The US is just a tad bigger than the UK I think, so that’s not proving much.
If you follow along with the first post and rest of the thread, it’s pointed out that the US population is 5 times larger than the UK, but the US flight sim user base is only 2 times larger than UK’s. The flight sim user base is disproportionately large in the UK, Germany, and Netherlands. I was just wondering why this is. Lots of good suggestions here about why flight sims are popular in these places, but not really why they’d be much more popular there than other places. The best answer I’ve seen so far is that it’s just some inexplicable cultural thing.
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Two World Wars fought over there. Airstrips built. Pilots trained. Surplus aircraft sold to civilians with a disproportionately high number of pilots. Then the hobby gets passed down from generation to generation.
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Interesting map thanks for sharing. Never realized the UK had so many. The interior (middle) of Wales has no airfields why is this? No real requirement?
Hill/mountain country in the interior with a very low density population.
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Regretfully, after the war there wasn’t much demand for private aircraft ownership as the UK, Europe, were left massively in debt. Only the USA made a profit out of both World Wars. The vast majority of surplus European aircraft were scrapped.
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That is a shame. Here in the states there was some cheap surplus available although most was scrapped here, too.
The key to wartime profit was the ability to mass manufacture without worry of bombardment.
Its full of mountains. Not suitable for airfields.
(and dragons)
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Over the UK, Netherlands and Germany in the war years 1940s, airplanes could be seen everyday, sometimes in combat.
Stories were told by dads to sons about the dogfigths they saw.
There was no aerial combat over the US during WWII. There were no eye witness accounts of dogfights over mainland USA.
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I wondered if it might be because of the war in a previous post. It makes sense with the UK and Germany being right at the top. But I’m not sure why if the Netherlands is, that France isn’t. Commercial/airliner simming also seems vastly more popular than the warbirds. So I’m not sure that’s the most significant reason, if there is any.
General aviation is also vastly larger in the US, and the current generation playing flight sim is much more likely to have experienced that then remembers wartime aviation from WWII.
Those are good guesses as to why it’s popular in the UK and Germany.
But WWII aviation was hugely popular in the US as well. Popularized in film and television. There are large reenactments at airshows every year all around the US. I’ll go out on a limb and say warbird aviation is currently much larger in the US than it is in Europe even.
As an American, I’ve always had the impression that having a hobby, and especially being an avid hobbyist, is especially widespread in the UK.
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I’m sure it in some way has some correlation to the number of people that own a PC, after that the skew towards the US & UK probably then lies with language to some extent. I suspect there are ‘political’ reasons that China is absent, and cultural reasons for Japan (they have many of their own genres I understand) and probably the same for South Korea
Some figures:
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At roughly 5 to 1, the ratio of US to UK video gamers follows the population trend, which isn’t surprising.
So it’s specifically simming that’s more popular in the UK (and parts of Europe). It would be interesting to see if this included train simming (I’m guessing it does, especially in mainland Europe), but I couldn’t find stats.
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I don’t have any numbers, but yes, train simming is quite popular in the UK. Railway modelling was always A Thing here, but it’s got expensive.
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Personally, and not wishing to cause any offence, I would have said that train simming would be more akin to flying a passenger plane - wouldn’t a (car) racing sim be more relevant to the smaller aircraft in MSFS?* I’m not saying that flying GA craft is not without a certain relaxation factor that certainly isn’t present in a racing sim, but there’s a wide range of flying to be had in this sim, much like the wide range of land-based simming, so maybe it’s worth casting that net a bit wider. There is also the Truck simulator scene - I wonder how that compares?
The only figures that I’ve found for any racing sim so fare are for iRacing, and they aren’t actual player count, though they so show a similar US/UK/Germany bias:
- I say this as someone who started with the first Colin McRae game many years ago and currently have Assetto Corsa, RFactor2, PCars2 and Dirt Rally 2.0 installed (though woefully unplayed), and my preference is for single/two seater GA craft, with or without engines (I’ve tried airliner/train/truck sims in the past and they just don’t do it for me, but hey).
NW Europe just like their sims 
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Looks very similar to mine. I was shocked as I thought I was making content only a handful of locals would be interested in.
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I was actully shocked at how few airfields there are in the UK. Although they are all very interesting airfields. You can get a flightsim.to version of nearly every airport there.
What blows my mind about Europe is how close together all these culturally different communities are located. You can fly a piston engine airplane from London to Moscow for example. Even with a short trip in the UK people will be speaking different version of English.
In the US I can travel thousands of miles and about all that changes is the weather.
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