I have always wondered how manu flightsimmers there are around in the world.

Is there anyone or is there anywhere any good figures of how many licenses are sold of:

 

FS4

FSX

P3D

XP11

DCS

 

Are we talking of a million, tens of millions or hundreds of millions all together?

 

Any good sources for these numbers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 3, 20196 yr by nas123

An interesting question... but, I have a feeling, that It's not an easy number to calculate... 

Be careful by adding together licenses for the various flight sims... I myself, own license for FSX, P3Dv3, P3Dv4, DCS and X-Plane (just to count the most recent) - and I'm only 1 person (or at least my psychologist says so...) 😉

If I had to guess, I would say, that we're are a niche-group. Simulation in itself, is probably quite a large group, where Flightsim is a part of that. But within Flight Simulation, there's several 'factions' if you will... 

Edited September 3, 20196 yr by Anders Bermann

A pure guess, I would say 150,000

One source is SteamSpy, that gives you a broad indication of how many owners there are on Steam.

Aerofly FS2: 50-100K

DCS: 2000-5000K

FSX-SE: 1000-2000K

XPlane 11: 200-500K

Since P3D isn't on Steam, one can only guess. I would say it is a little below the XP region - 100-300K

Owners of the original boxed FSX there are rumoured to be about 2000-4000K as well, and if the Steam relation between FSX and XP 11 holds true (4:1) then there should be 500-1000K XP download/boxed owners.

Best regards

Edited September 3, 20196 yr by Lorby_SI

Whats FS4? 

Using Steam cannot be any sort of benchmark at all, as there are many more out there that simply do not use any of the Steam sims.

FS2004 still has a huge following, as does FSX. Flightgear cannot be forgotten about either.

It is virtually impossible to give creditable numbers, as it cannot be differentiated between those that regularly 'play' the game, or have 'boxed' it in a cupboard.

There is also a vast European & Japanese following for the sims as well.

There are also guys with multiple installs of FS2004, so it's impossible to count the beans.

2 hours ago, philmurfin said:

A pure guess, I would say 150,000

Definitely not!

I'd say 151.000 🙂

Going to be interesting, when Microsoft is also aiming the new sim at the 63 million on the Xbox store. 

Wonder how many of those will bite? 1% will be 600000 new simmers!

17 minutes ago, Wobbie said:

Going to be interesting, when Microsoft is also aiming the new sim at the 63 million on the Xbox store. 

Wonder how many of those will bite? 1% will be 600000 new simmers!

If you look at the statistics from SteamSpy again, the optimisitc estimate of 7.6 million owners makes roughly 4% of all Steam users. Bear in mind though that this includes 5 million DCS people, who may find a civillian flightsim boring, no matter how pretty it is. So civillians there are only 2.6 mil - just about 1.5%.

Personally I tend to believe in the numbers from the lower end, they seem more plausible. Which then makes the civillian flight simmers 0,7% of all Steam users.

The caveat with these numbers is, that it is only a statistic about who owns the software. DCS is free-to-use, so of course many people have it in their library - but are hardly using it. Generally speaking, since MSFS is part of the XBOX game pass package, you could say that all 60 million are potential simmers. In reality, it will be a marginal number, as it always has been.

An then there will be the "shift"; people abandoning their old sim for the new, while the numbers stay the same.

Personally I don't think that the simmer community will grow that much through the new sim. Everbody who wanted a flightsim has already got one. We'll see what happens.

Best regards

2 hours ago, Wobbie said:

Whats FS4? 

Version 4 of Flight Simulator, released in 1989. As you can imagine, graphics weren't that great, although probably better than FS3, FS2, and even FS1.

That would be a highly variable number depending on your definition of simmer.

Anyone who bought a flight sim, even if he seldom uses it?

Anyone who regularly uses a flight sim, even in its default form (no addons)?

Anyone who only uses freeware addons?

Anyone who regularly buys payware addons?

I'd say there's 2 orders of magnitude difference between those extremes.

 

And the multiplicity factor for "uninstallers"...

I've bought FSX at least 4 times, XP10 and XP11 each at least 3 times, DCS countless times, IL2 Great Battles twice... Well, if there are more guys like me than I think, statistics will have to be carefully taillored... 🙂

Edited September 3, 20196 yr by jcomm

3 hours ago, Captain Kevin said:

Version 4 of Flight Simulator, released in 1989. As you can imagine, graphics weren't that great, although probably better than FS3, FS2, and even FS1.

I just was a bit confused as to why it was on the list, instead of FS2004, which is still supported, as you know.

Counts the members of Avsim... and call it done!   Easy peasy!

Greg

The listing of FS4 in the OT is a misprint. It should be FS 2004 as this is still used by many.

 

LOL, thought so