Interesting chart of FS usage

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

1 hour ago, skelsey said:

The interesting thing about that Google data is that what it really shows if you zoom out (say, to the last 10-12 years, pre-FSX release in 2006 to present day) is that the X-Plane graph is pretty much static: it hasn't changed much at all in 12 years, and if anything it's actually gone down very slightly (just by a couple of points). What has changed is that the FSX line is decreasing significantly and P3D, since its release, is increasing (albeit at a slower rate than the FSX line is coming down).

That would suggest to me that the apparent increase in X-Plane users is actually more likely to be due to a decrease in FSX users than any great surge in X-Plane interest. Certainly in terms of absolute numbers, at my VA our flight logging stats consistently have X-Plane stable at around 10% of flights, only just above FS9 in terms of actual usage (compared to asking people to say what they use), and that hasn't changed ever since we started supporting XP.

This is a wrong interpretation of the data, as it's not presenting a raw number of searches.

At each point, the number of searches is ponderated by the total number of Google searches, for a given region (here, region is global).

We all know that global internet usage has exploded thought the years, and searches through Google even more. We should multitply the curve above by the total searches amount curve to have a correct idea of the absolute number's evolution across large periods of time.

Some explanation: (https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533?hl=en)
 

Quote

How Trends data is adjusted

Trends adjusts search data to make comparisons between terms easier.

Search results are proportionate to the time and location of a query:

• Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents, to compare relative popularity. Otherwise places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest.
• The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.
• Different regions that show the same number of searches for a term will not always have the same total search volumes.

 

 

And another article, more in depth:

https://medium.com/google-news-lab/what-is-google-trends-data-and-what-does-it-mean-b48f07342ee8

 

Cheers,

Pascal

[skelsey 765]

37 minutes ago, tonywob said:

I find that very hard to believe. I can't offer hard facts or figures, but judging by the simple increase in comments one can see on YouTube videos or FB groups compared to 2 or 3 years ago would suggest to me that XP11 has attracted a lot of new users and is continuing to grow. Guess there's also a reason LR hired (and could afford to hire) 2 new developers.

I'm not disputing what you're seeing on social media, but forgive me for being slightly sceptical of social media as a reliable indication of what people are actually doing: the last couple of elections here in the UK have demonstrated that very well! I have no intention of starting a war (and I am conscious that I am on the XP forum!) but I think the stats are interesting.

1 minute ago, Pascal_LSGC said:

This is a wrong interpretation of the data, as it's not presenting a raw number of searches.

Thank you -- that does make sense. However, I would still suggest that regardless of raw numbers -- the broad thrust of what I was saying remains true, i.e. that in relative terms this is much more about the decline of FSX than any sudden upsurge in XP.

Likewise, what we are seeing in our VAs stats (so raw, dispassionate, auto-logged numbers) XP usage has remained flat for the last two years -- some small variation here any there but never more than 10% (and actually that's quite a high peak in the data) -- consistently between 100-200 flights per month out of ~4000. By contrast what we are definitely seeing is large numbers of FSX (and even the few hardy remaining FS9 users) migrating to P3D and in particular P3Dv4. In particular what we have seen is that sim usage is very closely tied to the availability of high-end addons: after P3Dv4 came out there was an initial uptick but then usage (in in fact activity in general) dropped to very low levels until an Airbus became available, an effect which we've seen across other platforms in the past as well.

Now, of course we are just 1,000 or so simmers (albeit obviously with a constantly gently-shifting membership) so I'm not saying we're any more representative than anyone else. But it is interesting.

[barrel_owl 304]

1 hour ago, skelsey said:

That would suggest to me that the apparent increase in X-Plane users is actually more likely to be due to a decrease in FSX users than any great surge in X-Plane interest. Certainly in terms of absolute numbers, at my VA our flight logging stats consistently have X-Plane stable at around 10% of flights, only just above FS9 in terms of actual usage (compared to asking people to say what they use), and that hasn't changed ever since we started supporting XP.

While nobody has hard conclusive figures (provided they ever exist), it is safe to state that X-Plane is being all but static. Quite the contrary, if one observes the trends on YouTube, Facebook, Discord groups, number of Twitch lives etc, then he can safely conclude that the interest for X-Plane is growing dramatically in the last months. One of the Facebook groups dedicated to XP, for example, is increasing the number of subscriptions at a rate of about 500 units per month with a rejection rate of 50-75%. I observe similar trends in the number of views on YouTube channels dedicated to X-Plane. Obviously, the release of the FF A320 brought another peak of interest on this side.

How this does compare to the interest rate for other simulators, like P3D for example, is hard to say, as many simmers use both platforms (and often others like FSW, AF2 and DCS). One thing is sure, though: X-Plane is definitely growing and growing fast.

[tonywob 4,768]

1 hour ago, skelsey said:

By contrast what we are definitely seeing is large numbers of FSX (and even the few hardy remaining FS9 users) migrating to P3D and in particular P3Dv4.

Out of interest, are these users mostly using PMDG products, as this would certainly make sense here, especially when 64-bit v4 came out, and would certainly match what we've seen happen on Avsim over the past year or so with the P3D and FSX forums. X-Plane hasn't been known up to this point to be popular for simulating airliners.

There was definitely a big rise in interest in the forum here (but we are tiny portion of real users out there) when XP11 was released, with lots trying out the sim, and even some changing their sims altogether. The same thing happened when P3D v4 came out, with a large surge of users downloading the sim (including myself)

One thing is certain, neither Lockheed Martin or Laminar Research are going to share their sales figures with us, so at the end of the day, nobody really knows 100%. Of course, there are the other two sims that nobody ever mentions (FSW and AFS), and they also have a following and may take away users from X-Plane or P3D in the future.

 

 

 

[hs118 707]

Hard for me to tell where this topic has evolved/devolved to...but for sure there are 2 very large groups of flight sim hobbyists that are being ignored and cannot be represented by Navigraph data.

1) Military flightsimmers -- VRS users in FSX and P3D are much greater in number than the folks at this site can believe. DCS is hugely hugely popular worldwide with flightsimmers that came from Falcon BMS and have never used FSX/XP.

2) Young first timers -- FSX-SE has had very strong growth with young people trying out flight simulation for the first time. Making FSX available on Steam was a significant evolutionary step for the hobby. Dovetail still competes with itself trying to get FSW adopted.

 

[Guest]

My own "research" consisted of monitoring the number of people online at flightsim websites over the course of the last few months, mainly avsim, p3d forum and x-plane.org. I've found that any time I looked there were more people online at x-plane.org than on avsim and the p3D forum combined. Right now for instance it's 840 on avsim, 1120 at the .org and 90 on the p3d forum. Even if 100% of avsim users were ony here for p3d (maybe 60-70% are?), x-plane would still "win" if you will.

And that's for those who take flightsim serious enough to visit dedicated websites, on a mere customer basis, XP will undoubtedly have a very much larger margin over P3D because of the exposure on steam.

There is, however, one big difference, which concerns add-on devs: The percentage of people who are willing to pay serious money for addons is probably much higher for P3D because there's basically no way of knowing about it unless you already are very interested in flightsims. And it has the highest "entrance fee" in order to make it visually and functionally acceptable. That's why, me thinks, many high-end addons devs from the ESP realm have only reluctantly moved into XP, if at all: They have a very loyal, deeply invested (both financially and emotionally) community who are willing to pay top-dollar. These are the people (most of them with Navigraph subscriptions btw), which XP needs to attract in order to become competitive in the high-end segment. And Navigraph data points in a very good direction in that regard, especially considering there are still a lot (30%) of sophisticated users on FS9/FSX, who - if they want to move on - have a large investment to make if they want to go to P3D (thx PMDG!) and are thus likely to consider XP11 as well.

[tonywob 4,768]

@domae001 Great post, thanks for the info