So as the title says (Richard Dawson reference) as when is the next survey about flight sim Navigraph chart polls are going to drop. I sure many people here are ready for that. Or not Any clue?

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by JBDB-MD80

2 minutes ago, JBDB-MD80 said:

So as the title says (Richard Dawson reference) as when is the next survey about flight sim Navigraph chart polls are going to drop. I sure many people here are ready for that. Or not Any clue?

As we approach the end of 2024, we can safely say that it’s been an eventful year for the flight simulation community. With releases still being rolled out and tested, we have decided to postpone this year’s FlightSim Community Survey until early 2025. This will allow us to capture the sentiment of the community more comprehensively and accurately. We are looking forward to your participation, keep a look out on our social media accounts for more information.

31 minutes ago, carlanthony24 said:

As we approach the end of 2024, we can safely say that it’s been an eventful year for the flight simulation community. With releases still being rolled out and tested, we have decided to postpone this year’s FlightSim Community Survey until early 2025. This will allow us to capture the sentiment of the community more comprehensively and accurately. We are looking forward to your participation, keep a look out on our social media accounts for more information.

Hmmm? something fishy is swimming the water. Me thinks.

I wouldn't say so just a lot more aircrafts in a new sim etc just not worth opening it when its only just released.

1 hour ago, carlanthony24 said:

I wouldn't say so just a lot more aircrafts in a new sim etc just not worth opening it when its only just released.

Sorry but I don't understand what new aircraft being released in 2025 got to do with releases that already exist in 2024 and not only in MSFS. This is skeptical. Maybe the survey should be delayed until December 2025.

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by JBDB-MD80

I don't think this upcoming Navigraph survey may show market significant market share gain by MSFS as a whole (MSFS 2020 + MSFS 2024) because of the troubled launch of MSFS 2024. I do predict however, than the Navigraph survey in 2026 (if they wait a full year after this upcoming 2025 survey) to show market gain by MSFS 2020 + MSFS 2024.

I know some of the hard core XP users keep claiming that XP 12 is doing very well.  But that's not the case according to Thrandra since MSFS 2020 was released:

Quote

I won't be disclosing sales numbers. But what I CAN say is, that they used to be many times higher... before MSFS2020 hit the market.  We have published 10 planes, roughly, since then... and not even with 10 more planes on the market, have we seen a month in sales like when we published the PC6 four years ago.  Not even with significant discounts on our products during entire months of sales.  It seems like a LOT of customers have left X-Plane.  And this is very alarming, because it's an intensifying feedback loop.  The less viable it is to make planes here, the less interest the market will have in X-Plane.

I trust Thrandra's actual words than what some of the hard core XP users claim. What Thrandra seems to imply above is that the peak market for XP, at least for them, was the peak of XP 11, and not XP 12.  Having said that, the MSFS 2024 release was not good.  And the list of fixes in the patch today was very long, so you can see they still have a ways to go to fix the bugs. I think the MSFS team will need about 2 to 3 Sim Updates to work out a lot of the issues in MSFS 2024. Also, a lot of 3rd party add-ons still need to be ported over to MSFS 2024, especially some big names like PMDG.  So if they need at least 2 Sim Updates before MSFS 2024 starts to gain traction and convince some of the MSFS 2020 users to switch over, and Jorg said they will only do Sim Updates quarterly for MSFS 2024, that puts the Sim Update 2 release probably around April/May.  April/May will be well past the time of the Navigraph survey release for 2025 so that's why I don't think the Navigraph 2025 survey will show any market share gain for MSFS. 

The 2022 Navigraph survey did show market share gain for MSFS because the first batch of study level planes were released in the spring of 2022 for MSFS 2020, and the Navigraph market started shifting to MSFS following those releases, and there was enough time for that shift to happen to show up in the 2022 Navigraph survey at the end of 2022.  Hence why I say to see actual market movement in the Navigraph survey, we are going to have to wait until their 2026 survey.

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by abrams_tank

1 hour ago, JBDB-MD80 said:

 Maybe the survey should be delayed until December 2025.

A survey in December of 2025 will definitely look better for MSFS. 

7 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

A survey in December of 2025 will definitely look better for MSFS. 

Even I didn't think it was going to be this bad.  I mean, Dec 2025 might be reasonable for just the UI alone, but instead Jorg and Seb decided to try and give us the entire world (streamed in), and ALL the aircraft in it.  There's no way they could have QCd half of those aircraft in the amount of time they had.

I think they bit off way more than they could chew.  I love them for trying, but now we're seeing the ramifications of it.

We're at least a good 2 years away I think from a stable 2024.  I think we'll be able to use payware aircraft OK (which you can now for the most part), once you get loaded in, but it's going to be a fight the whole way.

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by Jeff Nielsen

17 minutes ago, Jeff Nielsen said:

We're at least a good 2 years away I think from a stable 2024.  I think we'll be able to use payware aircraft OK (which you can now for the most part), once you get loaded in, but it's going to be a fight the whole way.

To be fair, everyone has a different definition of "stable."  Free Flight is stable for me, albeit I am using the default planes in MSFS 2024, and I usually use the Cessna 172 G1000 as well.  I also don't use VR, and I play at 1080p.  I haven't had time to test this update, but I expect it will be even more stable for me in Free Flight.  The scenery add-ons I bought for MSFS 2020 also seem to be stable for me as they didn't cause a CTD for me yet - but perhaps I am lucky because I have heard of scenery add-ons from MSFS 2020 causing problems for other people (but to be fair, those are MSFS 2020 sceneries and they need to be upgraded to the MSFS 2024 versions).

The bugs are mainly with Career Mode, and I think even after this patch, the majority of the bugs will still be with Career Mode, despite a lot of Career Mode bug fixes in the patch today.  But Free Flight was okay as of the last patch, and from the few live streams I saw today on Twitch, Free Flight was working well for the live streamer on this patch.  I would guess by Sim Update 2 of this year, Free Flight should be good for everyone, and the majority of add-ons will be ported and working fine in MSFS 2024 by then (so by April/May of 2025).

Edited December 11, 20241 yr by abrams_tank

1 minute ago, abrams_tank said:

To be fair, everyone has a different definition of "stable."  Free flight is stable for me, albeit I am using the default planes in MSFS 2024, and I usually use the Cessna 172 G1000 as well.  I also don't use VR, and I play at 1080p.  I haven't had time to test this update, but I expect it will be even more stable for me in free flight.  The scenery add-ons I bought for MSFS 2020 also seem to be stable for me as they didn't cause a CTD for me yet - but perhaps I am lucky because I have heard of scenery add-ons from MSFS 2020 causing problems for other people (but to be fair, those are MSFS 2020 sceneries and they need to be upgraded to the MSFS 2024 versions).

The bugs are mainly with Career Mode, and I think even after this patch, the majority of the bugs will still be with Career Mode, despite a lot of Career Mode bug fixes in the patch today.  But Free Flight was okay as of the last patch, and from the few live streams I saw today on Twitch, Free Flight was working well for the live streamer on this patch.  I am sure by Sim Update 2 of this year, Free Flight should be good for everyone, and the majority of add-ons will be ported and working fine in MSFS 2024 by then (so by April/May of 2025).

Yes, free flight, once you can get in is actually stable and the sim performs well.  The key is getting to it.  

There are also some really-really good default aircraft, but there's also a ton left to fix up just to get up to the bare minimum.  

The UI is actually a big deal.  If you look at it from the casual simmer (not you and me and those here in Avsim), they aren't going to know how to navigate through the bugs.  They aren't going to know to click on an aircraft that's liveried already to see more liveries.  They won't take the time generally, they'll just leave.

As far as sceneries, yeah, we're good there, but that was expected.  

Trust me, I'm the sim's biggest cheerleader, but we have a long way to go still unfortunately.  We give credit where credit is due, but we also have to be the biggest critics at the same time.  Doesn't mean we don't love Jorg and Seb, doesn't mean we'll stop supporting them, but we have to be able to see the big picture as well.

1 hour ago, abrams_tank said:

A survey in December of 2025 will definitely look better for MSFS. 

They will probably try to manipulate that poll too. IDK.

On 12/11/2024 at 9:04 AM, carlanthony24 said:

As we approach the end of 2024, we can safely say that it’s been an eventful year for the flight simulation community. With releases still being rolled out and tested, we have decided to postpone this year’s FlightSim Community Survey until early 2025. This will allow us to capture the sentiment of the community more comprehensively and accurately. We are looking forward to your participation, keep a look out on our social media accounts for more information.

It will be interesting to see if they also combine the MSFS 2020 + MSFS 2024 market share into a total MSFS market share in their charts.  That seemed to be the case with the last survey where they had a chart that showed MSFS had 71%/72% market share of the Navigraph survey.

The last Navigraph survey did not include users of MSFS 2024, so how could it have been a "combined" market share??

Crikey, that time of year again already, is it? Where are the years going?

OK Holiday season is over but where is the poll? or does MS2024 needs more time to fix the polls again.