We have over 110,000 registered members now and they have all been active within the last 12 months. We are averaging over 100 new registrants every day (we block 100's of spammers weekly, so they are not included in the number). I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

 

This is a graph by week of new registrants. The jump in registrations results from us shutting down guest access to all forum features in order to better serve our registered members.

 

My conclusion is that the customers figure provided by Orbx themselves is likely more or less close.  And of those only some percentage will actually get Global for various reasons.  Deep pocketed types are already downloading or already have it installed ...some of us are more budgeted (although I intend to get this product as overall it appears to me to be better then GEX), some folks are more focused on the planes and have all the latest and greatest.

 

I bet I'm not far off what sales will be!  Regardless, Orbx folks are very well versed on how the sim works and have taken a huge investment risk in going for the Global, and trusting that the followup work on regions, airports etc will still keep a good cash-flow. 

 

Hats off to them for having the jam to take this task on.

 

 

Hats off to them for having the jam to take this task on.

 

Amen to that. At least they didn't pull the Aerosoft Flight Simulator trick of all talk and no action.

Im sure with the recent registered only policy and with the pending 777 release, those avsim registration numbers took a spike.

We have over 110,000 registered members now and they have all been active within the last 12 months. We are averaging over 100 new registrants every day (we block 100's of spammers weekly, so they are not included in the number). I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

 

 

 

This is a graph by week of new registrants. The jump in registrations results from us shutting down guest access to all forum features in order to better serve our registered members.

Thanks Tom. This is what I was looking for. At least we can rule out the 7,432,591 count.

Personally I'm surprised there are still many new users registering at AVSim. With FSX and Flight both abandoned by their developers and Prepar3D still suffering from its licensing restrictions, I was under the impression that this hobby is in a sharp decline - no new users and existing users steadily leaving the hobby.

 

 

I was under the impression that this hobby is in a sharp decline - no new users and existing users steadily leaving the hobby.

 

There are some in this community who would like you to believe that, and they have since ACES was shut down. You know, the "Chicken Little" types who see every cloud as something that might fall on their head with their next step. Our numbers show otherwise and have for years. :ph34r:

I'm absolutely sure that there are more than 40,000 serious FSX users. Microsoft sold hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies and even a small percentage of those being still around would give an active user base many times the quoted figure.

 

I think a lot of the commercial viability comes around building a brand and a customer base which probably isn't that large, but buy pretty much everything you push out the door.

 

Orbx and PMDG have more or less done this. You only need to sell a few thousand NGX or FTXG products at $80/90 a go to have a viable product. If 10% of the quoted 'hardcore' users bought an NGX at $70 then that's $280,000. As we know, development costs for something like the NGX would be considerable, but PMDG and Orbx aren't doing it for laughs - they have mouths to feed. There's no way they'd be sinking year's worth of development investment into these products if it wasn't worth it. MS certainly have made life tough with the death of the franchise and the continuing 'limbo' of which platform takes us into the future, but in many ways we've never had it so good....

Then how many FSX users are there then?

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and have uninstalled.

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and went back to FS2004.

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and moved to XPX.

 

FSX never sold anywhere near millions of copies.

At least we can rule out the 7,432,591 count

 

You forgot about the bloke who switched to X-Plane...

You forgot about the bloke who switched to X-Plane...

 

You mean a person actually did that?

FYI the 40,000 figure is a number related to serious "FTX" not "FSX" or other words...Orbx scenery users.  Not the same thing as folks using FSX.

You mean a person actually did that?

 

That was Jcomm. But don't worry, he will switch back in the next week or so...

Then how many FSX users are there then?

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and have uninstalled.

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and went back to FS2004.

 

Don't count the ones that purchased and moved to XPX.

 

FSX never sold anywhere near millions of copies.

I agree with the sentiment Jim but most who went back to FS9 (me included) have probably since moved onto FSX, as evidenced by the death of development for FS9. Those who bought and uninstalled - yes there will be plenty. And those who went to XPX must be a small in number.

 

And as for FSX sales - well who knows? Only Microsoft.....

 

I recall JV saying a while back that Orbx had sold over 500,000 downloads, which probably puts the 40,000 FTX users in context. Also for those interested in the numbers behind the industry there's an interesting PDF online from when Sim720 (creators of FTX EU) were raising funds from private shareholders for a motion simulator platform. They say they sold 2500 copies of FTX England by the time the report was published, which was only a couple of weeks after it went on sale.

The only sales figures I could dig up for FSX is "more than 1 million units through December in the US" in an article dated January 23, 2009. So it is hard to figure what the worldwide sales figures to today's date is.