Remember in the 90s when there were so many WWI flight sims that you had a huge choice? Then, the market just kind of died away for various reasons.

Dungeons & Dragons was popular in the 80s and then it lost a lot of popularity until only just 2014 when the 5th edition came out. Now it is, quite literally, more popular than ever before.

Of course there are huge differences in the two markets. Modern flight sims are a massive undertaking to build and players have an almost unreachable bar of expectations regarding flight models, damage models, historical accuracy, etc. Furthermore, home computers in general are rapidly giving way to ever more powerful tablets and those who do have home computers often don't have all the flight aids like TrackIR, joysticks, etc to get the most out of a sim. D&D has none of those issues. Just new books with new rules and they were off and running. Not so for WWI flight sims. The base of PCs is actually shrinking even as the technological capability to produce a high fidelity WWI flight sim improves.

The closest thing recently to a WWI flying game is not even remotely a sim. It's Battlefield 1...and even EA is rumored to be going back to WWII for it's next Battlefield game. Rise of Flights development or even patches has not been a thing for years now and even the newly minted Flying Circus is essentially just a very small plane set using existing flight models from RoF wrapped inside a new engine on a small map. Historical depth will be around zero. WOFF UE is beautiful and the mod community works miracles, however official development is on pause while OBD focus on WOTR as a way to generate additional income, because the WWI flight sim market is too small at this point for even a single developer to stay afloat on it. Even one as passionate and dedicated to WWI flight sims as OBD.

So my question is - what do you guys think? Do you think WWI flight sims will ever flourish again in the future, maybe when VR becomes more common and so being in an open cockpit would be a perfect fit for such technology? Or has the WWI sim market already peaked long ago and WOFF UE, potentially still with some future updates maybe from WOTR technology, will be the last great WWI flight sim for the forseeable future?

It's all speculation, of course, but I would like the opinions of my esteemed WWI co-fliers.