Here is an interesting comment from Umberto (FSDreamteam) regarding the survey.
"The main point that many seems to miss is this is not the absolute market share partition of the main simulator, it’s a limited window over the part of those that responded to the Navigraph survey, which are not representative of the overall user base.
If this was a real scientific poll, we might say the sample is heavily biased towards a specific user profile, is as if you asked who’s gonna win the US Elections by asking only to users living in the Silicon Valley, and then being surprised Trump got 74 millions votes, when he shouldn’t have got any, according to “the poll”
Now, before someone says “yes, but this is the most interesting demographic, because they are the one who buys the addons”, this might have been true in the past years ( and not entirely, since I haven’t found a single developer that hasn’t confirmed their X-Plane sales never reached P3D levels, even the users number were very similar, so those users are not all the same in their purchasing habits ), but the presence of the MS Marketplace changes everything.
Because you, as users, only see this survey but we, as developers ( those that sell both on the the Marketplace and independently ), see the only thing that matters, which is actual sales, regardless where they are coming from, and that data is telling us the Marketshare for MSFS 2020, even considering only user that buy add-on, is already way bigger than what seems to be from that survey.
In fact, I’d say it’s impressive that MSFS was able to get in the lead SO FAST, even amongst the most dedicated users, it seems nobody seems to remember how hard was for FSX to achieve the same result against FS9.
I hope nobody would doubt the clear market lead for MSFS can only increase, since right now is fighting with one hand on its back, considering the lack of certain important add-ons.
And before someone would say “but Microsoft can pull the plug from MSFS and the Marketplace at any time”, I’d say while it’s possible, it’s very unlikely, and it would go against everything Microsoft did in the past years that put them back squarely at the top, that is switching from the old concept of selling you a new version of the software every X years, to selling a service with a subscription.
Because that’s MSFS + Marketplace really is, if you got it on Gamepass, you are already paying your sub fees directly to Microsoft, and if you haven’t, you are still paying indirectly, each time you buy an add-on on the Marketplace, because of the MS fees. So, as long as people buy add-ons from the Marketplace ( and they do ), Microsoft won’t pull any plug and support for sim will continue to be sustainable, and there’s a new version for the Xbox coming up, which will support all the add-ons made according to the current SDK, that’s the one and only reason why you are seeing a general drop in prices: developers are betting for another bunch of new users, one they never had any means to reach before, which will likely ask for simpler and cheaper add-ons."