The highly-awaited Microsoft Flight Simulator's launch on Steam has been less than ideal. Several players are unable to access the premium content they paid for, while others cannot download or play the game altogether. The developers are aware of some of the issues, and will likely issue a fix soon.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Steam-version-of-Microsoft-Flight-Simulator-is-plagued-with-download-issues-non-availability-of-content-and-a-host-of-other-problems.488018.0.html
I think we are being a bit dramatic, considering within 12 hours of release, the situation with the premium content not downloading had been resolved. This sim and its release had a lot of moving parts, and I for one think they did an outstanding job. I would rather deal with the occasional small hiccup and have access to the sim now, than wait for them to work out every single little nitpick item on the list, and release it 6 months from now. It has been 14 years since they last released a flight sim, maybe we can cut them a little slack?
I found a solution if the screen freezes on "Welcome, set your experience", so I don't have to download the whole game again. In the folder <C:\Users\[youruser]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_[something]\LocalCache\Packages\Official\OneStore> sort by order of modification, delete * .fspatch and *.fspackage files, and last modified folder, open the game, if it keeps freezing, delete the next last modified folder, and so on until the game starts. You no longer have to download everything again.
Masterpiece you say. If no reasonable joystick support, horrible AI, comical ATC and virtually no city scenery without paying through the nose is a masterpiece then .... yah, ok, it's a masterPOS
I'm one of the ones who paid for the Steam version of FS 2020 and can't get it to open. It wouldn't open to start with, so I contacted Steam. They said they don't provide support- that I had to contact Microsoft. Microsoft was able to walk me through getting the game reinstalled and it worked for a while. Now, the game won't launch again. Neither Steam nor Microsoft will answer my support requests. So, I just lost my money by paying for a game that won't work.
If anyone knows how to get the game to work on a PC, feel free to message me. I'm beyond frustrated at this point.