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As flight simmers across the globe get ready to take to the skies in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 from the 19th of November there are expectations that trying to download the game on launch day might prove a bit of a handful with the servers getting hammered. If you want to make sure that no woes befall you on launch day you are probably wanting to know whether you can get ahead of the game and make sure you are not left in a holding pattern waiting for the game to download. Let’s have a look at your options
MSFS 2024 Pre-install
There has been a little bit of confusion around the Xbox Game Pass version of Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 and whether it can be pre-installed or not. We have already talked about how the game will come to Game Pass on Day One, but if you head to its store page right now, and for the last couple of weeks, you have been greeted with the option to Pre-Install the game, leading to people asking why it hasn’t been released it all the files were ready.
In fact, as you go through the motions of pre-installing, the boxes clearly tell you how much space on your storage you are going to need, insinuating that the whole thing is set to be downloaded there and then.
We can however confirm, that, no matter how misleading the process is, selecting a pre-install only downloads a couple of small admin-type files and file structures. The vast bulk of that 50GB download is not coming your way, at least not right now.
Another thing to bear in mind is the download for MSFS 2020 was much larger, so it is unlikely that 50GB will be the full thing anyway, we shall have to see how that pans out.
It is unclear at this stage whether the game will pre-install itself ahead of launch day, we assume it will, when Asabo and Microsoft are happy that the version they are going to push is finalized.
How big is MSFS 2024?
The file size for download listed on Xbox Game Pass is 50GB, but as mentioned above that will not include a lot of the things you will end up adding on. So factor that in mind when you decide which of your storage drives you are going to download it to.
