Navigraph posted the results of its FlightSim Community Survey for 2026, and they’re certainly interesting, showing how Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 now firmly holds the top spot among flight simulators.
The survey was launched in February, and a whopping 42,332 users responded. That being said, 44% completed all the questions, and 2,700 were removed due to “showing two or more signs typical of insincere respondents.” This brings the total number of respondents to 15,600, which is certainly statistically relevant.
That being said, we should remember that this pool of users is likely skewed toward hardcore simmers compared to more casual gamers, mostly due to the groups of people among which the survey itself was visible. Clear signs are the fact that 17.9% of respondents actually work within aviation, while only 2.1% use Xbox as their main platform, and 0.5% use the PS5, as opposed to 90.0% using Windows PCs.
It’s very unlikely that these percentages represent the flight simulation community as a whole 100% accurately, but if we keep the hardcore simmer bias in mind, the results are still very interesting.
We learn that nearly half of the total respondents (49.5%) use Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 as their primary flight sim platform, followed by 27.8% still holding onto Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. This means that over 75% (77.3%) focus on the MSFS family.
X-Plane 12 by Laminar Research follows as a distant third at 11.7%, having lost 0.1% since last year, which means a rather stable performance.
DCS World only received 1.5% if the votes, but Eagle Dynamics’ military flight simulator is likely underrepresented because its users don’t really use Navigraph as a core utility.
Since last year, MSFS 2024 has completely overtaken MSFS 2020, with a vast majority of users who decided to change platform making the jump from the older sim by Microsoft to the newer one.
Another interesting data point is the sentiment toward Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which is now majorly positive after a little over a year since its release.
Asked how likely they are to recommend MSFS 2024, the overwhelming majority of respondents lean toward recommending the simulator, while only a negligible minority leans towards not recommending it.
There is plenty more data where this came from, for instance, the most popular add-ons, the average spend per user in software and hardware, and so forth.
If you want to check it out in extreme detail, you can find everything in the full report.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is available for PC and Xbox Series X|S.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also available for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out our recent interview with Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann.
X-Plane 12 is currently available for PC and mobile platforms.
DCS World is available only for PC.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our latest roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
