Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Getting a Physical Box, and it's Huge

In “news I wouldn’t be reporting on if it wasn’t such a slow day”, Microsoft announced that it was partnering up with Aerosoft to sell their upcoming behemoth, Microsoft Flight Simulator, on physical disks in Europe. Not normally the kind of eye-popping news you go to gaming websites to read about, but while there is a certain novelty to buying physical disks in this increasingly digital age, this story does have a rather fun twist: it's going to be released as a ten – count em’, ten – disk box set, which contains 90GB worth of “game.”

According to Aerosoft, only one disk contains the actual simulation code, which is apparently quite small. The other nine disks, and most of that 90GB of data, is purely the planes themselves and the digitalized world that those planes can explore. The data that remains are optional stuff that’s supposed to help you with streaming and forming online parties.

Another nice little bonus that comes in the box is a physical manual, which, judging by the photos, is the size of a small to medium book. So if you were looking for a good introduction into the world of flight simulation, that’d probably be a good place to start.

Anyway, if you were hoping that you could grab this box and enjoy the simulation offline, think again: you still have to connect to Microsoft’s cloud service, which does a lot of the heavy lifting. The only reason you’d really need the box is if your internet isn’t good enough to download that many files, but is still good enough to communicate with the cloud that’s necessary for the thing to run. Or if you just want the novelty of it.

Apparently, it’s going to cost roughly the same as the digital edition, so if you’re in Europe and you have 120 bucks you need to get rid of, why not give this a go?