Start Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 without intro videos

September 22, 2022 · msfs2020, flight simulator

When you start up Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, you are always greeted with some introduction video's, showing the sponsors and brands that worked on the product. However if you have to develop products, or add-ons for the sim, you'll likely have to start and restart the sims often.

To speed up the (re)start of the simulator, you can easily disable the video's, reducing the startup time.

Steam version

In the Steam Library, right-click on the game title, and select Properties.
Under the General tab, click the Set launch options button.
Enter the following -FastLaunch
Close the Properties window, and launch the game.

Microsoft Store version

Right click on the desktop, and click New and then Shortcut.

In the window, enter the following:

cmd.exe /C start shell:AppsFolder\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App "-FastLaunch"

Click Next and give the shortcut a name such as MSFS 2020.
Click on Finish, to save and close the window.
To Run, double click the newly created shortcut.

Using MSFS2020 SDK

If you have the SDK installed on your machine, you can also execute the Tools/bin/fsdevmodelauncher.exe which basically does a similar trick