MSFS is now 10 million players strong

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/7/2022 at 3:48 PM, blingthinger said:

Nope. I'm downplaying the statistics put forth by marketing departments. Bots are a real problem. I'm not claiming they're involved, just allowing for that possibility. And these departments are all too eager to turn a blind eye to things like install failures and call them 'new users', simply to pad egos and market numbers.

The UI is most certainly for xbox on all levels. Wouldn't be surprised if the medium resolution ortho was also an artifact of that requirement. Certainly the flight model is a function of someone demanding backwards compatibility w/ legacy FSX, so that's not forced xbox-assimilation. Though given how that part was designed, yeah, definitely a game.

It's true that there are Lies, Damned Lies,...and Statistics.

So, would YOU, per chance, have any useful numbers to compare/contrast? Or any actual quantitative analysis other than mud flinging?

MSFS isn't my favorite flight simulator, but it has certainly earned it's place at the table. Further, it's rocketing ahead with improvements at a literally unprecedented pace and has already absolutely erased many of the advantages any of the other sims have. 

With CFD-Lite, it's even (finally) gnawing away at X-Planes previous "serious simmers" bastion feature.

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/8/2022 at 12:56 AM, OzWhitey said:

 

 

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Anecdotally, I'd say the steam version Steam is a little more popular than the MS version amongst keen simmers.

Uh...Source, please? Pretty much the opposite of what the devs themselves say, as well as any reasonable interpretation of the situation.

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What that shows is that MSFS peaked back in 2020 in the first two months after release. It's never come close to regaining the player numbers from month one and month two.

Talk about "fake news" - you just won the Pulitzer!

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/1250410,269950,314160,223750#All

MSFS peaked with 62,000 players on Day 1. X-Plane 11's all-time peak was 4,000.

MSFS also had a "paltry" 20,000 peak with the 40th Anniversary. I know, it's "only" 5x higher than it's next closest Steam competitor

Finally, "Concurrent" matters not - the entire world is networked now, so there's always people playing when others are literally sleeping.

On any given day, there have consistently been about 8,000 players of MSFS, vs about 2,000 for XP 11 for the entire 2 years MSFS has been out.

Edited December 11, 2022 by UrgentSiesta

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/8/2022 at 2:14 PM, blingthinger said:

Measure up? I mean...I'll let the FAA and NASA be the judge of that.

I call it a 'game' because all aircraft are fundamentally modeled as a balsa-glider geometry. Asobo calls it the Planform Model. The fact that the model then gets scaled and squashed to fit the FSX model is also quite funny. Actually, the UI is pretty silly too, but that's neither here nor there. I do think the weather model is kind of cool though...

Red Herring. Or maybe Non Sequitur.

Probably both.

Edited December 11, 2022 by UrgentSiesta

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/9/2022 at 9:16 AM, blingthinger said:

Just be sure your network connection is working! Otherwise, that's exactly what you get. If it even starts at all on your xbox.

One of the many nice things about MSFS is the multiple Caches available. They operate transparently in the background and can be adjusted by us unsophisticated "gamers" to keep all the Hi Fi streamed scenery we've got room for right there on our local drives.

And unlike traditional scenery enhancements, when I get the urge to explore a different part of the world, it all gets downloaded & saved for me and I don't have to download or convert a single ortho file myself. I just fly and it happens automagically.

Cool, huh?

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/9/2022 at 11:17 AM, blingthinger said:

It will take a while, but that same final database is public domain now. It's gradually being used to populate OSM.

The potential offered by OSM is actually superior than plain AI. It can carry far more information about structures than a simple orthophoto can contain. This turns into a big deal when looking outside of photogrammetry data areas.

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"The potential offered..."

"Potential"? OSM's been around and in use in XP for quite awhile. It does a great job.

But, as asked before, show us at least a few examples of where XP's scenery is "far more informative" than MSFS'.

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 12/9/2022 at 4:54 PM, Theboot100 said:

For what it's worth steam spy shows 1.4 million in sold copies for msfs on steam.

I bought my copy on the Microsoft store, I'm not sure what the ratio is 

The steam reviews have definitely improved their ratings

Mostly Positive (77% of 40,678) ALL TIME

Very Positive (83% of 966) RECENT

They have surpassed xplane 12 review rating

Mostly Positive (75% of 525) ALL TIME

Mostly Positive (72% of 191) RECENT

 

 

Xplanes initial influx of sales would probably be from owners of Xplane 11.  Once its released out of beta we will see how many MSFS players are keen to run 2 flight sims.

Xplane targets Windows, Macs, Linux and Mobile.

MSFS targets Windows and Xbox

At the end of the day MSFS has opened up flight simming to a more main stream audience. Regardless of which sim you prefer this is great for the hobby and I wish both sims well.

Overall yes, but some mistakes made.

It's inappropriate to reference version 12 of X-Plane, which is still Beta / Early Access and also has only been available for a few months.

X-Plane v11 is the current version, and that's the only one to compare.

MSFS is overall 77% positive, but XP v11 is overall 90% positive. 

That v12 Beta isn't wildly popular can hardly be considered a surprise (MSFS was less than great at first, too, and for many of the same reasons).

I personally run more than a few flight sims, and the only one in any real danger is Prepar3D, but definitely not until several handfuls of Hi Fi addons (like A2A, PMDG 747, et al) make their way to MSFS.

I think it's less about X-Plane losing users than it is about MSFS being utterly dominant in the genre.

[Pathfinder633 224]

I recommend going outside for a walk (dont take your phone)

[cmpbellsjc 2,963]

Alright guys, this one’s reached its end and has turned into another sim vs sim argument that never leads anywhere.

I think we would all agree that the numbers presented are pretty good but don’t represent a total value of regular daily/weekly users, and that’s ok, it’s still gotten some trial and visibility.

Unfortunately for some people, maybe one or two users who’ve posted in this topic, they have strong feelings about the numbers that don’t represent their chosen platform. As we see a lot in society today, some people can’t stand others choosing something different than what they like and things tend to get nasty from there. 

No point in going in circles wasting time debating it, no one’s going to change somebody’s mind on what sim they prefer or what the numbers represent.