Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

The game was developed by the French video game studio Asobo Studio and published by Xbox Game Studios. Asobo previously worked on narrative adventure games like *A Plague Tale: Innocence* before taking on this massive simulation project. Their proprietary engine handles the streaming of the entire globe's geographic data.

The simulator pulls real-time data from Bing Maps satellite imagery and Microsoft Azure cloud services to procedurally generate the 3D world. It streams this high-resolution topographic data directly to the player's PC or console, creating photorealistic terrain. It also pulls real-time weather data, meaning the skies in-game match the real-world weather exactly.

The simulation was released for Windows PC on August 18, 2020. It later launched for the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles in July 2021, making it the first major entry in the franchise to appear on a home console in decades. A VR version for the HP Reverb G2 was also announced and released shortly after the PC launch.

Yes, the game features over 37,000 real-world airports, manually hand-crafted in premium editions and procedurally generated for the rest. It also integrates real-world navigational data, airways, and flight plans. Pilots can practice actual IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) approaches using real-world avionics and GPS systems modeled identically to their aircraft counterparts.