2017 was the best year in FS history - some considerations of current market trends (P3D, XP11, FSX, etc)

[GCBraun 2,392]

Hello everyone,

I think it is fair to assume that 2017 was a game changer for us flight-simmers. In the last 12 months we got P3Dv4, XP11, Aerofly FS2, FSW, multiple high-quality add-ons and the rise of VR as one of the biggest advancements in flight simulation`s history. With all major platforms now offering native VR, I think 2018 will be an year of exponential growth of the installed user base and consolidation of this great technology.

I believe it is also fair to point out that the FS landscape has changed significantly in the last year. Even though P3Dv4 was a great leap forward, I believe XP11`s constant evolution is starting to change the composition of this market. I do not say this without any data to back it up.

As I have shared in a post in the PMDG forum, the annual Navigraph survey shows a very interesting perspective of the flight-sim world:

2017`s Navigraph Survey

• Microsoft FSX (FSX box + FSX: Steam) 33.19%
• Lockheed Martin Prepar3D v4 30.75%
• Laminar Research X-Plane 11 19.58% 

So, just by this numbers, it is clear that the ESP/FSX based sims still hold about 60% of the market, while XP11 currently has around 20%. Let`s compare this numbers with last year`s poll, shall we?

2016´s Navigraph Survey

• Microsoft FSX (FSX box + FSX: Steam) 60%
• Lockheed Martin Prepar3D 30%
• Laminar Research X-plane 10%

Taking just these two polls into consideration in one year, it seems to be clear that:

• FSX is loosing popularity quickly
• Prepar3D is not growing that fast
• XP11 has doubled it`s market presence

Besides the Navigraph poll, I would like to show some Steam Charts numbers. For those who don`t know, Steam Charts is a website that tracks the gaming platform Steam`s statistics. It is very useful to get a hold of market trends and popularity of software released on that platform.

Considering that P3D is not on Steam, this analysis will just concentrate on FSX: Steam Edition and XP11.

First, FSX with numbers dating back to April of this year:

While still a very healthy platform, FSX: SE has decreased in size in the last months, with a reduction of about 400 to 500 users of its peak number of 4.926 in April

Now, let`s see the picture for XP11:

The picture above shows that XP11 has doubled it`s Steam usage in the last 8 months, with a significant increase of about 20% in the last two months alone. It is, nevertheless, a smaller platform in Steam when compared to FSX: SE. 

Some thinks to keep in mind:

• Steam is not the only store where XP11 can be bought. I would even argue that most users but XP directly from LR or from other retail/online stores.
• Steam is the only platform for FSX: SE but, of course, not for FSX as a whole.

These polls or statistics do not represent the whole picture, but they show a trend of considerable growth of the XP11 platform. I think that it is fair to assume that the FSX platform is shrinking and the data above shows that a significant percentage of these users are not switching to P3D directly, but actually to XP11. This is the only explanation why the P3D platform has not grown considerably in the Navigraph poll, while XP11 has doubled in size.

As a final note, please keep in mind that I am very open-minded individual and that I active use all civilian and even military flight-simming platforms. I would even say that P3D is currently my main FS platform.

What do you guys think of these numbers and of 2017 in general for FS? What can we expect for the next year?

Thanks and a happy 2018 for everyone!

 

 

 

[Patco Lch 1,465]

Interesting and thanks for the informative post.

[AviatorMan 253]

There seems to be a typo in your 2017 numbers where you show FSX+Steam at 33% but assert that they retain 2/3's of the market. In any case, I am not sure that Navigraph purchasers represent an accurate picture of the flight sim population. I assume these numbers reflect those who have purchased Navigraph products? Do most flight simmers purchase these products?

[Boomer 1,619]

XP11 is likely snatching FSX GA fliers.

Heavy Metal and airliner simmers are moving to P3D.

[G-RFRY 1,710]

You forgot to include FSW in ESP based sims which has 50,000 steam sales and OK it`s not fully out yet, FSX steam average 60,000 users in two weeks not including boxed, the numbers game is to early to tell 4 new 64bit sims in one year, in two years from now who knows.

PS last time I checked FSX:SE was nearing 1 million copies sold since December 2015 and is still selling, likely newbe and unlikely to have purchased some addons in any.

PPS you left out FS9, still used today by some shall we say 80% ESP based sims and that may be conservative.  

[AviatorMan 253]

10 minutes ago, Boomer said:

Heavy Metal and airliner simmers are moving to P3D.

Yes I have seen where GCBraun has made this assertion in earlier posts, but not sure what this opinion is based upon. I am full into P3Dv4 and mostly fly A2A GA aircraft, and occasionally the PMDG DC-6 and Manfred Jahn DC-3, all over ORbx sceneries, which look great in P3Dv4. Have never flown a tube liner in P3D.

[simmerhead 885]

The only thing that hasn't changed in the last decade is that you still can't enjoy the sim with all it's bells and whistles - even with the absolute best hardware money can buy :) 

[Boomer 1,619]

27 minutes ago, AviatorMan said:

Yes I have seen where GCBraun has made this assertion in earlier posts, but not sure what this opinion is based upon.

Simply this...XP doesn' have good ATC nor AI jets to simulate a commercial airliner environment.

[GCBraun 2,392]

1 hour ago, AviatorMan said:

There seems to be a typo in your 2017 numbers where you show FSX+Steam at 33% but assert that they retain 2/3's of the market. In any case, I am not sure that Navigraph purchasers represent an accurate picture of the flight sim population. I assume these numbers reflect those who have purchased Navigraph products? Do most flight simmers purchase these products?

I mentioned that FSX+ESP hold about 60% of the market. P3D is derived from ESP.

Regarding Navigraph, of course it does not represent all of the community, but I think it is a pretty good source to get an idea of general trends. I would say that the most engaged and invested simmers usually have a Navigraph subscription. 

 

1 hour ago, Boomer said:

XP11 is likely snatching FSX GA fliers.

Heavy Metal and airliner simmers are moving to P3D.

It is very difficult today to stay out of the P3D environment if you enjoy "heavy" aircrafts. Being that said, I definitely enjoy the IXEG in XP11, which is for me more immersive than anything available for P3D, albeit not 100% complete FMC-wise. Still waiting for the FF A320 to be released, but it does look very good!

 

1 hour ago, rjfry said:

You forgot to include FSW in ESP based sims which has 50,000 steam sales and OK it`s not fully out yet, FSX steam average 60,000 users in two weeks not including boxed, the numbers game is to early to tell 4 new 64bit sims in one year, in two years from now who knows.

PS last time I checked FSX:SE was nearing 1 million copies sold since December 2015 and is still selling, likely newbe and unlikely to have purchased some addons in any.

PPS you left out FS9, still used today by some shall we say 80% ESP based sims and that may be conservative.  

Thank your comments! My post was not meant to give a final and expansive overview of the market, but rather to show some general trends.

 

32 minutes ago, Boomer said:

Simply this...XP doesn' have good ATC nor AI jets to simulate a commercial airliner environment.

If you fly online, that is taken care of. PilotEdge, Vatsim and Ivao are compatible with XP11. There are great AI packages for XP11 that make Vatsim look really realistic! For me Online Flying is like VR, once you are used to it, it is very hard to go back to a Monitor (or to offline ATC, for that matter).

Being that said, World Traffic 3 was released very recently for XP11 and seems to be a solid product. There are also 3rd. Party ATC solutions like Pilot2ATC that should not be ignored. In the end, you need to resort to addons for a decent experience, or do you think that default ATC in P3D is good enough?

 

[AviatorMan 253]

In any case, I would expect to see a significant uptake in P3D growth in the upcoming year - P3Dv4 is a completely new world compared to the pre-64 bit versions.

[Anxu00 176]

12 minutes ago, AviatorMan said:

In any case, I would expect to see a significant uptake in P3D growth in the upcoming year - P3Dv4 is a completely new world compared to the pre-64 bit versions.

Agree.  I did not pick up FSW even with the Steam sale. The support of 3rd Party Devs for that platform is murky, whereas my investments are protected with P3Dv4. Heck, I still have P3Dv3.4 and share with it most of the sceneries to save space.  There are simply too many aircrafts that are still not available in v4 yet (well excluding the Carenado sausage factory)

[anubhavs 66]

Great post OP.  While I am hoping this doesn't devolve into a P3D vs. XP bashing thread (I use both), the biggest takeway for me this year was definitely the maturity of XP as a platform. The velocity of new add-ons, announcements, new developers, growth of the payware community is unparalleled in XP's history and credit goes to Laminar Research for a fantastic product. Their openness in dealing with their consumers (via their blogs, interviews etc. is also a refreshing change from the rest of the development community). It remains to be seen whether the XP platform can eventually evolve to provide ALL the features we need from a simulator (GA, tubeliners, weather, VR etc) but the platform as it currently stands today has the potential to do just that. The upcoming Vulcan transition is a great example of further modernizing the simulator. Frankly its exciting to be an XP user at this time.

P3D is the already fully matured platform with all the bells and whistles available and nothing comes close to modern airline simulation experience (yet). But the problem remains that you need to spend a lot on scenery, textures, utilties etc. payware to achieve relatively similar results as XP11 + free Ortho. IMO one of their biggest competitive advantage vs. XP is their PMDG exclusivity and I am sure many users (such as I) are hanging on to P3D solely because of PMDG.

The day quality modern tubeliners (FF A320 looking at you!) come to XP11, I will eventually let go of my ESP roots..why? I just find XP and its roadmap way more exciting.

[GCBraun 2,392]

28 minutes ago, AviatorMan said:

In any case, I would expect to see a significant uptake in P3D growth in the upcoming year - P3Dv4 is a completely new world compared to the pre-64 bit versions.

I think P3Dv4 is great and will definitely keep growing! It is important to consider, nevertheless, that the biggest platform until 2016, FSX, is loosing popularity fast. From the FSX users, a significant percentage seems to be migrating towards XP11 and not directly to P3D. This could represent a significant change in the FS landscape in the next year or two. 

 

Just now, anubhavs said:

Great post OP.  While I am hoping this doesn't devolve into a P3D vs. XP bashing thread (I use both), the biggest takeway for me this year was definitely the maturity of XP as a platform. The velocity of new add-ons, announcements, new developers, growth of the payware community is unparalleled in XP's history and credit goes to Laminar Research for a fantastic product. Their openness in dealing with their consumers (via their blogs, interviews etc. is also a refreshing change from the rest of the development community). It remains to be seen whether the XP platform can eventually evolve to provide ALL the features we need from a simulator (GA, tubeliners, weather, VR etc) but the platform as it currently stands today has the potential to do just that. The upcoming Vulcan transition is a great example of further modernizing the simulator. Frankly its exciting to be an XP user at this time.

P3D is the already fully matured platform with all the bells and whistles available and nothing comes close to modern airline simulation experience (yet). But the problem remains that you need to spend a lot on scenery, textures, utilties etc. payware to achieve relatively similar results as XP11 + free Ortho. IMO one of their biggest competitive advantage vs. XP is their PMDG exclusivity and I am sure many users (such as me) are holding on to P3D solely because of PMDG.

The day quality modern tubeliners (FF A320 looking at you!) come to XP11, I may eventually let go of my ESP roots..why? I just find XP and its roadmap way more exciting.

Thank you! My goal here is not to have yet another XP vs P3D discussion, but rather to analyse the (limited) numbers we have and try to make an educated guess on where these trends are going. 

[Chock 17,769]

Whilst interesting, there are a number of non-sequitur leaps in the logic of your conclusion from the numbers. If we look at this for example:

5 hours ago, GCBraun said:

2017`s Navigraph Survey

• Microsoft FSX (FSX box + FSX: Steam) 33.19%
• Lockheed Martin Prepar3D v4 30.75%
• Laminar Research X-Plane 11 19.58% 

So, just by this numbers, it is clear that the ESP/FSX based sims still hold about 60% of the market, while XP11 currently has around 20%. Let`s compare this numbers with last year`s poll, shall we?

2016´s Navigraph Survey

• Microsoft FSX (FSX box + FSX: Steam) 60%
• Lockheed Martin Prepar3D 30%
• Laminar Research X-plane 10%

Taking just these two polls into consideration in one year, it seems to be clear that:

• FSX is loosing popularity quickly
• Prepar3D is not growing that fast
• XP11 has doubled it`s market presence

There were 3,187 respondents to the most recent Navigraph Survey, thus any conclusions drawn from these can therefore only pertain to the respondents. There are for example, well over half a million owners of FSX-SE, which is a considerably larger number than the 3,187 people polled in the Navigraph Survey.

This of course does not mean there are not additional users of the Navigraph service, since not everyone is inclined to complete surveys, but any conclusions other than what the specific data itself from those who responded indicates, would be fallacious. To expand on that, since one can obtain AIRAC cycles from other sources, such as Aerosoft for example, or even use a flight sim without obtaining any new AIRAC data at all, it is therefore clearly a non sequitor to conclude 'it seems to be clear' this or that flight sim is gaining or losing popularity, since the survey figures, and perhaps even more the user types, are in no way representative of all flight sim users. Thus the only truly relevant conclusion one can draw from those figures therefore, is to say: 'of the users of Navigraph who responded to a survey, this is the trend amongst them'.

Even taken in isolation, any such figures can be and often are misleading; it is easy to mistakenly conclude things from interpretations of such data, or as numerous people throughout history including Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Benjamin Disraeli said: 'there are lies, damn lies, and statistics'.

For example, what such figures also cannot show, is whether the users of any simulator platform are using that sim exclusively, or whether they are using numerous sims and merely favouring one over the others at that time: I buy pretty much any and every flight simulator which comes out, but this for a number of reasons beyond merely a preference for that platform, among them: to support the development of simulators in general; to test them out for myself; to be able to try out various new add-ons for any platform. Obviously when I bought XPlane 11 and a few add-ons for it to check it out, I was flying it quite a lot. In doing that, I came to the conclusion that it still needed some work even though there were some very cool things about it, which is why it currently is not installed on my PC. But no statistic would demonstrate my conclusion; it would simply show that I'd been flying it a lot at that time.

But there are nevertheless some statistics which do at least illustrate that owning and using a flight sim platform does not necessarily amount to the same thing. Here's one (source: Dovetail Games sales figures): There were (according to mid 2016 DTG sales figures), approximately 600,000 copies of FSX-SE which had been sold, but of those 600,000 copies, according to the related Steam usage figures, 96,000 buyers had literally never even installed the simulation software. This was presumably an indication of people either buying it and then keeping it as a back up for an already installed boxed version of FSX, or some people just simply picking up a discounted bargain and saving it until they could be bothered to getting around to trying it out at some point, although any guesses as to the reasoning behind those figures beyond merely the numbers is, as it must be, a guess.

I will doubtless be listed as a 'user of XPlane 11' on Steam statistics since I bought it through Steam even though it currently isn't even installed on my PC. I'll also be listed as an FSX-SE user too, and whilst that currently is indeed installed on my system, I don't use it that often since I tend to use P3D. But of these two sims which are on Steam (I have others too), I would be more inclined to buy an add-on for XPlane 11 than I would for FSX-SE, since where sim platforms are concerned, I would prefer to invest in a 64 Bit iteration of it, however, in saying that, unless there was a specific reason to do so, I tend not to make the purchase through Steam. But even this could be misleading since many add-ons are dual install capable for FSX and P3D, so the fact that I don't buy such an add-on through Steam is not indicative that I would not use it on my Steam version of FSX, I'm simply not buying it through Steam in order to take advantage of dual-platform capability by not having bought it from Steam, and even with products which are for a single platform, such as the Just Flight FSW Piper PA-28, I still preferred to buy it direct from JF since that gave me some of their reward points, whereas going through Steam would have circumvented this. So the figures are definitely going to be skewed and in no way truly reflect the actual situation.

In other words, statistics can be interesting to check out, and they can (with care) point to trends if one interprets them carefully, but care should always be taken to avoid leaping to conclusions based on limited data, and unfortunately, some of the best data one might interpret trends from will never be freely available, such as that of, for example PMDG: They will know exactly how many FSX, P3D and XPlane add-ons they sell from their own sales data and their online update/installation service/registration utility. So whilst we may not have that data itself, we can at least conclude from their inclination to develop for specific platforms, which ones they are seeing usage from. But, that alone would not be a conclusive indicator of usage overall, since many flight sim users have no interest in the airliners PMDG make.

Figures are interesting, but they don't always give an accurate picture.

 

[G-RFRY 1,710]

1 hour ago, Anxu00 said:

Agree.  I did not pick up FSW even with the Steam sale. The support of 3rd Party Devs for that platform is murky, whereas my investments are protected with P3Dv4. Heck, I still have P3Dv3.4 and share with it most of the sceneries to save space.  There are simply too many aircrafts that are still not available in v4 yet (well excluding the Carenado sausage factory)

Just an update on FSW addon products there more addons available outside of steam than there are on DLC so it`s got to be on steam is no longer the case so it seams, devs are offering addons for FSW on web stores which you cannot buy on steam.