“Last August, Microsoft released the latest version of its Flight Simulator, extending the run of that franchise to 38 years and making it the longest-running product line in Microsoft’s history.”
The trick is that Microsoft already owned the planet. Bing Maps supplies the imagery and Blackshark’s machine learning chews through it on Azure. A French studio, Asobo, built the game on top. Flight Simulator is a very pretty demo for a cloud bill.