Originally expected to come out the week before Christmas, Magnus Axholt, Navigraph’s CEO, has today taken to the official Navigraph blog to share the results of this year’s FlightSim Community Survey.
The FlightSim Community Survey is the largest annual survey in the community conducted together with several major developers and organizations. It aims to gauge the prevailing flight simulation trends and users’ requests for future development.
In the results of this year’s survey, it’s evident how the community has changed since the Microsoft Flight Simulator release. Whereas last year’s survey was also conducted after the Microsoft Flight Simulator release, the platform had time to evolve this time.
To pick a few of many results. The survey has indicated that over 50% of respondents use flight simulators because of their curiosity and interest in aviation. As for the simulator market share, the Microsoft Flight Simulator user base has grown since last year while Prepar3D has decreasing tendencies. X-Plane franchise continues to hold at 53%.
In the matter of simulator usage, Microsoft Flight Simulator takes first place in the leaderboard. Followed by X-Plane, DCS, Prepar3D, and the legacy FSX. Going further through the report, in the case of various online networks, VATSIM was voted as largest followed by IVAO.
The largest flight simulation media continues to be Avsim.com followed by FSElite and FlightSim.com. The store with the biggest reach in this survey was Aerosoft, followed by Orbx Direct and the in-game Marketplace.
The information Magnus detailed in the blog post is very limited. Thus, in case you would want to go through every individual question results, they are all displayed in the final report available on the Navigraph website. If you want to like to play around with data, there is also a datasheet containing the raw data available.
