Aero Fire Global 24: the free upgrade was real, and it was the last good news

On 9 March 2025 South Oak Co did something almost nobody in this hobby does. It shipped a rebuilt version of its firefighting add-on for a new simulator, put it on simMarket at the same price as the old one, and then told everyone who had already bought the old one that they did not have to pay again. The wording is still on the page today, seventeen months later: "If you previously purchased AERO FIRE GLOBAL MSFS20 at simMarket, you are entitled for a free upgrade. Simply purchase the product and you will not be charged."

We have twice held that sentence up as a rebuke to the same developer's later behaviour. It deserves the credit. It is real, it is still honoured, and it is unusually generous.

It is also, as far as the public record shows, the last thing that happened to Aero Fire Global 24 that anyone should be pleased about. The product has sat on version 3.0.0 since August 2025. In May 2026 the same people — trading by then as SoCoSim — released FS Fire, a firefighting add-on with missions, multiplayer and a live global fire feed, at exactly the same €12.99, with no upgrade path for Aero Fire Global owners in either direction. Since then Aero Fire Global 24 has become the add-on that nobody names. When an MSFS 2024 pilot went to AVSIM on 13 July 2026 asking which wildfire add-ons to compare, he listed Cheyenne Design's Wildfires and SoCoSim's FS Fire. Four people replied. Nobody mentioned the product this developer had been selling for sixteen months.

So the question this review has to answer is not "is it any good". It is "is there any reason to buy the older, quieter, cheaper-feeling thing when the same house sells the louder one for the same money" — and, awkwardly for us, whether the generosity we praised bought its customers anything more than a seat in a cul-de-sac.

This review draws on 27 sources: both simMarket listings and their full rating breakdowns, the developer's own site, store pages, Facebook release notes and public GitHub account, the SoCoSim site, four press write-ups across two languages, three official MSFS forum threads, the MSFS 2024 SDK career documentation, an AVSIM comparison thread, the in-sim Marketplace record, two rival listings and four videos. Reddit is refused outright in our research environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing here, and for a product with only two store ratings in seventeen months that absence bites harder than usual.

What you are actually buying

A toolbar panel and a set of fire simobjects. Nothing else. There is no aircraft, no scenery and no career layer in the box, and the whole download is 27.72 MB.

Open the panel in flight and you get a moving map of real fires, sourced from NASA satellite data, which you can spawn into the world around you. You can also spawn a random fire nearby, or type coordinates and a size and put one exactly where you want it, or drop in props — fire trucks, rescue vehicles, ground crew. Fires only go out if you actually drop water or retardant on them. It works with any aircraft you own, and on MSFS 2024 it hooks the simulator's native water-drop effects for the 747 Global Super Tanker, the Viking CL-415 and the Air Tractor AT802.

	Aero Fire Global 24	Aero Fire Global (MSFS20)	FS Fire (MSFS24)
Simulator	MSFS 2024 only	MSFS 2020 only	MSFS 2024 (separate 2020 SKU)
simMarket price	€12.99 ex-VAT (€15.59 inc.)	€12.99 ex-VAT	€12.99 ex-VAT
Released	9 March 2025	29 August 2024	2 May 2026
Current version	3.0.0	3.0.1	1.1.4
Download size	27.72 MB	11.99 MB	26.68 MB
Missions	none	none	325
Multiplayer	none	none	synced sessions
Store ratings	2	6	3

Two things in that table matter more than the rest.

The first is that Aero Fire Global 24 is MSFS 2024 only, and Aero Fire Global is MSFS 2020 only. They are separate purchases with separate product IDs, and the free upgrade runs one way only: 2020 buyers get the 2024 build free, not the reverse. The offer is also conditional in a way the summaries tend to lose — it applies to people who bought at simMarket, logged into the same account. If you bought Aero Fire Global through the in-sim Marketplace, where it has been sold since 23 September 2024 and has collected forty-two ratings, that clause does not reach you at all.

The second is the price question, because it is not the one it looks like. simMarket shows €12.99 to an unresolved session at 0% VAT; FSElite quoted €15.59 for the same product in March 2025, and simFlight wrote "€12.99 (+Vat if appl.)" on 13 March 2025. Both are the same figure with and without twenty per cent. FS Addon Compare converts the simMarket SKU to $15.14 and shows the in-sim Marketplace at $12.99 — but the Marketplace record it is pricing is the MSFS 2020 build, and the developer's own August 2025 note said the 2024 update was still only "coming soon to the MSFS2024 Marketplace". I could not confirm the MSFS 2024 build is on the in-sim Marketplace at all. So: do not go looking for a cheaper store. simMarket is the developer's shop window — southoakco.com has no checkout of its own and links there — and €12.99 plus whatever VAT your country applies is the price, unchanged since launch.

The developer question, settled

Our two FS Fire reviews attribute that product to SoCoSim and this one to South Oak Co, as though they were neighbours. They are the same people, and the evidence is not circumstantial.

SoCoSim's own about text says it plainly: "SoCoSim is a new chapter, born from the experience built under the southoakco name." The underlying company is SOUTHOAKCO, LLC, founded in 2021 by Tyler Newport. And the two brands share infrastructure they never advertise: the public GitHub account southoakco, opened on 23 August 2024 — six days before Aero Fire Global went on sale — hosts the fire-map pages built for this product and the repository named "FS Fire Multiplayer Sessions", created on 27 February 2026, which is what FS Fire's live session browser runs on today. One account, both products, eighteen months apart. Whatever the storefronts say, this is one house.

What the community consistently praises

It was first, and the idea still lands. MSFS Addons, covering FS Fire in May 2026, went out of its way to credit "South Oak's Aero Fire Global back in 2024, which was the first tool to bring satellite-tracked fires into free flight mode" — a rival product's launch article giving the older one its due. When a user opened a wishlist thread on the official forums on 15 March 2025 asking Asobo to build NASA FIRMS data into the simulator natively, he cited Aero Fire Global by name as the thing already doing it. That is the highest compliment a third-party utility gets: being the reason people ask for the feature.

It does not care what you fly. This is the quiet reason it stayed useful. MSFS 2024's own aerial firefighting career runs on the aircraft the career gives you; Aero Fire Global runs on whatever is in your hangar. Every positive account of it in the record is somebody flying it in a machine it was never built around — a Taog's Lama with a Bambi Bucket, a Miltech MH-60, Taog's Huey, the default Air Tractor. The AVSIM crowd's standing complaint about firefighting in MSFS 2024 is that the sim gives you two scoopers and one VLAT and nothing else. This add-on's answer is to ignore the aircraft question entirely.

The developer answered his post. The single most useful line in the whole record is a simMarket review dated 24 March 2025, two weeks after launch. Łukasz wrote that he was "very pleasantly surprised by quick dev support" when his favourite Taog's Huey turned out not to be natively supported: "New feature was introduced in a matter of days to get me back to enjoying the addon. Both thumbs up." In a market where support means a ticket queue, that is worth reading twice — and it is dated, which matters for the section below.

Helicopter pilots got there first and stayed. Across both builds the enthusiasm is disproportionately from rotary flyers, who had the least to do in either simulator and the most to gain from a tool that spawns a fire and a bucket target wherever they happen to be. "This is a great addition to MSFS, especially for a heli enthusiast like me," wrote one buyer on 30 August 2024, singling out the spawn-a-random-fire-nearby button.

It is genuinely cheap and genuinely small. 27.72 MB, one panel, no dependencies, no launcher, no account.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Two words of warning about this section. The public sample for the MSFS 2024 build is two store ratings, both positive, and roughly a thousand cumulative video views. Nearly every complaint below was raised against the MSFS 2020 sibling, which shares the codebase and the panel but not the SKU. I have kept the two apart, and I have not imported a single word of it from either FS Fire review.

The fires are small and flat, and the record for the 2020 build says so in plain language. Status: still open. On 7 September 2025 a French buyer of Aero Fire Global MSFS20 wrote that the idea was very good but "le rendu est très décevant, les feux sont minuscule" — the rendering is very disappointing, the fires are tiny — and that fire-size adjustment was nonexistent. It is the only one-star rating either product has on simMarket. Nobody has said the same about the 2024 build in public. But the developer's own promotional screenshots for the 2024 build show one 747 drop over terrain in which the two fires are barely-visible orange flecks, and the fire objects in the AT-802 shot read as flat billboards from above. This is not the FS Fire complaint transplanted; the FS Fire 2024 raters all volunteered that the flames and smoke look wrong, and no Aero Fire Global 24 rater has said anything of the kind. It is a narrower finding, and it is a fair one: the flames here are cheap, and the marketing does not claim otherwise.

Fires land in the wrong places. Status: partly addressed, partly open. The longest-running thread on the product, on the official forums between August 2024 and June 2025, contains a detailed report from 22 December 2024 that live fires spawn over water, hang suspended in midair over mountainous terrain, or fail to render at all in volcanic regions. That is a consequence of spawning satellite hotspots as objects at ground level without checking what is underneath them, and it is inherent to the approach rather than a bug someone forgot. Version 3.0.0's user-submitted coordinates give you a way round it manually. Nothing has been said publicly about the automatic case since.

Switches that do not stay switched off. Status: still open on the 2020 build, unknown on this one. The same September 2025 review reports that fuselage drop remains active with the toggle set to OFF, which makes the drop look wrong, and that this started with an update. It is worth flagging because it is the same failure mode independent AVSIM posters later reported against FS Fire — live fires drawing with the toggle off in May 2026, a bucket reappearing after every scoop in August 2026. Three reports, three products, one house, one class of bug.

Xbox. Status: unresolved, and probably not your problem. A buyer of the MSFS 2020 build on the in-sim Marketplace called it a "COMPLETE waste of money" on 24 September 2024 because the map did not work at all on console. The MSFS 2020 Marketplace record still carries nineteen per cent one-star ratings out of forty-two, which is a lot of unhappy people for a product with a 3.8 average. Nothing in the MSFS 2024 listing claims Xbox support, so treat this build as PC-only until somebody says otherwise.

No changelog, anywhere. Not on the product page, not on the support page — which carries FAQs for FS Birds and Traffic in Sight and nothing at all for this — and not on simMarket beyond a bare version number. The only place the 3.0.0 release notes exist in public is a Facebook post.

Nobody is talking about it. Two simMarket ratings in seventeen months. Four videos, the largest of which is a 3.1K-view tutorial about the 2020 build. The 2024-specific videos are a 468-view MH-60 flight and a 463-view French stream. A July 2026 comparison thread that skips it entirely. That is not proof of a bad product; it is proof of an unsupported one.

And check the store's arithmetic. simMarket prints "5 out of 5" above this product's two ratings. They are one five-star and one four-star. The true mean is 4.5. The MSFS 2020 sibling prints "4" over six ratings that work out to 3.5 — and two of those six are the same buyer posting near-identical text twice on 30 August 2024, so it is really five people.

Performance and stability

There is no independent frame-rate testing of this add-on anywhere in the public record, and given a 27.72 MB payload that is not surprising. What it costs you is what the fire objects and prop simobjects cost you: spawn a dozen fires and a fleet of fire trucks into a dense forest and you are paying for a dozen fires and a fleet of fire trucks. Nobody in eighteen months has complained about frame rate, and in a hobby where people complain about frame rate reflexively, that silence is meaningful.

Stability reports are equally absent, which given the sample size proves less. What can be said is that the panel is a toolbar gauge doing simple work, it has not been reported to crash anyone's simulator, and the two people who rated the 2024 build both rated it four or five stars.

The live-data side is the part I would watch. The fire feed is the entire point of the product, it depends on an external satellite data source, and it has had no maintenance release in twelve months. Nothing suggests it has stopped working. Nothing has been done to it either.

Multiplayer, and the thing it never got

It has none, and it never did. On 15 March 2025, six days after launch, a French buyer left five stars and one question: "Un synchronisation multijoueur de prévu à l'avenir ?" — is multiplayer sync planned? A French streamer ran a session called "MSFS 2024 Aero Fire - Multiplayer - Le grand test !" that year, which in practice means several people in one MSFS session each spawning their own fires locally and hoping they lined up. Fourteen months later the same developer shipped that feature. In a different product, at the same price, with no discount for the people who asked.

Who should buy it

You already own Aero Fire Global for MSFS 2020 and you have moved to MSFS 2024 — buy it, today, and do not think about it. It costs you nothing. The offer has stood for seventeen months but it is a store promotion on a product the developer has stopped updating, and promotions get taken down. Log into the simMarket account you bought the original with, put it in the basket, and check that the total reads zero before you confirm. There are no refunds on upgrade purchases.

You want fires to fly at in MSFS 2024, you fly helicopters or a bush aircraft, and you want to spend as little as possible — try the free option first. aarque's Wildfire Panel App on flightsim.to does the same core job — NASA FIRMS hotspots, spawnable fires, extinguishable by drop, any aircraft, both simulators — in 283.8 KB, for nothing, and it was updated on 18 July 2026 with satellite maps and a new interface. It holds 4.5 from four reviews. Its top comment asks for better fire visuals, which tells you the flames are no prettier there. Download it, spend an evening, and only then decide whether €12.99 buys you enough extra.

You want firefighting to be an activity rather than a toy — buy FS Fire instead. Same developer, same price, 325 scored missions, synced multiplayer sessions, an actively maintained version number. Our review of it is not uncritical, but on the evidence it is the product this one was heading towards and never reached.

You want fire that behaves like fire — spend the extra on Cheyenne Design's Wildfires. €24.48, MSFS 2024 only, released 6 December 2025 and rebuilt in v1.1 on 31 May 2026 with a redesigned propagation engine: wind-driven spread, burn scars, deployable ground units. It is nearly twice the price and it is the only one of these that models a fire rather than placing one.

You fly MSFS 2020 — this is not your product. Aero Fire Global 24 will not install. Buy the MSFS 2020 SKU, and know before you do that it is the build carrying the one-star review and the toggle bug.

And if you already own FS Fire, do not buy this. There is nothing in it that FS Fire does not do better, and simMarket will not give you a penny off — the FS Fire listing's only upgrade offer is for people who bought the developer's relocation utility.

Where it stands today

Aero Fire Global 24 is the first good version of an idea that its own author has since replaced. Everything it does, FS Fire does; most of what it lacks, FS Fire has; and the free alternative on flightsim.to has closed the gap on the part that made it worth paying for in the first place. On 20 August 2026 it sat at number 49 on simMarket's weekly chart, thirty-two places behind FS Fire's MSFS 2024 build and ten behind FS Fire's MSFS 2020 build. It is not dead. It is being outsold by its own successor twice over.

The temptation is to call that abandonment, and it is not quite. The developer answered a customer's compatibility request in days in March 2025, shipped a substantive feature update in August 2025 that added coordinate spawning, custom fire sizes and scene props, and updated the MSFS 2020 build a fortnight after. A firm that walks away does not do that. What happened instead is more ordinary and, for the buyer, no different in effect: the good engineers moved to the new product, the old one was left working, and nobody has written a line about it since.

For anyone who bought Aero Fire Global for MSFS 2020 at simMarket, none of that costs anything, and the free upgrade remains one of the straighter deals in this market. For anyone opening their wallet in August 2026, the honest position is that this is a functional, cheap, unsupported utility competing against a free tool that matches its core feature and a paid tool from the same author that beats it everywhere else. Buy it for zero. Think hard before buying it for €12.99.