Data is consistent with information I have from other sources beyond Aerosoft.

 

From a 3rd party perspective, the customers buying 3rd party products is the most important ratio.  Those numbers are also in favor of P3D.

 

As far as platform sales numbers go ... DTG claimed they sold 500,000 copies, figure that is avg of $10 per license (most probably bought it when it was very cheap) and I'm guessing P3D have sold 180,000 copies at avg of $80 per license (assuming most get academic version at $60) ... do the math and that's DTG at $5.0 M and LM at $14.4 M ... LM have re-invested some of that revenue in the expansion of their development team (which is good news).

 

Where this will all end up I have no idea, but for now P3D is my main platform, then XP10, then DCS (for combat sims), then I'm waiting to see what DTG come up with in 2016 and/or other development efforts.

 

Cheers, Rob.

And how do you know that?

 

I should have refreshed before I posted question to Namco. :smile:

Surprised but pleased with this poll. 

Surprised but pleased with this poll. 

 

I would be a bit surprised with the result of the poll, if it was truly global, but as it actually features the forum-going Aerosoft users only, it might be a bit misguiding.

There are still a lot of 'old' FSX users around, and even FS9 is still rather wide spread among those reluctant to upgrade or can't afford a better hardware, so even if those folks need to be calculated.

 

No doubt, P3D gained a lot recently and does well in this scene, but FSX can count much more users globally for sure.

 

The X-Plane number also seems to be way above the actual figure, as according to the largest company selling add-ons for X-Plane tells me a different percentage, a bit below 5% actually.

 

I fly for a very active Virtual Airline that has quite a  few real world pilots. Here is the statistics as of today , for this month's activity as far as simulator use:

 

December 2015

 

Total Hours 3,985.9 hours 

 

FSX  1,260 (77.6%)

 

P3D   152 (9.4%)

 

FS 2004  194 (12.0%)

 

 

FS 2002   0 (0.0%)

 

FS 2000 (0.0%)

 

X-Plane  17 (1.0%)

 

Other   0 (0.0%)

 

Still seems like FSX has a commanding lead, and I have seen similar results in other VA's.  P3D is still trailing behind FS 2004 which is surprising to me. 

That result underscores the point that I made in my follow-up post. I'd bet that the vast majority of those people have computers that are more than 5 years old and are quite happy with FSX.

 

Another point that's germane to this discussion is  that I'd wager that most 3rd party developers were once quite happy tooling off into the future with just FSX as the base sim. But now that P3d has made inroads (and XP also), I would speculate that most of them would rather see FSX fade away with a whimper. Trying to stay current with XP, FSX, FSX-SE and P3d has become a chore that is eating into 3rd party developers' resources. It's no wonder that Pete Dowson is on holiday so much these days.

Talking about hardcore gamers vs flight simmers my view on this is these groups are pretty much the same. At least if you look at hardcore flight simmers.

 

Looking at my own rig that is the kind of rig that would work perfectly fine with most of the latest and most demanding games. In my case I built it with flight simming in mind to get the best possible performance out of P3D just like any hardcore gamer would buy him/herself a rig that can handle the latest games.

 

So in this regard I think both these groups are very similar. Then of course you have the "mainstream" guys in both these groups that don't have the latest and fastest hardware but still play/simulate but by sacrificing some details etc to achieve acceptable performance.

 

Hmm...not even sure what I'm really trying to say here or add to the discussion :smile: but guess my main point being there's not that much that differentiate a hardcore simmer from a hardcore gamer.

 

I completely agree.

 

The gap is closing.

I've been flight simming over 30 years, and the combination of large panel 4k screens, computer hardware, and the games and sims to run them has revolutionized living room gaming for me.

 

P3Dv3, DCS, Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, iRacing, ARMA III, Fallout 4, all amazing !!

 

 

P3DV3 is without a doubt the most hassle free flightsim I've ever used.

 

Cheers

From my memories, Matthis Kok of Aerosoft stated, that this poll was not so much about wich plattform is the most wide spread in terms of active users. Rather they tried to figure out where the people are heading wich buy and will further buy such quality-addons in the class of there Airbuses. To keep development-cost and time tight. In this context it looks good for P3D and XP.

From my memories, Matthis Kok of Aerosoft stated, that this poll was not so much about wich plattform is the most wide spread in terms of active users. Rather they tried to figure out where the people are heading wich buy and will further buy such quality-addons in the class of there Airbuses. To keep development-cost and time tight. In this context it looks good for P3D and XP.

 

Makes sense because quite obviously Aerosoft is most interested in the direction of their current and potential customers rather than the "average" flight sim user or the flight sim user that is still running FS9 with no intention to replace it with a more up-to-date simulator any time soon.

Hopefully the result of the poll will also be reflected in Aerosoft's shop structure: X-Plane is still on top and Prepar3D is last. If people are going to buy P3D products in the future, then the order appears not to be accurate...