Module / DCS sales figures?

[Mr_Burns]

Does DCS or any of the module TPs publish figures on usage/purchase?

Steam does have the ability to track DCS Steam usage but I as many others don’t use Steam.

Wandering what the player base is and module uptakes are, purely out of interest for me but maybe assist third party hardware manufacturers.

My first selfish interest is just nosiness and my amateur interest in business economics, something which obviously no-one has to pander to being privately owned companies.

My second, again, purely personal is to understand what kind of user base we have using DCS in 2023, I have many friends who play PC and console games and none of them are flight simmers, wondering how niche we really are in the scheme of things.

[SharpeXB]

I don’t think they’re going to publish that sort of data. 
Steam user data used to be publicly available but you have to realize DCS World is a free game so last I saw that it had 4.5 million users with an average gameplay time of 30 seconds. Go figure…

The Navigraph survey mostly tracks civ sim players but DCS is a distant third there in terms of popularity. 

[draconus]

You can guesstimate some popularity with forum posts counters divided by time since release.

[silverdevil]

18 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

Does DCS or any of the module TPs publish figures on usage/purchase?

16 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

I don’t think they’re going to publish that sort of data.

i agree with sharpeXB. we will likely never see this until they become a publicly traded company. its too bad there is no "poll" feature.

[Rudel_chw]

22 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

Does DCS or any of the module TPs publish figures on usage/purchase?

 

I've been here since 2013, and have never seen ED or third parties sharing that type of data.

 

22 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

Wandering what the player base is

 

I can guesstimate that it is around a million users, based on the fact that the most popular YT channel dedicated to DCS has almost half a million subscriptors. A recent poll on another popular channel can give a glimpse onto the user demographics:

 

 

22 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

and module uptakes are

 

The same survey, gives these as the most sold modules (not necesarily the most played):

 

 

 

However, this survey is very biased as the YT channel that did it is oriented towards modern jets, and thus WW2, helos and cold war aircraft are probably mis-represented.

 

22 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

I have many friends who play PC and console games and none of them are flight simmers, wondering how niche we really are in the scheme of things.

 

Console games? Maybe you have young friends, simming is kind of an adult passtime (in my opinion, of course)

Edited May 28, 2023 by Rudel_chw
Added Helicopters chart

[Mr_Burns]

Thanks Rudel,

They are interesting polls so thanks for that.

Its interesting that DCS A-10 and Blackshark, being the oldest models, are not the most owned, of course it could be subject to the poll or that more modern platforms attract more users, which may or may not be obvious.

If you consider like you stated, a statistic of 500,000 youtube subscribers to a channel could be extrapolated to 1 million users, Christen Eagle still sold a few copies!!

 

Oh and no, I dont have a massive friends network who 'compute' anyway and I have a fair split between strategy, FPS and sports, just no flight simmers in my circle or colleagues!

Edited May 29, 2023 by Mr_Burns

[Furiz]

12 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:

Console games? Maybe you have young friends, simming is kind of an adult passtime (in my opinion, of course)

Yeah, that's why our community is kind of divided to simmers older people and people that pvp / airquake / hot start etc which are I guess mostly younger population.

[BIGNEWY]

On 5/28/2023 at 1:24 AM, Mr_Burns said:

Does DCS or any of the module TPs publish figures on usage/purchase?

Hi, 

no we do not publish sales figures. 

thanks

[Mogster]

6 hours ago, Mr_Burns said:

Thanks Rudel,

They are interesting polls so thanks for that.

Its interesting that DCS A-10 and Blackshark, being the oldest models, are not the most owned, of course it could be subject to the poll or that more modern platforms attract more users, which may or may not be obvious.

If you consider like you stated, a statistic of 500,000 youtube subscribers to a channel could be extrapolated to 1 million users, Christen Eagle still sold a few copies!!

 

Oh and no, I dont have a massive friends network who 'compute' anyway and I have a fair split between strategy, FPS and sports, just no flight simmers in my circle or colleagues!

 

It seems implausible that the early modules don’t have the highest ownership, unless the user base has increased hugely over the last few years. Back in 2008 everyone (or so it seemed) bought the Ka50 as other than Lock On there was nothing else, same in 2010 with the A10C.

Nowadays there’s much more to choose from, but then the user base may be much larger.

 

[Demiurgo]

On 5/27/2023 at 6:24 PM, Mr_Burns said:

Does DCS or any of the module TPs publish figures on usage/purchase?

Steam does have the ability to track DCS Steam usage but I as many others don’t use Steam.

Wandering what the player base is and module uptakes are, purely out of interest for me but maybe assist third party hardware manufacturers.

My first selfish interest is just nosiness and my amateur interest in business economics, something which obviously no-one has to pander to being privately owned companies.

My second, again, purely personal is to understand what kind of user base we have using DCS in 2023, I have many friends who play PC and console games and none of them are flight simmers, wondering how niche we really are in the scheme of things.

If you search you'll find Wags stating the amount of some modules sold at a given time. If you use the survey that Rudel post it and extrapolate you'll have a better idea. Also check the amount of users playing at any given time in MP and use the same survey to refine said numbers....

You'll have a better estimate than only relying on Steam

Personally I think they are note even close to have 1M regular users.

[Rudel_chw]

29 minutes ago, Mogster said:

It seems implausible that the early modules don’t have the highest ownership, unless the user base has increased hugely over the last few years.

 

In fact, I do believe that the user base has increased over the years, here is a chart I made measuring the yearly transactions on the ED Store (it does not include transactions at Steam or other stores):

 

 

This data is based on the transaction ID of purchases that I've made on the Xmas sale of every year so far. Of course it does not tell us anything about what items are sold on each transaction, but it gives an indication of the volumes sold over the years. Only 2022 broke the increasing trend, most likely because the war shifted purchase prorities for a lot of people, myself included.

So, my belief is that there are almost certainly more than a million DCS usesr out there.

 

[Demiurgo]

7 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

 

In fact, I do believe that the user base has increased over the years, here is a chart I made measuring the yearly transactions on the ED Store (it does not include transactions at Steam or other stores):

 

 

This data is based on the transaction ID of purchases that I've made on the Xmas sale of every year so far. Of course it does not tell us anything about what items are sold on each transaction, but it gives an indication of the volumes sold over the years. Only 2022 broke the increasing trend, most likely because the war shifted purchase prorities for a lot of people, myself included.

So, my belief is that there are almost certainly more than a million DCS usesr out there.

 

if you add these numbers it gives you 1.4M aprox tickets....I don´t know how much you can infer from here based on the fact that most people have much more than 1 module based on Spud survey you showed. Also you don´t know if said tickets are only for purchase and how many units typical user buys.

[Rudel_chw]

17 minutes ago, Demiurgo said:

if you add these numbers it gives you 1.4M aprox tickets....

 

Yes, plus 0.2M from sales prior to 2015, plus an unknown amount from Steam and other stores. 

 

17 minutes ago, Demiurgo said:

Also you don´t know if said tickets are only for purchase ...

 

What other transaction types the ED store has?

 

Anyway, I just wanted to show some data rather than do conjectures only out of thin air 

 

[Demiurgo]

Until you can explain with hard data how many things are bought per ticket and if said tickets have consecutive numbers you are pulling things out of thin air.

 

Just FYI: if you review MP numbers at any given time you'll see around 1000-2000 players at peak time. So...... how 1M users are translated into 1% playing on heavy traffic days???

Take into account all the things you want to include but it seems far fetched that there are 1M regular players. I would agree that probably there are more than 1M that downloaded the game and some others that abandoned the game for whatever reasons....

 

 

Right now is Holidays in the US and this is the amount of players in the server:

 

Around 1k......

[Rudel_chw]

24 minutes ago, Demiurgo said:

Until you can explain with hard data ...  you are pulling things out of thin air.

 

Agree .. didn't I said that it was a guesstimate?

 

24 minutes ago, Demiurgo said:

Just FYI: if you review MP numbers at any given time you'll see around 1000-2000 players at peak time. So...... how 1M users are translated into 1% playing on heavy traffic days???

 

maybe it means there are not that many players actually interested on MP ? 

[Demiurgo]

It could be but it seems to conflict with the survey you posted.....

There it says this:

 

I know said 76% can´t be playing all the time...but 76% vs 1% seems weird.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Demiurgo

[draconus]

Online user count is momentary. Players around the world play in different time zones at different times. These are mostly people that play regularly plus some that are just trying MP.

I'd not be surprised if a vast majority of customers play casually SP having 1-2 modules, never reaching the forum or any polls.

[Demiurgo]

Of course. I mentioned that. It´s clear as well that Spud´s survey has a bias but is one of the few sources of information we have.

I wanted to give the OP ideas on how he might approach to a reasonable number.

[Rudel_chw]

37 minutes ago, Demiurgo said:

I know said 76% can´t be playing all the time...but 76% vs 1% seems weird.

 

Lets see it the other way around ... you say that there are around 2,000 users on MP, multiply that for 24 time-zones and we would have about 50,000 users that do MP ... if they were truly 75% of all DCS users, it would mean that DCS users were only about 65,000 world wide  ... do you really think that it is a reasonable guesstimate?

[Demiurgo]

again, that's incorrect because: 1) not all time zones have the same amount of players so the math you are doing is incorrect 2) I never said those were 75% of all players; just it SEEMED WEIRD that 1k on a holiday in US playing when you say there is 1M players and most of them are in MP according to your survey

Here's another data point:

Don´t know how accurate is this but this is the amount of people that start STEAM and then the GAME. I don´t know how much of the people on DCS use STEAM (i my group is much more than 50%) but it seems rather small against 1M players.

 

EDIT: TYPOS

Edited May 29, 2023 by Demiurgo

[freehand]

on line players are very small compared to sp.

Edited May 29, 2023 by freehand

[Temetre]

IIRC ED said something like 10% of the playerbase actually plays MP? Might be completely wrong about that tho.

Often games like this tend to have a low percentage of player doing MP. Its just misleading because the most active people in forums/etc are the ones playing online.

[Demiurgo]

Yes, that's why I said Spud survey has a bias. Till we don't get info from ED or some other source we won´t know for sure.

[Mogster]

I don’t think Steam Charts records just MP activity though, it’s having the software running.