SIm Related Question.

Hi Guys,

I was thinking the other day (Big for me) while i was watching my boy play a race game on his xbox one.

Here is the question.

Say out of 100 gamers how many of them would be simers. Be it flight/land/Sea ?

And would you give the war thunder/WOT crowd a 1/2 % point as some could be moved over to a more full realism sim. Like DCS now that more content is coming online.

Just Thinking

O_Smiladon

Go Team Zealand,For the race to take home the 35th America's Cup.

I would take an educated guess and say that probably about 2-3 out of every 100 PC gamers play hardcore simulations like Dangerous Waters, DCS, Grand Prix Legends, etc.


If you expand that to include casual sims like Strike Fighters, the Dirt racing series and Cold Waters then I'd estimate about 5-6 out of every 100 PC gamers.

Depends on the definition.

Hard Core simulations? Maybe one in a hundred. If you add games like Forza and the other 'lite' driving games I bet the number is around 10/100.

WOT or WOW to me is not a simulation but could be a gateway to other games, something akin to people who initially play Battlefield and then look at games like ARMA.

We are a niche market. That isn't necessarily bad but it does mean that we won't get a lot of big titles since the cost to produce these games is a lot higher than for much more simple shooters.

I don't know the exact percentage of WT players playing 'Simulator mode' but it is a tiny proportion of the millions of subscribers to the game, and most of those sim mode players are on ground forces I believe.

Thanks guys,

Very interesting.

O_Smiladon

What I've found more interesting is how we classify simulations:

1. There's the "hardcore" sims or "study" sims like DCS and BMS and Steel Beasts
2. There's the "normal" sims like maybe FC3, Strike Fighters, easier modes for DCS and BMS, and the like
3. There's the "sim lite" sims like maybe ARMA III and War Thunder
4. There's the "pretenders" like Ace Combat and World of Tanks

What do you guys think? How would you qualify games like Steel Division, Wargame, SABOW, Combat Mission, and the like where weapons and armor are "simulated" in detail but the player is more like an RTS commander than a soldier-on-the-ground or pilot-in-the-cockpit?

If we take 1-3 above, then there may be quite a big number. A lot of people "graduate" from Call of Duty or Modern Warfare and play ARMA. DCS/FC has a lot of players.

Big difference between "instant fun 'cause I'm bored, let's play a game" and "I am intensely interested in this facet of endeavor so I want to learn the minutiae of it".

Ace Combat isn't a flight sim. But to the general public, for some reason, anything with flight as a main activity = flight simulator. I think this dates back to the early 90s when the difference between a "simulator" and what is now a modern flight shooter is not that different. You can argue Ace Combat is more realistic than the original flight sims, as it is a 3D game, the graphics are much more realistic, cockpits, sounds and whatnot. But back then a simulator trying to be realistic was not too different from Air/Ace Combat, aside from weapon count. I suppose it stuck since. Air/Ace Combat was a "simulator" back then, and seeing as the series survived all odds into 2017 I suppose they still call it a "simulator" because that is what they called it in the early 90s.

What annoys me even more is "space sim". Most space sims are not only arcadey style shooters, but they're mainly RPGs in space. A "hardcore space sim" may be as complex as Ace Combat, but you run around in an unimaginative wild west Star Wars knock off. At least Ace Combat emphasizes flight, whereas space sims hardly emphasize space flight. Maybe Star Citizen will change that.

This guy thinks otherwise


link



Hehehe.... but I agree with your point. The bar of "realism" has gotten higher and higher because of the increased capabilities of modern PCs. However, even if we say that modern "pretenders" or "sim lite" are more detailed than the very first flight simulators, that doesn't "bump up" the modern games nor does it "bump down" the earlier flight simulators. The term "flight simulator" should be judged in relation to a specific moment in time.... so the list I mentioned above is more applicable to "modern" sims.... maybe the past 10 years or so.



And again, we can have classifications for space sims. Elite Dangerous, for instance, has made concessions with regards to physics otherwise people may just be zipping past each other at ridiculous speeds... But then what about Kerbal Space Program?

KSP is it's own thing, and absolutely the best money I have ever spent on a computer 'game'.

The last somewhat "realistic" space combat game I played was "Freespace 2" and "Klingon Academy". The manual for the latter was actually quite large and in-depth. It was like the space combat sim equivalent of Falcon 4.