The idea of bringing the game to Sony’s console first surfaced more than two years ago.
In an interview with XDA Developers, franchise head Jörg Neumann revealed that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was the catalyst for the recent wave of Xbox exclusives that have begun appearing on PlayStation.
Neumann says the concept of releasing Flight Simulator on Sony hardware dates back roughly two and a half years. In 2023 the team ran into a major issue: the game’s size had ballooned to about 300 GB and, given planned content, threatened to exceed a terabyte. The solution was a radical redesign — Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was reworked into a compact, roughly 8 GB application while the primary game content was hosted in the cloud.
That architecture opened the door to other platforms. Neumann pitched a PlayStation 5 release to company leadership but was initially told it was “too early.” The situation changed when Sony made the first move: a simulator-enthusiast within Sony convinced management the project would integrate well with the PS5 ecosystem. After that, the Microsoft president returned to Neumann and said: “Remember that conversation about PlayStation a year ago? Sony’s interested too.”
Source: iXBT.games