers alike were blown away by the stunning visuals and the depth of simulation. Joining us is York Newman, the head of Microsoft Flight Simulator. York, thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. Good to meet you. Those are cool glasses. You got your jacket? Yeah, I got my jacket as well. So, you had some announcements this Sunday about Microsoft Flight Simulator. Can you go into that a little bit? Yeah, it was super cool. We announced that Microsoft Flight Simulator is coming to Xbox Series X and S, and the franchise has an awesome history on the PC. It's going back all the way to 1982. You know, it predates Office and Windows. And when we launched last year, it was on the PC only, and it was a really warm welcome from simmers and from press and from people who have never flown flights in before. So, we're super excited.

that it comes to console now and um so for the first time in the history of the franchise. So, I've been playing flight simulator since last year on PC. I have a 3080, but is now coming to the Xbox Series X and S. What sorcery are you doing to get this running on both of those consoles? I have to know. I think it's a combination of two things really. My first off, it's a super powerful console. Yes, and then we are really using the Microsoft tech stack in an interesting way. So, as you know, Sirius X and S is like a beast. The GPU is awesome, super powerful CPU with multiple cores, RAM, fast RAM, and we can run in 4K. That's super important for planes because you sit there in the cockpit, you need to be able to read all the text, SSD, fast internet. So, it's basically the equivalent of a really powerful high-end PC. And on top of that, on flights, and we're using the Microsoft stack a lot like we have

2.5 petabytes of data. It's 1.6 million CDs sitting on Azure, and we're basically streaming that down as you go. And we also do machine learning algorithms up there, and that's how we build procedurally in runtime 1.5 billion houses and 2 trillion trees. So, it's a combination of those two things: super powerful console, super good use of the Microsoft tech stack. You get it to work on console; that is fantastic. Now, with Xbox Game Pass and with it coming to console, you're going to expose Flight Simulator to a whole lot of new gamers, right? So, what are some of the things that you're going to do to make it more accessible to a wider audience? So, we had to, you're exactly right, we had a little bit of that last year when we launched because we knew the flight simmers, that's their hobby. They came in, they know everything about aviation, they know exactly what to do. But we had a lot of people come into Xbox Game Pass on PC.

and basically tried for the first time. So, we even on the PC launch, we did a bunch of work on onboarding with tutorials. We give some assistance, but now for this Xbox version, we're actually doing a ton more. And I actually brought you a little video. And so, there's five things we did. The first thing, if you're becoming a pilot, the first thing you do is you do a discovery flight. It's basically, you know, you have a flight instructor next to you. He does most of the work, he or she, and you get to steer the plane and feel really good about yourself, right? And so, we said we need to recreate that. So, we picked two ten places on Earth, like some of the most compelling places, like Mount Everest or Rio de Janeiro or New York or the pyramids, and we basically put you on a plane. It's ready to go, it's beautiful weather, and all you need to do is fly and have fun. And it really is an onboarding

experience. It's super good. And then we noticed on the PC side that people really love to explore the world in flight sim. I did that. I've spent like a month in South America, and I've never been to South America, and it was super cool. But it was only visuals, and you know, so you didn't quite understand how everything fits together. So now we added labels, and Bing has all these labels basically for every POI, like famous place, a river, or mountain. So we have all those now, and we put that into the world map. And even if you go down and you try to plan out your flight, you can now see all the cities around you, and it totally transforms the experience. Same in-game. So we now have labels in-game where you see, you know, here's Everett over there is, you know, whatever, and you learn about the planet more, and it's a much more enriching experience just experiencing the planet. Oh, well, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the next thing

we did um is that we re-ramped the tutorials. We wanted to basically smoothen out the onboarding experience. We wanted to retain knowledge more so. We had eight tutorials on the PC, now we have 22. And they're shorter, they're much more focused, and we have a performance um a performance indicator system. So basically, it rates you on how you did, and you get a score. And honestly, I can speak for myself, like I'm totally motivated to get better and better and better. And with that, you learn more and more how do you how you really fly. So it's been super successful, and I think it's going to help newcomers a lot. The next feature that we have is it's called flight assistant, which I use a lot um. It's basically just imagine you fly over New York and you see you you want to actually just look at the landscape and to look at the city, but you you know eventually you want to go to Brooklyn Bridge. So on that flight instructor you

can now uh flight assistance. You can now click on go to Brooklyn Bridge, and the AI, almost like a co-pilot next to you, will fly you to the Brooklyn Bridge, and you can just look around and have an interesting time. Same with airports, which are sometimes challenging for people. Like, we can click on the airport and say, Please land me at, say, Newark Airport. And then the last thing is, if you really get yourself in trouble, like you stall out the plane or something like that, you can actually now click into, you can now go and basically say, Recover, and it's almost like the pilot is sitting next to you. Super helpful. I think that people will love it. And the last thing was, um, you know, we learned that people are, everybody's good at taking off, but some people are hesitant to land, specifically when you look at, like, big international airports, and they seem scary, and you need to talk to the air traffic controller and all that super technical. So we added a new feature called Land Anywhere, just let them land anywhere, and then when you

do that. The first thing you see is 71% of the planet is water. Yes, so we added basically floats to a bunch of our planes, and you can land everywhere now on the ocean or in rivers or wherever. Same with snow, so we have skis on our planes now, and so you can go to the polar regions, mountaintops, or when it's winter because we have winter when it's snowing. You can now land anywhere. So, I think those five things in combination will really make it easier for people who have never been in a flight sim because it's, you know, we made a decision not to dumb down the flight sim. It's not easy. It's not gamified. Like, we made, we gave you a system. We gave assistances to help you learn how to actually play, fly a plane. I think we're going to achieve that. So, one thing on PC is there's a ton of flight accessories that you can use as far as various peripherals and controls. What are you going to be able to bring

to the console that can somewhat replicate that experience. Totally. Yeah, it's a good news story. So, there's two really good flight sticks already on the console. It's the Thrustmaster T Flight Hotels 1, but you have that. And then there's also the Hoti Horta's flight stick. And so, we fully support those two. And then we work with all the main top-notch peripheral makers, both on PC and Xbox. And I can all I can say is they're going to be some really good announcements coming up. And for Core Summer, I can say you can now play. We have the software to have a full Core Sim experience. And we'll have the hardware on Xbox, all for the first time on a console. It's going to be great. Oh, that's going to be great. Now, we obviously had the funny start with the Top Gun Maverick expansion pack. You announced that, but can you go into a little more detail about that? Yeah, I mean, you can expect. We couldn't be more excited, right? Like, I

mean it's really like a dream come true. If you think about entertainment and the franchises that celebrate aviation, you will actually come to Microsoft Flight Simulator and Top Gun, and it's a perfect marriage. So, um, I can't say that much about it because the movie obviously is, you know, keeps everything under wraps. But if you look, if you watch the trailer carefully, you saw there's some F-18s and there's an aircraft carrier. There might be another plane, and then I can say is we're going to go fast, like really fast, and we're going to be in the danger zone. That is going to be great, really looking forward to that. Now, as we wrap this up, there's not much else you can say about the Maverick expansion pack, but what else can people expect from Flight Simulator in the near future? A lot. So, um, ever since launch, we said we're gonna launch, we're gonna launch and have a new update, like a big meaningful update, every single month. And we launched nine months ago, and we had nine updates.

uh so we have something called world updates where we just pick a zone on earth like the United States or Japan or like England and Ireland and we make that really better like we get the latest possible the best possible satellite imagery. We create an elevation map that basically makes the mountains look better. We create 3D cities like after launch. We launched London and Paris and we also make missions so we celebrate the planet like with these updates and we're just going to go around the planet. We're shipping two more this year and six more next year and then we also have something called sim updates simulation updates where we work with the manufacturers of planes with the flight sim community out there that knows tons about everything and also with real-world pilots and we're basically making the sim better and better. The goal is to make the ultimate sim. It's the perfect thing of totally authentic and then on top of that you should expect the unexpected like with just like with Maverick which I don't

think people really saw coming. There will be more of that, and I think all I can say is it'll get the gamers and the simmers both their hearts pounding. So keep watching the skies. That is awesome. Now again, I'm so excited that more people are going to get to play Flight Simulator. I've been playing it on PC. I love it. I highly recommend everyone do the flight from LA to Paris. It's really good, very cathartic. But as we get out of here, I want to thank you so much for taking some time to talk about Flight Simulator. Can't wait for that expansion pack. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you.

Microsoft Flight Simulator - Game Overview | Xbox Games Showcase

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Microsoft Flight Simulator - Game Overview | Xbox Games Showcase

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