Up until the middle of last year I was mainly flying Fly!II - no kidding.  Every time I tried MSFS I found it to be lacking, especially in flight-modeling.  It was obvious that there was more advanced scenery in FS and the navaid databases were constantly being expanded, but it was the aircraft and flight experience I was going for.  I got FSX a while back and found that there had finally been some improvements - I also saw the tremendous work that Rob Young, PMDG and other skilled developers were contributing.  With the Prepar3d implementation I decided to finally come back to the FS world, though I found the simulation interface to be difficult to transition to (key-mapping, instrument control features and viewing controls being quite different from Fly!).

Early last year I was still flying Rob Young's Citabrias, a finished version of his Piper Seneca, a wonderful 3rd party Socata TBM 700, PMDG's first B777 and several other wonderful aircraft of the Fly! world.  All of this came to a crashing halt when I was forced to switch over to Win 10 due to other program and system needs and Fly! finally gave up the ghost.  Advantageously, I saw the announcement of the upcoming release of MSFS 2020 at that time, so I've made the journey back to FS - and, I'm having a ball! Yes, there are a lot of issues to be resolved, but I am finding this sim to be truly immersive.

Merged data:

I hope this will help guide developers...  Where to place their resources...

MSFS and XP11 are well above the others.  If the kinks can be ironed out of MSFS, I will be using it well into the future.

We do know a few devs are doing government contracts in P3D - and that pays better than consumer work typically.

1 hour ago, omarsmak30 said:

Merged data:

I think it’s not fair to split the MSFS family in two, but... ok.

Edited January 12, 20215 yr by ca_metal

You CANNOT merge the data as it is how much do you fly each piece of software.

So if someone says 50% Xplane 11 and 50% MFS2020. Then a second person says 50% xplane 11.5 and 50% MSFS202.  You don't get a combined figure for xplane of 100% and MSFS 50%!!!

To do any sort of merge you would need to do a weighted average. The most anyone merged sim figure could be is the highest single version figure but will most likely be a fair bit lower than that,

Equally the question where it says have to changed your main flightsim this year. The No figure is quite high, I would argue as there will be many people like myself who have ONLY used MSFS2020 so we have not changed we have only used MSFS2020.

 

CJ

 

6 minutes ago, CJ1045 said:

You CANNOT merge the data as it is how much do you fly each piece of software.

So if someone says 50% Xplane 11 and 50% MFS2020. Then a second person says 50% xplane 11.5 and 50% MSFS202.  You don't get a combined figure for xplane of 100% and MSFS 50%!!!

To do any sort of merge you would need to do a weighted average. The most anyone merged sim figure could be is the highest single version figure but will most likely be a fair bit lower than that,

Equally the question where it says have to changed your main flightsim this year. The No figure is quite high, I would argue as there will be many people like myself who have ONLY used MSFS2020 so we have not changed we have only used MSFS2020.

 

CJ

 

Yeah, it’s complex. Also you can say you didn’t switch your main sim, but you are using MSFS 2020.

That pretty much matches my observations. Msfs2020 is top dog after just 4 months since release. X-plane is still going strong but p3d is in decline - first it was losing simmers to x-plane and now to msfs2020.

4 hours ago, tpete61 said:

They (MS/Asobo) are certainly a leader. By a wide margin can be subjectively argued they are not.

I see that many are still using XP11, FSX, P3D and in pretty high numbers as well.

A word of caution on interpreting these results.  While it’s true that there are more survey respondents than in the past, it still likely represents the harder core enthusiast community than the entire user base at large.  I suspect that this larger user base leans heavily MSFS and therefore doesn’t necessarily get reflected in the survey results.

If I went to an Apple convention and surveyed which phone people use, I could conclude that iphone owns 99% of the smartphone market.

Edited January 12, 20215 yr by Gilandred

5 minutes ago, Gilandred said:

A word of caution on interpreting these results.  While it’s true that there are more survey respondents than in the past, it still likely represents the harder core enthusiast community than the entire user base at large.  I suspect that this larger user base leans heavily MSFS and therefore doesn’t necessarily get reflected in the survey results.

Yep.

It is also possible long term that a smaller percentage of a much larger user base may still end up with more "bums on seats" and hence money for the other sims. Hard to tell.

MSFS won!!!  .....Weeeell tell them what they've won, Johnny.

You can make a graph tell any story you want with a little creative rearrangement of the underlying data. Why split X Plane 11.4 from X Plane 11.5?

Just now, snglecoil said:

MSFS won!!!  .....Weeeell tell them what they've won, Johnny.

You can make a graph tell any story you want with a little creative rearrangement of the underlying data. Why split X Plane 11.4 from X Plane 11.5?

Well... it wouldn’t change the winner, actually.

On one of the charts they’ve put together all P3D versions and all Xp versions, and MSFS won, and they have put MSFS 2020 alone, not including the older versions. They didn’t add the FS2002, FS2004 and all FSX numbers.

32 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

They didn’t add the FS2002, FS2004 and all FSX numbers.

I noticed this too, but maybe because there is really little to no compatibility between these and MSFS2020? Although MSFS carries on the heritage of these older platforms, it is also a different beast in so many ways. 

I also don't know about winning and losing, but there seem to be some general trends emerging in the direction of these platforms that relate to their individual strengths.

MSFS is a new platform and I don't think it's fair to combine it with FSX and before. There is not direct add-on compatibility and the work to port things over is much much more then moving between versions of P3D or within .xx releases of X-Plane.

Here's the actual source blog post from Navigraph - https://blog.navigraph.com/post/640055551804489728/flightsim-community-2020-survey-results

I wouldn't call that 'a clear winner by a large margin'. Especially if all of the X-Plane 11 data were in one result, and P3D v4/v5 are combined (since many 3rd party addons have not been updated for v5 yet), then it pretty much becomes a 3-way tie.

The fact that only 32% of respondents have switched their software in the last year is a much clearer indication that MSFS is not yet capturing the entire market (at least within people who would see and respond to the Navigraph survey).  Also in the 2019 survey pre-release, 48% of respondents said they were 'very likely' to switch - the big delta between the two numbers indicates that expectations were not met for many people.

Edited January 12, 20215 yr by marsman2020

Actually I am pretty sure, there are far far more MSFS users that don't know about Navigraph or about this survey though. Hence it could be the MSFS users far more than the charts.

20 minutes ago, marsman2020 said:

MSFS is a new platform and I don't think it's fair to combine it with FSX and before. There is not direct add-on compatibility and the work to port things over is much much more then moving between versions of P3D or within .xx releases of X-Plane.

Here's the actual source blog post from Navigraph - https://blog.navigraph.com/post/640055551804489728/flightsim-community-2020-survey-results

I wouldn't call that 'a clear winner by a large margin'. Especially if all of the X-Plane 11 data were in one result, and P3D v4/v5 are combined (since many 3rd party addons have not been updated for v5 yet), then it pretty much becomes a 3-way tie.

The fact that only 32% of respondents have switched their software in the last year is a much clearer indication that MSFS is not yet capturing the entire market (at least within people who would see and respond to the Navigraph survey).  Also in the 2019 survey pre-release, 48% of respondents said they were 'very likely' to switch - the big delta between the two numbers indicates that expectations were not met for many people.

Well, add-ons for x-plane 10 won’t work on v11 and most 32bits add-ons for p3d v1 - v3 won’t work for P3D v4 and v5 and still they put all the “families” together. 

I don’t think the criteria was add-ons compatibility. They’ve said on the chart notes they wanted to compare MSFS 2020 with the others.

About the “entire market” you mean the more hardcore users, right? I don’t think most Steam users (for both MSFS and x-plane) and most MS Store users are answering those kind of surveys.

Edited January 12, 20215 yr by ca_metal