3 hours ago, flying_carpet said:

So, I rather would call these young people "kiddies" or at best "gamers". Undoubtedly, older simmers have and invest more money into their hobby and I would also claim that they are taking their hobby more seriously (i.e. flight/ground physics, failure simulation, ... etc. over scenery). But that's only my interpretation 😉.

I bought my first version of MSFS at 15 years old (v5.1).  Sure I started by trying to fly a Cessna between buildings etc, but quite quickly I started learning how to navigate and fly “properly”.

It’s great to see that many young people in the hobby, that bodes very well for the future and is probably a lot of the reason the addon market is so much stronger than previous sims.

It’s also impressive that so many young folks took the time to fill out the survey…maybe they’re a bit more into the hobby than they get credit for.

Edited December 23, 20232 yr by regis9

6 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

The fact that 70% of the market flies MSFS virtually guarantees that "most anticipated release" will be utterly dominated by MSFS titles.

But there is no 70% lead in "anticipated releases". There is a 92% lead. And, as you mentiond Xplane, there is a 100% lead over XPlane in this category. And no, bascially for none of the listed products XPlane users are covered well.

4 hours ago, flying_carpet said:

So, I rather would call these young people "kiddies" or at best "gamers". Undoubtedly, older simmers have and invest more money into their hobby and I would also claim that they are taking their hobby more seriously (i.e. flight/ground physics, failure simulation, ... etc. over scenery). But that's only my interpretation 😉.

great observation! You should point out to the guys in that thread that XP12 got a 20% increase in usage because of the kiddies!

 

Quote

 

(i.e. flight/ground physics, failure simulation, ... etc. over scenery).

 

Low effort trolling detected...

Edited December 23, 20232 yr by Krakin

2 hours ago, simbol said:

At the moment I see 25% to 30% of my sales being on the consoles vs 50% as in 2021.

Thank you so much for this information @simbol! We hardly get figures like this from devs and although you are one developer, your metrics don't fall under anecdotes. This may give some insight that things aren't as lopsided towards the Xbox marketplace as we think.

4 hours ago, flying_carpet said:

I just have seen a very interesting post "over there" in the X-Plane forum. It is about the age of the simmers, namely that earlier the average age of the community was around 50 years or even older. Currently, we have ... see below.

Then head "over there" to see my post on why this doesn't make any sense.

2 hours ago, fsiscool said:

Who would have thought that MS actually extended the user base by a fair share of professional users by launching MSFS on XBox?

Jorg Neumann and Phil Spencer sometime around 2015...

I’m just going to emphasize the observations of @jrw4 when he cautions (here) about making inferences from a non-probability sample. That is to say, that neither we nor Navigraph have any ability to draw inferences from the sample about the broader public of flight simulation users.

A classic (old!) case of making this mistake was the use of the Literary Digest poll to predict the 1936 election which was an overwhelming landslide for Franklin Roosevelt. The Literary Digest poll sent out questionnaires to their readers and to a large sample of driver registrations and telephone book addresses and got over 2.4 million responses. That “survey” had been used to successfully predict the 1924, 1928 and 1932 elections. But it failed miserably to predict 1936. As you now know, in 1936 Americans who subscribed to the Literary Digest or owned telephones or cars were much more “upper middle class” than the electorate as a whole. The poll had a built-in social class bias and underrepresented working class voters who switched massively to Roosevelt in 1936. (Or at least that is the common understanding. The sampling error was additionally compounded by a bias in responsiveness: working class people may have been less inclined to respond to a Literary Digest prompt.)

The Navigraph survey team is aware of the problem. (See p.98 of their report. However, the sample size does NOT mitigate biases, as demonstrated in 1936. Nor does consistency over time. The biases in the sample design and the responsiveness of those sampled may be consistent over time. These biases are serious threats to inference.)

It is unclear how to define the “real population” of flightsimmers. Does the population include everyone who has tried a flight simulator program? Who have used a flight simulator at least once this year? Or only those who have used a flight simulator some number of times this year: 10, 50, 100, or 500 uses? Or is the survey meant to represent the addon market? What would that mean? Even if one knew just the right population to survey, it is not obvious how to do this correctly. How would we get everyone (including those who are uninterested in the flightsim community) to respond equally to a Navigraph prompt?

It is possible (but not certain) that we are getting data heavily weighted by committed simmers who fly almost daily jet transport flights in complex Boeing/Airbus simulations using state-of-the-art hardware and Navigraph charts and flightplanning tools.

On the one hand, it is great fun to see real numbers. But it is impossible to say what we can reliably learn from them.

You knew this already ... 😉

7 hours ago, GoranM said:

I have to admit, I'm surprised at the fact there are flight simmers who are 100 years old.

If I make it to 100 (unlikely) and I'm still flight simming I'll consider it to be a result. But hopefully I will have grown up by then.🤪

7 hours ago, scotchegg said:

What claim of causation do you see in Abrams post? I see a deduction, (and arguably not a high quality one), but I’m not sure I see a claim that A has caused B…?

Yes, and as true to form as ever.

It's probably a case of Garbage In, Garbage Out...

 

 

 

7 hours ago, flying_carpet said:

I just have seen a very interesting post "over there" in the X-Plane forum. It is about the age of the simmers, namely that earlier the average age of the community was around 50 years or even older. Currently, we have ... see bel
...
So, I rather would call these young people "kiddies" or at best "gamers". Undoubtedly, older simmers have and invest more money into their hobby and I would also claim that they are taking their hobby more seriously (i.e. flight/ground physics, failure simulation, ... etc. over scenery). But that's only my interpretation 😉.

Your interpretation is... something. What is the age barrier under which your definition of "kiddies" fall under? If it's age 20 or under that's 26% per the results .. if under 30 that's around 34%. So the rest who're "non-kiddies" are 66% if not more of the total respondents. Your first "claim" is that those younger folk don't take the hobby seriously.. but even if that were true, the majority (i.e. >= 66%) are then supposedly taking the sim seriously. Now if you're claiming that only those who're 50 or older take the hobby seriously then that's.. quite a reach.

Last year when asked to rate various factors of flight simulators as "very important", "important", "indifferent", etc the results showed that a realistic aerodynamic model was the #1 answer with 60% rating it as very important, and 35% rating it as important. The #2 factor was realistic world graphics with 50% rating it as very important and 40% rating it as important. This year for the question about most important factors in a sim aircraft, the answers were: systems complexity - 38%, realism and authenticity - 26.6%, flight model accuracy - 17.4%, graphics/visuals - 10.4%

These results kind of make it clear how "serious" the survey respondents are taking the hobby don't they? And also why MSFS has topped the results from last year and this given these factors which people consider important.
 

Edited December 23, 20232 yr by lwt1971

7 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Interesting that you'd accuse somebody of false equivalence immediately after suggesting a spurious (I say spurious, what I mean is patently absurd) analogy of SUV sales and hardcore family transportation (offensive initials not allowed?!?!) for flightsim software.

It's interesting that you seem to take more issue with my phraseology than the blatantly incorrect assertions they reference...?

Why don't you get in the game instead of sniping from the sidelines...?

4 hours ago, Krakin said:

He made no claims about quality, he made a claim about preference and he's obviously correct about that.

Nope. His clear implication is that people are choosing MSFS because it's superior (e.g., the "hard core" comments). It's clear to see via other easily available market statistics that people frequently prefer lower quality products.

2 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Nope. His clear implication is that people are choosing MSFS because it's superior (e.g., the "hard core" comments). It's clear to see via other easily available market statistics that people frequently prefer lower quality products.

UrgentSiesta just so I understand you correctly: You're trying to say despite the results of what factors the majority of respondents consider important in their flight sims and aircraft, and despite the majority's top choice of sim platform, that doesn't necessarily mean the top choice sim and top choices for add-on products are superior? And then given there are other examples outside outside the flight simming world where a majority of folks choose lower quality products, that it could apply to these Navigraph results from 2022 and 2023 too? So who's ultimately assessing the level of quality of products then? (be it flight simming or otherwise)
 

3 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Nope. His clear implication is that people are choosing MSFS because it's superior (e.g., the "hard core" comments). It's clear to see via other easily available market statistics that people frequently prefer lower quality products.

He asserted that for a couple of reasons. 2.6% of respondents using a console and the fact that it is often said that the xbox market is the more gamer/casual one. 2 thirds of respondents use navigraph charts, which is an expensive service one has to renew yearly. He looking at this data and concluding that most people who take the survey are what we would call hardcore or serious simmers. You are coming up with your own interpretation of what he THINKS that might mean.

As for people prefering lower quality products, that is usually due to them costing less. Until very recently, MSFS has had price parity with its competition (outside of optional upgrades). Now let us cut to the chase. A big reason for MSFS dominance is because it has the best QUALITY graphics. It trades blows with the other sims in various aspects but the big draw, the big eye catcher is the fact that it looks the best almost across the board. That is still quality no matter what culinary comparisons Austin chooses to make lol.

2 hours ago, MM said:

It is possible (but not certain) that we are getting data heavily weighted by committed simmers who fly almost daily jet transport flights in complex Boeing/Airbus simulations using state-of-the-art hardware and Navigraph charts and flightplanning tools.

All you need to look at to gauge what kind of simmers predominantly participates in the survey is the huge amount of simmers in the survey who use Navigraph services, including the paid ones like Charts. The survey obviously reaches Navigraph customers first and foremost, and those are usually not 'gamers' but SeriousSimmers™ given that these services are completely unappealing to anyone who just 'goofs around' a bit in the sim but targeted at people who are willing to subscribe to get real world flying resources. This also explains why just 2.6% of the participants are on Xbox, and it's not a surprise that aspects like realism, systems depth, accurate weather simulation, etc. are valued highest among participants.

This would look different if, say, Microsoft did a survey. I think it's obvious that these results are biased towards the hardcore simmers.