PMDG 737NG: eight months, one visual overhaul, and a sentence about coffee

The line that follows PMDG around is not about flight models or systems depth. It is about coffee.

Somewhere in the long run-up to the 737NG arriving on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, PMDG's Robert Randazzo suggested the upgrade from the 2020 version would cost about what you would pay for a couple of cups of coffee. When the 737-800 actually landed on 18 December 2025, the upgrade was $30. A thread appeared on PMDG's own forum with the title "Is $30 the price of a cup of coffee in the USA?", and the answer, for most people, was no.

Eight months later the aircraft is in a very different place than it was that December. The fleet is complete, the visual overhaul everyone was waiting for has shipped, and the crash reports have thinned out. So the question worth asking now is not whether the launch was handled badly. It obviously was. The question is what you actually get in August 2026, and whether it is worth the money at the prices being charged today.

We read through roughly two dozen sources for this one: launch coverage, two long-term revisits published months apart, the PMDG forums, the MSFS forums, AVSIM, review sites, and PMDG's own product pages. Every one of them is listed at the bottom.

What you are actually buying

The NG fleet is four separate aeroplanes, sold separately, at prices that are not remotely uniform.

Variant	Price	Upgrade from 2020
737-600	$34.99	~$13
737-700	$69.99–$74.99	~$30
737-800	$74.99	~$30
737-900	$49.99	~$20

The upgrade discount is 60% for existing MSFS 2020 owners. Sources disagree slightly on the -700's list price, which tells you something about how much the pricing has moved around.

Worth noting for anyone comparing: the MSFS 2020 version is still there, still supported, and after four years of patching it is mature in a way the 2024 build only recently became. If you are not on 2024 yet, you are not missing an aircraft. You are missing a rendering update.

On the PC the package is a one-to-one match with the Xbox build, which matters more than it sounds and is dealt with further down.

What the community consistently praises

Systems: still the reason anyone buys this

Start with the part that is not in dispute.

Nobody who spent time with this aircraft came away arguing that the systems modelling is anything other than excellent. Electrical, hydraulics, pressurisation, fuel, the FMC logic, the failures suite that PMDG claims covers "nearly all QRH scenarios" — the consistent report is that you can sit down with a real 737 manual, work through a procedure line by line, and the aeroplane responds the way the book says it should. That is a very short list of desktop aircraft.

PMDG describe the -700 build as "the most in-depth simulation of the type yet created for desktop simulation." That is marketing language, and marketing language is exactly what this review exists to interrogate, but on this specific point the community does not push back. Reviewers who were sharply critical of other aspects of the product still conceded the systems.

If depth is why you fly airliners, this is the benchmark, and it has been for a long time.

In the air

The flight model draws the second-most consistent praise, and it is worth separating from the systems because they are not the same thing.

Discussion on the official MSFS forums comparing the 737 against PMDG's own 777 kept landing on the same observation: the 737 is unusually pleasant to hand-fly. One poster noted that essentially every previewer who flew it, including several real-world pilots, remarked on how natural manual flying felt. Trim behaviour is sane. It goes where you point it. The aircraft rewards stick-and-rudder flying in a way the more automated 777 deliberately does not.

Ground handling was the older complaint here. The original MSFS 2020 release drew real criticism for taxi behaviour that slid under tiller input and would not hold a turn cleanly. More recent coverage of the 2024 build describes taxi and rollout as controlled and believable, so this looks like something that got fixed somewhere along the way rather than something that was never a problem.

The visuals, after May 2026

The High Detail Update is a substantial piece of work and the reception was warm across the board. Tens of thousands of hand-placed rivets, screws and fasteners. Reworked skin mapping. Rebuilt gear bays, engines, hatches, external controls and ground equipment. Better lighting, more exterior animation, additional detail through the cabin and cargo holds. The before-and-after comparisons circulating in May were genuinely striking.

The timing of it is a separate matter, and it belongs in the next section.

Sound

PMDG brought in Echo 19 for the audio, announced alongside the December release. The reception has been good: attenuation through the cabin, a properly built 3D environment, a clear step up from what PMDG had historically shipped.

The interesting signal is what came next. There is an active AVSIM thread discussing the third-party Boris sound pack for the 2024 737, and a workaround thread for getting it running. Simmers do not go hunting for replacement audio when the stock audio is unimprovable. Read that how you like — this is a community that replaces sound packs on aircraft it loves — but "good, and some people still swap it" is a fairer summary than "definitive."

What keeps coming up as a problem

The five months everyone argued about

This is where the launch fell down, and it is worth being precise about the sequence, because the sequence is the story.

PMDG's product page for the 737-800 advertises the aircraft as "significantly upgraded with new, lidar scanned models, improved textures and lighting." That copy describes the aircraft as it exists today. It did not describe the aircraft that shipped in December 2025. At launch the exterior was close enough to the MSFS 2020 model that reviewers openly questioned what the $30 was buying, and the phrase "ground-up revamp" started to look uncomfortable next to what people had actually installed.

The real visual work arrived slowly. PMDG teased the High Detail Update in March 2026, originally targeting late February. It shipped first with the 737-700 on 9 April. The 737-800 — the variant most people own, the flagship, the one that took the brunt of the pricing backlash — did not receive it until 14 May 2026, five months after launch. PMDG's explanation was that over 90 included liveries had to be redone, which is a genuine reason and also not much comfort if you paid in December.

So the claim on the product page is true now. It was not true when it was first made, and a lot of people paid money in the gap.

The GSX problem nobody wanted

PMDG dropped GSX door integration. The reasoning traces back to console parity: GSX does not exist on Xbox, and PMDG have committed to shipping one product that behaves the same everywhere.

That is a defensible strategy and it is genuinely why Xbox simmers have a study-level 737 at all, which is not nothing. It is also, unambiguously, PC users giving something up so that console users can have something. Long-time PC customers said so loudly and they were not wrong to. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on which platform you are sitting at.

The money

Here is the part that still stings, and it is worth separating the two complaints, because they are different.

The first is the price itself. $30 to move one aircraft to a new simulator, times four if you own the fleet, is real money — call it $95 for the full set at upgrade pricing. Fenix, FlightSimLabs, iFly and TFDi all handled their MSFS 2024 transitions more generously. That comparison was made constantly and it is a fair one.

The second is the expectation management, and it is the one that actually did the damage. If PMDG had said "the upgrade will be $30" in the first place, the reaction would have been grumbling. Saying it would cost about as much as a couple of coffees and then charging $30 produced something closer to betrayal. One long-term reviewer, ultimately positive about the aircraft, put it plainly: other companies "have offered better upgrade pathways, set expectations better, and offered better value." Opinion in the weeks after release ran the full distance from "the best thing since sliced bread" to "PMDG scammed us all."

Both of those are overreactions. That they coexisted in the same community about the same aeroplane tells you how badly the messaging went. What PMDG spent in this cycle was not technical credibility. It was goodwill, and they spent it on a sentence about coffee.

Performance and stability

The WASM crashes are the ugliest part of this aircraft's first eight months.

The symptom is memorable. You are deep into a flight, often somewhere past top of descent, and the cockpit instruments all go red at once. The sim keeps running. The aeroplane keeps flying. The avionics are simply dead, and so is your flight.

To PMDG's credit they were direct about the cause. Randazzo attributed it to "instability in the way MSFS allocates dynamic memory for third-party add-ons during normal operation" — a simulator-level problem, not a 737 problem. But they also conceded that the fix was about "minimising exposure rather than eliminating the root cause," which is an honest thing to say and a frustrating thing to hear when you have just lost a two-hour flight.

The patching has been steady. A March 2026 update caught a specific trigger involving flight-path edits after sequencing the first fix on a STAR, which is an extremely normal thing to do and would explain a lot of late-flight failures. Further WASM work landed in July. Reports have quietened noticeably. "Rare" is the honest word now, not "fixed."

There is also a live approach bug worth knowing about: intermittent ILS signal dropout somewhere between 500 and 50 feet AGL, sometimes taking VNAV or the radio altimeter callouts with it. It does not reproduce reliably, PMDG could not consistently trigger it in testing, and it appears to be environment-dependent. Pilots who hand-fly from the final approach fix never see it. If you fly coupled approaches to minimums, be ready to take over.

Who should buy it

Buying fresh, on MSFS 2024. Straightforwardly recommended. You are getting the aircraft in its finished state, with the High Detail Update included, at prices that are competitive for what is in the box. The 737-600 at $34.99 is the value pick in this entire category and it is not close.

Already own the 2020 version, still on 2020. No urgency at all. The 2020 build is mature and supported. Move when you move to 2024, not before.

Already own the 2020 version, now on 2024. This is the genuinely hard one, and the answer changed in May. Before the High Detail Update, the upgrade was difficult to justify. After it, you are getting a real visual generation jump, better audio and native 2024 support. Still annoying to pay for. Materially better than what you had.

Xbox. Buy it. It is the only study-level 737 you can get, and it is a one-to-one port of the PC build.

Deciding between this and a Fenix or an iFly. Different aeroplanes for different appetites. PMDG if you want depth, Boeing hand-flying, and a developer who will still be here in five years. The competition if external companion apps do not bother you and you want the newer engineering.

Where it stands today

Eight months of patching turned a contentious launch into a very good aeroplane. The systems were always the best available and still are. The flight model is a pleasure. The visuals finally match the marketing, even if the marketing got there first by five months.

If you are weighing this up today, you are evaluating a finished product rather than a promise, which is a materially different purchase from the one people made in December.