Long before the Xbox, Microsoft had Flight Simulator. Designed to allow pilots and enthusiasts to practice flying from their living room, the program won the Guinness World Record for the longest-running video-game series in 2012, three decades after its debut.

Now, to the surprise of its most ardent fanatics who thought Microsoft had abandoned the market, the company is planning to update its Flight Simulator X application for the first time since 2006. Earlier this month, the company said that sometime in 2020, consumers will be able to play it using Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service.

"I don't think anybody in our industry had a clue this was going on," said Reed Stough, managing partner of Rex Game Studios, which develops detailed clouds and weather patterns for flight simulator programs. "They might hint that they did, but honestly, I don't believe it."

On its own, Flight Simulator is a niche product that isn't likely to move the needle for a company that generates over $30 billion in quarterly revenue. But the update could showcase some of the cutting-edge technology coming out of Microsoft, including mapping imagery from the Azure public cloud, and it plays into CEO Satya Nadella's push toward subscription products and away from traditional packaged software.

Still, Microsoft may struggle to generate much excitement in a business that it helped popularize. That's because consumers have moved onto smartphones and attention spans have been shortened from the quick hits of social media. A single flight on Flight Simulator can span several hours.

"You've got so much competition in the general gaming area that it's hard for a simulator of flying a plane from point A to point B, without much of a purpose or drive behind it, to keep that momentum going," Stough said in an interview.

There are also rival products on the market. A simulator called X-Plane is developed by Laminar Research, and Lockheed Martin makes a program called Prepar3D (pronounced prepared).