Thanks for the confirmation.

 

How many grains of sand on the beaches of the world?

Hey Jim,

 

Using some very rudimentary stats models, and not having the benefit of some hard numbers, I'd put the number between 240,000 and 270,000 at the center. This is based on someone who fires up flight sim 4 times a year all the way to the online guys who fly a few times or more per week. I might easily be wrong, but that's what the basic stats say. Weekly online guys ring up to be less than 3000 world wide. Probably 40 guys who fire up the sim at least 4 times per year for every online guy.

 

You win the gum ball my friend, though I was thinking I was the .33 guy (late again... darn it).

 

Pretty small market share for a company like Microsoft.

 

A couple of guys and I considered a business venture in flight sim, and decided against it based on the low numbers.

 

Now here is the interesting thing, A basic (but technical) market analysis I did last year showed that there was one hardware company (and only ONE, who was already purchased by another company) who the numbers showed was the in a prime position to take advantage of, if not corner the flight sim market at an excellent profit ratio and low risk for new product releases (specifically multi-platform overhead panels, MCPs, CDUs, and mutli-platform throttle quads). I can't say more than that, except that under current management it's not likely to happen - different business philosophy and they two are looking at other genres due to the FS market size.

 

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to who the company was?

I am so glad to know that the number I pulled out of my nether region has been confirmed by two well known statisticians.

 

Anyone what to know the lottery numbers for tomorrow?

Throw every username from Simviation, AVSIM.ru, AVSIM and FS.com in to an MSAccess database, do a SELECT query grouping by username and you will have a good idea of the number of hobbyists our there. Seems pretty simple if people cooperated.

LOL Jeff!

 

What happens is a person uses different names at each site?

 

What about those that don't belong to any site?

 

I still think my number is the exact truth as of this date.

 

Please add 247.5 after December 25th.

 

Edit:

Go Red Wings.

 

Go Lions?

I was interested in this once, and took a quick glance at available site traffic numbers at several of the more well known forums for which the data was available at the time. The general pattern was of steady decline, except for spikes around significant release dates. (God knows how much of that was bot traffic!)

 

Only a few sites seemed to buck the trend.

 

Of course that only tells part of the story, as I happily toyed with FSX off and on for years before accidentally bumping into First Megascenery and then Aerosoft and the rest of the "community"

 

I am sure there are tons of fliers out there that will never be seen on these sites.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

Total as of 08th Dec 2012 (units): 0.11m

Ref: http://www.vgchartz.com/game/14689/microsoft-flight-simulator-x/

 

----------------------------

 

Rough assumption: Retail Price $60 with 50% retailer markup = $30 / copy.

 

$30 * 0.11M = $3.3 Million

 

Wow. No wonder they closed it down !!

($3.3 Million, 100 people over 4 years = $8.3K / year per person)

 

====================

 

By Comparison: Microsoft Flight Simulator 31st October 1996

5.12 Million Units

 

Ref: http://www.vgchartz....ight-simulator/

LOL Jeff!

 

What happens is a person uses different names at each site?

 

What about those that don't belong to any site?

 

I still think my number is the exact truth as of this date.

 

Please add 247.5 after December 25th.

 

Edit:

Go Red Wings.

 

Go Lions?

 

You Detroit guys need to get out of the cold- it really cleared my head up ( a former Detroiter of 31 years)! :lol:

237.3

Na! Too warm here lately!!

 

FYI FSX sold WAY more than .11 million.

Now I want to know how many stars are in the sky?

 

Jim there are between 100 and 200 billion stars in each galaxy and there are roughly 100 billion galaxys in the known universe.

 

But i think only 1 galaxy, called 'the Milky Way' has somewhere lost in a little corner 1 small star called 'Sun' with 1 little blue planet called 'Earth' where (according to you) 263,590.33 kind of evolved apes (according to me) of the roughly 7 billion available, try to fly while sitting at their desk, and i am one of them.

 

To summarize: Some of the smart :Monkey: of the little blue planet try to :p0502: to have :yahoo:!

double post -_-

Na! Too warm here lately!!

 

FYI FSX sold WAY more than .11 million.

 

"For My Information" : What is your source of the above information ?

 

On closer examination, it would seem the 0.11 million number I referenced was just for 2011 & 2012 (the source does not seem to have sales figures for previous years).

It was not until one looked deeper, into the data by year, that it was obvious that their Total Numbers, were only for the past 2 years !!

 

So yes, TOTAL sales should be very significantly higher, as one would have expected sales in the year it was released, and the next four, would have been far higher than more recently.

 

But TOTAL sales aside, a more relevant number is the number of copies still being used, on a regular basis.

 

I suspect that estimate is only know to Microsoft, if they keep any records of number of License verifications, when FSX is started, and calls into them. (For those that are Online when running FSX)

So how are you guys going to find out the answer?

 

How is P3D the answer to anything seeing it is not an entertainment piece of software? (No it will not be. MS is not going to say to LM: "OK 2.0 can be sold as entertainment software.")

 

I've brought this up b4 in the p3d threads but p3d could very well be a big piece of the pie in the future. Entertainment is just a words that can be changed. If they were hung up on it then something is fishy because they are welcoming and encouraging add on devas with welcome arms and all these add ons are developed for fsx. They r entertainment products. If they wanted nothing to do with it then why invite them and support them.

So when 2.0 hits whatever the wording, that is a very big slice of this whole flight simmng community. Their market includes a whole bunch of corporate clients flying p3d for training. The X fsx`rs r merely a bonus. And the addons enhance it further.

 

Your hung up on exact numbers my friend and mocking it.

This was a general statement for the approximate overall flight swimming community. And devs wold have to have estimation of this for projected sales as part of the businss plan to make sure its worth it.

 

But all good. Were all having fun with it at least.

 

 

The original question was how many simmers world wide not in the universe.

 

However, based on;

1. Latest Kelper results indicates at least 1.3 planets per star on average.

2. 100 billion stars per Galaxy (10^11)

3. 100 billion galaxies in this universe.

4. 1 in a billion chance that planet is in the Goldilocks zone with water

5. 1 in a billion chance life intelligent has evolved on said planet

6. 235.000 average interested in simming on each planet.

 

Then the total potential simmers in this universe would be

 

(10^11 * 10^11 )

------------------- * 1.3 * 235,000

(10^9 * 10^9)

 

 

Which is about 3 Billion people which means Microsoft should start again asap.

 

Of course the added benefit is that as it would take many years to distribute flight sim that far, by the time it arrived, their PC's would be fast enough to run it

Now I want to know how many stars are in the sky?

 

Only one at the Big Bang!

 

 

Thanks for the confirmation.

 

How many grains of sand on the beaches of the world?

 

Still counting - I'll let you know.