22 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

I'm a father with 4 kids, a real world pilot and ATC.  I wrote casual gaming on my response

(Just two kids here, I stopped in time, lol)

But yes, also submitted casual gaming. Time is simply not there anymore.

31 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

I'm a father with 4 kids, a real world pilot and ATC.  I wrote casual gaming on my response.

Given the answer choices and not being an IRL pilot, I was trying to decide between 1) and 2) and went with "Curiosity / Interest in Aviation" 🙂
 

1 hour ago, ha5mvo said:

33% casual gaming. Yep Indeed reflective of the current situation.

I entered casual because I do have a bad landing once in a while and scrape a wing or just crash, I just reload the plane and try again. I also get up and go to the kitchen once in a while to grab a cold beer (yup, while I'm flying). I'm casual.....

1 hour ago, Krakin said:

Yeah that is what you call market domination and despite the hiccups surrounding it's announcement, it looks like MSFS 2024 will have a healthy kick-off from the more hardcore crowd

Yup, MSFS is increasing its domination of the market. It's a no brainer if you're a 3rd party developer and you want to make money, which platform you should develop for.

Asobo deserves our praise and gratitude for the well-earned success that this year's Navigraph Survey clearly documents. Asobo has not only maintained active and intense support for MSFS, but has literally doubled the vast number of coders and artists and support teams working on the forthcoming MS2024. In a way, the yearly Navigraph Survey is the flight sim community's version of the Academy Awards. Using that analogy, MSFS has just walked away with an arm-load of Oscars for its popular reception.

6 minutes ago, David Mills said:

In a way, the yearly Navigraph Survey is the flight sim community's version of the Academy Awards. Using that analogy, MSFS has just walked away with an arm-load of Oscars for its popular reception.

And as @Krakin pointed out, only 2.6% of Navigraph survey users were primarily using consoles. This means the vast majority of Navigraph survey users are probably "hard core" flight simmers. And what flight simulator do the "hard core" flight simmers prefer? Yup, that's right. The "hard core" flight simmers prefer MSFS (FYI, this is not surprising, as Avsim is mostly made up of hard core flight simmers, and the overwhelming majority of Avsim are active in the MSFS forum now).

Edited December 22, 20232 yr by abrams_tank

We do need to remember that all of the responses reflect the nature of the respondent pool and not flight sim as a whole. I glanced at the lengthy pdf file that details the report's findings and one thing stuck out like a sore thumb (p43): only 2.6% of the respondents report using an XBox gaming console as their primary hardware. While I don't know what the actual percentage of MSFS users access their flight sim on XBox vs. Windows PCs, I would be quite shocked if it were anywhere near the 92.4% shown for PCs vs. 2.6% for XBox as shown in the accompanying figure.

Similarly, two-thirds of respondents report (p55) using Navigraph Charts. Only in their wildest dreams do the folks who own that company believe that a supermajority of all MSFS participants subscribe to their product. So we can take what we will from this survey, but let's not make any general conclusions regarding the millions of individuals who enjoy flight desktop flight simulation. There is a brief discussion of sampling bias and validity on page 98 that does acknowledge some of the shortcomings of this type of sampling methodology. It might be possible to carry out stratified sampling to reduce those biases somewhat, but that becomes potentially an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. For now however, these results are highly skewed and clearly do not represent the diverse flight sim community.

1 hour ago, jrw4 said:

We do need to remember that all of the responses reflect the nature of the respondent pool and not flight sim as a whole. I glanced at the lengthy pdf file that details the report's findings and one thing stuck out like a sore thumb (p43): only 2.6% of the respondents report using an XBox gaming console as their primary hardware. While I don't know what the actual percentage of MSFS users access their flight sim on XBox vs. Windows PCs, I would be quite shocked if it were anywhere near the 92.4% shown for PCs vs. 2.6% for XBox as shown in the accompanying figure.

Similarly, two-thirds of respondents report (p55) using Navigraph Charts. Only in their wildest dreams do the folks who own that company believe that a supermajority of all MSFS participants subscribe to their product...

That's fair and basically one can say the survey doesn't speak for *all* the people using MSFS and other sims out there on the various hardware platforms.. but 27,736 people responded to this survey, and that's a sizeable sampling and definitely gives indications to all the stakeholders in the simming world a good view on user trends. I'd say the stakeholders interested in this survey (such as high/medium fidelity add-on developers, sim platform devs of course, sim hardware/controller developers, etc) fits right in with the folks who responded.

Hopefully add-on developers are getting good stats/numbers of X-Box usage from MS/Asobo and the marketplace (and MS is the only funnel where XBox'ers can purchase add-ons anyways so it can definitely pass on the numbers).
 

Edited December 22, 20232 yr by lwt1971

29 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Yup, MSFS is increasing its domination of the market. It's a no brainer if you're a 3rd party developer and you want to make money, which platform you should develop for.

A 3rd party developer making items for the other two sims, is like a manufacturer deciding  to start making VHS tapes again. 😏

Edited December 22, 20232 yr by Bobsk8

Just now, Bobsk8 said:

A 3rd party developer making items for the other two sims, is like a manufacturer deciding  to start making VHS tapes again. 😏

🤣 🤣 🤣

4 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

A 3rd party developer making items for the other two sims, is like a manufacturer deciding  to start making VHS tapes again. 😏

Funny, but absolutely true. It amazes me that the backlog of 3rd party add-ons is so vast for MSFS that Asobo now includes a section in its weekly blog titled Backlog. Thanks to Asobo, we are currently enjoying the Golden Age of flight simulation. For me, Christmas will come the day MS2024 is released.

7 minutes ago, David Mills said:

Funny, but absolutely true. It amazes me that the backlog of 3rd party add-ons is so vast for MSFS that Asobo now includes a section in its weekly blog titled Backlog. Thanks to Asobo, we are currently enjoying the Golden Age of flight simulation. For me, Christmas will come the day MS2024 is released.

And look at this chart from the Navigraph survey about the best flight simulation product released in 2023:

The top 4 spots are all MSFS related or MSFS itself.

Here's a YouTube link to Navigraph's just-released video presentation and explanation of this year's survey results. Because this is the MSFS forum, I have cued the video to the MSFS results.

 

Edited December 22, 20232 yr by David Mills

The title of this thread is a given.  In what possible way would this be 'unexpected'?

10 minutes ago, Mike S KPDX said:

The title of this thread is a given.  In what possible way would this be 'unexpected'?

No one is suggesting the outcome was 'unexpected'? We're discussing the aspects of the survey results related to MSFS on this thread, and trends in usage patterns, changes compared to last year, etc 🤷‍♂️