8 minutes ago, Joseph29 said:

Maybe Drzewiecki Design has low sale numbers today because everyone has everything he released already? The last scenery I bought from him was Tokyo Narit and I bought that in December 2020 or January 2021.

I really don't think DD ranks up there with the majors, so not sure what their stats are really worth.

1 hour ago, jaytee73 said:

the statistic that shattered me from a major P3D producer of aircraft

was the statement by the head of PDMG that --- " they sold more downloads of the DC 6 for MSFS

in the first week of it offered for the sim - than all the total sales - ever -  of the product for P3D"

I'm gonna quote myself here:

On 12/10/2021 at 1:51 PM, d.tsakiris said:

I've read that here a few times now. At first, that sounds impressive, but I don't think it's a fair comparison. For P3D, I believe the DC-6 wasn't a big thing, as there were at least a dozen excellent airliners available, which are additionally more relevant (i.e. not historical). Different story for MSFS.

I can understand why companies are pushing out add-ons for MSFS as fast as possible, it's where almost alll the money is. But I don't think it will stay that way. The MSFS market will also get more saturated, and things will balance themselves out, I believe.

 

12 minutes ago, Joseph29 said:

Maybe has low sale numbers today because everyone has everything he released already?

Just a clarification.  I believe the number was installed user base, not sales today.  An installed user base would include all sales over time since release. Personally I am not informed of all the products or product lines Drzewiecki  markets.  Are all of their products or product lines strictly for entertainment based flight simulation?

1 hour ago, SimeonWilbury said:

What I would like to see is data from a dev like FlyTampa that is still actively releasing content for P3D, in terms of the number of 'customers' I'd imagine that could form the basis of a more statistically valid figure to go on. I expect MSFS will still have quite a bit more marketshare but I don't think there's necessarily no money to be made round here.

Would be nice for other 3rd party devs to release their data but we only get tidbits here and there from 3rd party devs, as that information is normally guarded information that companies want to keep private.

I do recall Milviz saying they released a new plane for P3D a couple of months back and that the sales was very poor for that particular plane.  Coincidentally, Milviz has also shifted priorities to MSFS in the last year, and I would suspect it's because they see better sales in MSFS.

With respect to your comment about "I don't think there's necessarily no money to be made round here," you need to take into consideration that if companies have limited resources, they will opt for projects with the highest return (ie. projects that provide the highest total profit).  For example, let's say a company can release a product for platform A or platform B:

A) Releasing a product for platform A will take one year of development time and net them X profit, given a team size of 5 developers.  
B) Releasing a product platform B will take 1.5 years of development time and net them 5X profit, given a team size of 5 developers.

Any rational thinking business will opt for option B).  Despite option B) taking 0.5 years longer (and therefore higher costs from the longer development time), they will get much more total profit from option B) than option A).  This is how a rational company thinks, if their resources are limited.

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

9 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Just a clarification.  I believe the number was installed user base, not sales today.  An installed user base would include all sales over time since release. Personally I am not informed of all the products or product lines Drzewiecki  markets.  Are all of their products or product lines strictly for entertainment based flight simulation?

Oh, that's interesting. Do you have a source for this?  Or perhaps Drzewiecki Design could verify this.  If this is installed user base, that would be very interesting information.

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

22 minutes ago, IanHarrison said:

I really don't think DD ranks up there with the majors, so not sure what their stats are really worth.

Well, Drzewiecki is not my favourite developer, but we should do some justice to him, at least in numbers, as quality is a different subject.
For over 10 years, this developer has released 37 airports (some with modelled cities) and 7 separate city/landmark packs in Europe, Asia and the USA, which is quite an impressive work.
I guess only ORBX and Aerosoft have released more, but even they are mainly publishers (not that it doesn't count in statistics, of course).
For compasion, Flytampa has released around 20 airports and my favourite Flightbeam (not counting a few cases of being a publisher rather than designer) has released 7.

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by Rafal

9 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

With respect to your comment about "I don't think there's necessarily no money to be made round here," you need to take into consideration that if companies have limited resources, they will opt for projects with the highest return (ie. projects that provide the highest total profit).  For example, let's say a company can release a product for platform A or platform B:

A) Releasing a product for platform A will take one year of development time and net them X profit, given a team size of 5 developers.  
B) Releasing a product platform B will take 1.5 years of development time and net them 5X profit, given a team size of 5 developers.

Any rational thinking business will opt for option B).  Despite option B) taking 0.5 years longer, they will get much more total profit from option B) than option A).  This is how a rational company thinks, if their resources are limited.

I fully understand and accept this argument - but at the same time I feel that Airport scenery is probably the area where this argument applies the least as it is the area with arguably the most commonality between the two sims. Many MSFS scenery releases of late have been conversions of existing sceneries originally developed for P3D, so I don't think it's unreasonable to request that the reverse be considered if the development requirements are sufficiently low.

12 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Just a clarification.  I believe the number was installed user base, not sales today.  An installed user base would include all sales over time since release. Personally I am not informed of all the products or product lines Drzewiecki  markets.  Are all of their products or product lines strictly for entertainment based flight simulation?

Interesting if that is the case, I'd agree in also liking more information, though I'd also like to see if the same is true for FlightBeam/ FlyTampa/ MK Studios

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by SimeonWilbury

4 minutes ago, SimeonWilbury said:

I fully understand and accept this argument - but at the same time I feel that Airport scenery is probably the area where this argument applies the least as it is the area with arguably the most commonality between the two sims. Many MSFS scenery releases of late have been conversions of existing sceneries originally developed for P3D, so I don't think it's unreasonable to request that the reverse be considered if the development requirements are sufficiently low.

Oh, I agree with you on scenery. If it's not too much work for 3rd party devs to port their work to either MSFS/P3D, they probably do port it over to MSFS/P3D for the extra sales. I notice with a lot of 3rd party scenery devs, for example FSimStudio, they are doing their airport sceneries for both MSFS and P3D.

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

5 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Hi.  I came across this information from Drzewiecki Design, who gave the actual percentage of its P3D customer base in their forum:

[...]

It would be nice if other 3rd party devs also shared their customer base makeup so we could compare it to Drzewiecki Design.

Third party developers are unlikely to share the information when it's commercially sensitive. The developers who have shared sales figures, tend to be using them as a justification to no longer interested develop for a platform (take a look back at developers who have started developing for XP, but returned to P3D only).

I uncritically shared Drzewiecki's comment on another thread here, but as correctly pointed out, if you don't create new content on a certain platform, you can't get sales for it.

The reverse of Drzewiecki's POV is that Flightbeam said (IIRC) that their P3D version of NZAA outsold all of their other titles. That shows when their is pent up demand, sales will flow.

Which brings me to my next point:

1 hour ago, jaytee73 said:

was the statement by the head of PDMG that --- " they sold more downloads of the DC 6 for MSFS

in the first week of it offered for the sim - than all the total sales - ever -  of the product for P3D"

This RR comment is typical of the "lies, word not allowed lies and statistics" argument.
There is no like-for-like comparison being undertaken here.

The DC-6 in MSFS was one of only two complex third party aircraft available. (Pent up demand).
MSFS is a new platform with a lot of interest, hype and excitement surrounding it.
Of course the DC-6 numbers are going to look fantastic compared to a mature sim platform.

Let's wait until MSFS has multiple complex aircraft to compete for people's attention and finances.
The 'new' glow of MSFS has worn off.

FlyTampa has admitted on their forums that the MSFS sales haven't been as great as they had anticipated, despite the lower prices for MSFS that they are offering.
To critically appraise FT's comments, you could argue that they are no longer one of the best scenery developers w.r.t. MSFS scenery. Alternatively, you could argue that they are, but that with competition from hundreds of other scenery products, even one of the better quality developers isn't getting the sales they envisaged.

We'll see how things really look in a year or two. If developers releasing products on both sims, such as FlyTampa, MK-Studios, TFDi, Orbx, etc. continue producing for P3D, then we'll know that the sales exist for it to be worth their while to continue giving us new content to buy.

15 minutes ago, F737NG said:

FlyTampa has admitted on their forums that the MSFS sales haven't been as great as they had anticipated

This is saying nothing.  MSFS scenery could've outsell their P3d 10 to 1 ratio. But if FT expected 15/1 ratio then sales are underperforming. 
What was FlyTampas forecast?

 

5 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

This is saying nothing.  MSFS scenery could've outsell their P3d 10 to 1 ratio. But if FT expected 15/1 ratio then sales are underperforming. 
What was FlyTampas forecast?

Go ask them
https://flytampa.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14660

To quote the comment:
"The prices were initially set low by other devs believing sales would be FAR greater than fsx/p3d/xplane. It didn't turn out that way but the prices sort of stuck."

Interesting stat about the 4%, but it does not surprise me.  As others have said in this post, scenery developers like DD haven't released anything new for P3d for a long time, and the reason is they see a bigger market/sales volume in MSFS.  If someone wanted a DD scenery for p3d, they've likely already bought it.  I think Fly Tampa's point (this is a guess) is developers expected to sell way more scenery in MSFS than they have because of the larger audience in that sim, but the majority of the MSFS market aren't the ones who migrated over from P3d and are in fact new simmers, and enjoy MSFS for the eye candy it already provides in its vanilla form.  Most don't care about airport accuracy and additional features, or not enough to shell out $10-$15 for it. 

How well did T2G LFPGv2 and FlyTampa EHAMV2?  Would be interested to know those numbers. 

2 hours ago, micstatic said:

I have MSFS.  And I like it.  But we are still waiting for the airliners!  So many of us who still lurk in this forum are probably unlikely to spend too much time in MSFS until they release some higher quality airliners.  

This. And I have MSFS and XP. 

These retail numbers only tell so much. Keep in mind that P3D is essentially a commercial platform, which entails commercial licensing. It's an area we don't hear much about, and in fact the only developer I can recall coming forward with a few details was ImagineSim some time ago. They said their Barbados/Bridgetown scenery had been developed for a sea rescue company and was only later on released to the general public. It is not completely unreasonable to believe that other enterprises that use P3D as a training platform need high quality sceneries, too. And there are only so many companies that are experts at creating them. 

Edited December 11, 20214 yr by thepilot

2 hours ago, SimeonWilbury said:

I'll take your point insofar as not having tried it. I have been tempted to, but with a Student's budget I chose to continue investing in P3D. So yes a sunk-cost issue on my part. But I still feel I have the right to advocate for P3D as a mature platform with a catalogue of Study-Level airliner sims already available.

Completely understood!  I felt the same about FS9 for years!

2 hours ago, SimeonWilbury said:

AIG being freeware may also be skewing things slightly, though the 1/3 figure cited there I'd be willing to believe more than the 4% cited by Drzewiecki Design.

My Main point is that I'm not aiming to slag off MSFS, I think its a great looking sim and will most likely get it at some point in the future. But I also think P3D is still a viable sim in the medium term, and I think some of the statistics being cited about P3D usage are potentially misleading when proper context isn't being provided and/ or taken into account.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying.  AIG was at one point 50,000 new installs per day with MSFS whereas TOTAL P3D was 15,000 or 1/3 total of what MSFS was doing per day.  It's that great of a market delta and I just finished a PMDG777 haul from DD KEWR to KMIA in P3D so certainly not belittling P3D in any way I still use it however MSFS is not merely as it has been described by some either... 

Even with it's immaturity (think of P3D V1/V2) in terms of maturity it still is ages beyond the base platform and foundation of any sim leaving it great potential to mature.  Honestly once/(if) they figure out the largest remaining issues which are not insignificant and large enough to derail PMDG's 737 release and can achieve parity in terms of what is lacking then what is superior is so far superior there won't be any discussion unless P3D v6 can counter MSFS's offering. Some will always have issue with the subscription/streaming model but especially when you look at things like the GEForce Now offering and Steam's success at some point there may not be an option.  MSFS's streaming data go far beyond modern HDD capabilities so if LM wants to provide a Google Earth alternative they will ultimately be in the same boat.  Streaming and subscription certainly seem to be the flavor the past few years outside FS and now within it as well.  

OK, back to my P3D flight now but some personal thoughts in addition to the clarification above.