According to SteamDB, X-Plane 12 has peaked at 273 active users, up from 235 yesterday.
For comparison, X-Plane 11 peaked at 1,636 active users today. The number of active X-Plane users has been on a downward trend since March, where it peaked at 2,749 active users, and lately it has maintained a peak average of between 1,300 and 1,700 users.
For those who want to know the MSFS numbers, the peak concurrent users today was 8,112 users. To give you an idea, this is twice the highest peak X-Plane 11 had, which was 4,210 users in March 2020. MSFS highest peak was on release day with 61,829 users.
Speaking of the current X-Plane 12 numbers, I can’t see them as being bad or being a signal that it is struggling to sell. I think it’s too early to assess that. Also these numbers are only on Steam. On X-Plane.org, there was a campaign to get people to buy the website version and reject it from Steam, because that way, LR would get all the money while on Steam, the store would get 30%. Also the Steam version took a week and a half to release after the website version, so a significant portion must have purchased from the website.
This campaign to buy on the site was pretty toxic, I would say. It was led by one of the forum community leaders, who even spread fake news to try to dissuade people from the idea of buying on Steam. An hour ago, he made fun of a person reporting that the beta build on the Steam version is behind the build on the website version and said something along the lines of ‘See? I told you so. Now deal with it’.
When you see one of the forum leaders acting this way, you realize how seedy and hostile the forum is, and it makes me appreciate the mod team here even more for keeping a civil environment and setting an example.