Population of IL2 4.08m
 

Just so you guys know, I did a little research and found this to be interesting after scanning IL2 servers we still have over 5000 End ussers playing on-line.

109 Servers

Now thats world wide.

Imagine if 1C was to further suport this current version and add-ons to it.

I have seen this game for sale in USA at Walmart and it's still going strong, young and old.

Big Salute to 1C and company. ~S~!

Not to burst your bubble but to burst your bubble...

5000 users... ity bity stuff man.

Give you some stats to think about.

Currently 9 Million Players on World of Warcraft at 15 bucks a month. That's right do the math.

I just did a search on Call of Duty 4 with over 20000 servers out there.

Il2 so small it doesn't show up on any relative content sights.

We are the few the proud for sure.

What do you mean by 5,000 users exactly. Is it 5,000 active users currently?
How many copies of Il2 have been sold? FB? AEP? PE2? 46? These are the numbers that interest me. How many of us are out there? Perhaps many of the copies sold are collecting dust, who knows.
I do know that so many people who have Il2 don't even know about the UBI website, or this one for that matter.
If they don't know about these websites, then they surely don't know that a better sim is in the works.

I also think you'll have to concider alot and i mean alot of copies got sold to people that never play online since IL2 dosn't "officialy" have any real internet lobby thingy.

But ye i guess that around 5000-6000 users active is what it's about now and thats really awsome after such a long time, and don't compare it to COD4 etc shit guys cod4 came out 7 months ago brand new and is also a totaly different title.( MC AND ARCADE)

JG27:: Yep. Happy offliners are the barrier between Oleg and "pay to play" so to speak.

The population of IL2 is shrinking, whether you believe it or not. Open HyperLobby, you'll find the most popular servers there are arcade ones with cockpit off and external view on. The number of total online players at HL has also decreased greatly. It was usual to see 1000 plus players flying online at the same time before 2007. But now it is a different stroy. There were also many large squadrons flying at HL years ago which I have never seen for nearly two years.

+1
We share the same point of view...
...
...
...

One thing I've noticed : Fights moved from HL servers to forum's topics...:rolleyes:

Now we know why Olegs pushing IL2/BoB into XBox, Playstation, and that funny 'hand-held excuse' for a computer .. :)

The wider the market the more interest and eventual conversion to the PC.
Good strategy - actually no choice..
:cool:

There aren't nearly as many consistent users of IL2 online as there used to be. This is still the pinnacle of WWII flight simulation and those that realize it are the ones that continue to stick around and populate the servers. While there might be 500 servers out there, there are really only a dozen or so that have consistent pilot numbers and that's been common for the last couple years. Even though the DVD compilation release brought quite a bit of new blood, there also seem to be a number of pilots leaving for other things at about the same rate.

This sim will continue to have a strong and loyal player base that will no doubt still be flying this sim for a couple more years to come despite an engine that's long in the tooth and mildly dated graphics. They'll continue for the sheer broad spectrum of content.

The fact that there is a cross-platform game being developed is really only a good thing...yes, even for us hardcore pc bird nerds.


TB

You cannot count online figures as simplistically as:

" 5000 users for IL2 vs 9 Million Players on World of Warcraft at 15 bucks a month and Call of Duty 4 having over 20000 servers out there."

Lets put it like this, Battlefield 2/2142 have on average double the number of players Call of Duty 4 has. Counter Strike Source had even more but a lot have jumped over to COD 4.

Now 9 million players at 15 bucks a month may sound a lot but it is a game that is constantly being developed, requires an extensive backbone serverside to run. Put that against over 1.4 billion internet users worldwide and you have a problem. Then 9 million users are a drop in the ocean.
Mark my words, a realistic WW2 simulator covering, ground air and sea catering in the fps style (armed assault type) would have in excess of 30 to 40 million users easily.
That against a backdrop of 1.4 billion is still a drop in the ocean, just slightly bigger.
What flight sim companies should be doing is marketing their products together with after-market products such as trackir, joysticks etc...

Lastly, Il2 is over 10 years old and the fact that it has the largest online flight community bar none is and indication of what could happen with the right product.
Remember when Il2 came out broadband was in it's infancy in most countries.
All the other products that have been quoted have come out since the big internet boom.
Imagine a product that records stats like BF2, is ultra realistic and is great to look at...
time will tell but I believe SOW will reinvent how online flight sims are seen.

We still cannot discuss SoW, cause we have not seen it in public.

With regards to the IL-2, I totally agree that it's shrinking. Whatever is left is some DF servers, which is nothing if you consider that DF is just something arcade (no matter what the settings are) and IL-2 was not meant to be something arcade.

Online coops? Sadly only a few flown every day...

Online wars? Sadly no decent online war exists...

Players? We got to be honest and accept that every day we see the same 500-1000 names. And this list is getting shorter and shorter, not to mention those who just show up in HL and are not flying at all. They just come for some chit-chat and then they leave.

I won't be talking about offline players, cause we do not have any real proof of their numbers and the time they spend in this game.

Anyway, this game will keep some 50+ players for many years, even if no other sim appears.

I always liked "realistic" simulations (driving, ww2) more than any stupid shooter for kids...war of warcraft is another genre but still its full of kids and that fantasy shit isnt attractive to me....

Actually you can... Take a look at the page rankings and the traffic for your favorite IL2 site. Even Ubi's forums are tiny tiny in comparison to the shear volume of WoW fans. We as in a community are in the thousands they are in the Millions period.

So what is your point? In terms of numbers playing this game online any any given time there are some 600 folks playing. That's Hyperlobby numbers.

Uhh sorry what are you talking about here? It's bar none the most successful PC game of all time period. Lets do a little math for a second.

9 million people purchased Wow = 9Mx$39.00 $351,000,000 just in the first iteration.

9 million people purchased Wow Burning Crusades at $29.00 = $342,000,000

That's $693,000,000 Just in revenue from purchases. Even if half were pirated copies that is more money than any other game or movie success right out of the gate.

Now lets add in the subscription fees per month. $135,000,000 now I know it didn't start out at 9 million users it started out with 4 million users and grew. I will play devils advocate for just a moment. Even at a modist 6 Million users a month that is $90,000,000 x 3 years = $3,240,000,000 just in Subscription fees.

Are you starting to get the picture? This title has blown away any Entertainment movie by leaps and bounds and it continues to do so. Yes there is overhead but when you've made about 5 Billion in revenue you can afford the servers and the development team that makes WOW work. Even if the overhead to run their servers at a 100 million a year (which is far from reality) They dwarf any WW2 Simulator and every other game by leaps and bounds.

30 to 40 million users? Uhh I don't think you understand the gaming industry and realistic numbers. IL2 and even all of it's iterations might have sold 500,000 copies at the most not 30 to 40 million.

Just start looking into Site traffic and it will show you very quicky just how tiny this genre is. Go to google and load up this site. It's tiny dude.

If you think having an integrated sim and ground war simulator is going to draw massive crowds take a look at WWII online as a good starting point.


The fact is there is a reason why 1c is releasing a Console and handheld version of IL2. Most gamers don't play PC games anymore. WOW and SIMs are the only ones making entertainment software company execs scratch their heads. Wow and SIMs are the most succesful PC games of all time. Even if you include Microsoft Flight Sim as being a competitor it dwarfs the IL2 community.

Do some research and you will see just how wrong you are.

That may be true but you are in the minority. 9.3 million active players right now and there is no end it sight. They will be releasing the Wrath of the Lich King in the Fall and it will continue the saga.

It doesn't matter if you don't like the game. The numbers speak for themselves.

I've never purchased or played WoW nor any of its iterations. Also comparing this sim to THE MOST SUCCESSFUL online game ever is kinda like apples and oranges.

There's no denying this genre represents a very small fraction of the comparable game sales of more demographically diverse genres, but you can expect me to be more protective and argue with more fervor on behalf of my hobby than the vast majority of those WoW players ever would for theirs. I might have less chance of being heard than a Who in Whoville, but I still shout as there is always a chance there might be a figurative Horton somewhere out there.

Not really. The point in bringing it up is to offer perspective. Publishers and Developers are in this to make money. This is their business. Just because our genre is near and dear doesn't always agree with where the money is and where it will be spent.

In terms of being protective and arguing with more ferver you couldn't be more incorrect. They are just as freakish as any of us. They have all their calculations for all the zillions of items and classes just as much if not more than us given all the different variables with the game. There are entire business surrounding the information about Wow. The UI is open to be modded and it's frequently modded I might ad. So much so you need a client on your machine just to manage the software.

There is far more depth and breath to their software than with ours. We have so many flyables and so many things that can be done within our software.

They have an entire economy setup with full blown auction houses resembling ebay in the real world with tons of tools to search and sell items. In the game you actually make a living either by finding and selling things or actually making things.

Its such a deep game I can't even begin to scratch the surface.

Just because you and I are into the WWII Flying stuff and it has incredible history and Breadth doesn't mean they don't. You have no idea.

We have virtual squads with say 20-30 guys in it. They have entire Guilds with 100s of people. Remember some of their content can only be played with 40 guys at the same time working together to bring down the big guys. These are called raid guilds and one instance can take a few days to complete. Those aren't 1 hour sessions either. They last 3-6 hours at a time.

I will stop talking about it because it will go on and on.

The thing to remember is even though this game is so different from ours the backing and the idea is to sell software in the end.

Thinking that we are anything but tiny is fantacy. The fact that someone is willing to take a risks and spend time and money to build my favorite type of game is pretty incredible. Notice how many US based companies are releasing flight sims. I can think of one.. Microsoft. The rest of the big boyz are building console games and attempting to sap WOW.

Recent release of Age of Conan is the first real attemp to give wow a run for its money. 3 weeks old and it's already sold 1M copies.

I won't bet a cent on this info, but for sure a respected UBI forum's moderator wrote some time ago that the total sales of Il2 family games exceeded 5 million units.

Regards,
Insuber

Very possible but I doubt it.

i think the official total sale figure quoted by 1C for the whole il2 series worldwide was just under 600.000

You somehow seem to think I was taking a dig at WOW and have jumped to it's defense. Sorry if I gave that impression.
I was merely pointing out that with the internet having 1.4 billion users, 9 million people play WOW is really not that big.

To put it another way, there is a massive untapped market waiting to be exploited. I was just pointing out that a combined WW2 sim having all the elements of COD2, IL2 and Silenthunter 4 (include surface ships) would easily attract 40 million plus players.
Again it would have to follow the same stats, ingame world of the landmark games like WOW, EVE etc. WW2 online failed mainly because of a lack of developer support, the game basically remained the same from initial release...
So in a nutshell I was saying an online game, with a persistant universe featuring, planes, tanks soldiers and naval assets in a large FPS type world with complete stats, rank and upgrades would be successful especially if it was regularly updated and maintained.
If WOW is the alpha and omega of online game in the future then that would be sad. I firmly believe a persistant online ww2 war on an epic scale would be very successful.

I have played guild wars, Navy fields, ADW, Il2, Armed Assault, BF2, BF2142, Falcon 4, Lomac, Prey, Crysis, COD4, DOD online. Offline, Warcraft in all it's incarnation, AGE of empires and the list goes on...
As for consoles replacing PC's I say 20 years ago who would have though mobile phones would be available to everyone... Wher technology is heading is anyones guess. But anyone ignorning 1.4 billion users is an idiot.
Five to six years from now WOW will be one of hundreds of titles competing for the biggest market in the world.

Hmmm I'm not suggesting you're attacking WOW and I need to defend it... I'm merely pointing out your downplay of 9 million users and the insane financial success of the game.

I think your figures are a bit optimistic given WOW is the most successful game off all time and it comes nowhere near 40 million.

Take a look at the demographics for IL2 I bet most of the American Players are above the age of 30 with I'm sure a few exceptions here and there. EU players there are a lot more but not enough to get 40 million people playing.

The more popular games are MORPGS and RTSs for that matter. Even shooters don't have the volume of the later.

My point is even if you could be such a game I doubt they would come. WWII only interest a few out of the thousands of gamers.


Publishers and Developers aren't ignoring the numbers. What may surprise you is there is a very large untapped segment out there that is just now coming into the sights of these companies. Want to know who that is?

Women.... Game developers and Publishers are all to aware of the guys and what they like. What they got a glimps (SIMS) of was women play too. I can assure you women aren't interested in a 1.93 Ata 109k4 vs a +25 Spit MK IX matchup.

So that's whats missing from your equation.

whats missing is the sense of this thread.
it reminds me of a pissing-contest :-)
who really cares in this forum what other games people are playing???
and it is that to reach more people you have to be less sophisticated, isn´t it?

Point taken lol

It's not a pissing contests and some of the comments made in this thread are quite relevant. I'm not sure what the point of your comment is other than to flame people...

The point of the thread was to discuss just how popular IL2 is... I just gave a comparison of how it's not.

What I find odd about it is the fact most people don't understand how games are funded and what companies like UBI and 1C are willing to do. Yet people comment frequently about getting BOB to market.

I do not know how you read the title of this thread, i read population and not popular.

And yes, as more demanding a game gets as less popular it will be.
The average iq is reciprocal proportional to the number of people who get together.
Face it, we are the elite because we are so few! :-D

No offense intended!!!

I guess some of you know nothing about economy. If it was like you're saying there would not be Lexus, but only Toyota in this world.
IL-2 and flight sims in general, may not be the most popular games in the world, but no one asked for this. I'm pretty sure that Oleg and his small team are more than happy with the money they've earned from this industry so far. They're not doing this for nothing. They do business in a niche market, that won't make them Bill Gates (but who else can be anyway?), but for sure they make a better living than most of the people here.

And you think that Ubi and other big corporations don't care about their product that much? Not in a million years. They made an excellent profit out of this product and they would be silly to not want to repeat this. And they're not silly, otherwise they would not be that high.

All in all, we all can understand that between starving and being Bill Gates there are lots of levels, and no one would demand being on the top otherwise to starve.

Comparing WoW to IL2 could be more comparing apples and oranges. I wonder how many people play WoW only offline?

So comparing the online-numbers of a 9 year old engine to a 3 year old massive-multiplayer-game is the same as saying there are only 30 people a day eating a pizza in the local restaurant, but millions eating each day at McDonalds worldwide.

That doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the food nor does it give you a basis of which is more likely to stay in business or if those making the food can live from the money they earn. ;)

"Excellent Profit" Relative to what? I agree for a WWII sim the product line is sucessful and part of the reason behind that line of though is all the addons throughout the years.

Actually there are very few Flight sims that are slated to come out and there is a reason for it. There was even rumor some time back that MS wouldn't release a new version of Flightsim for fear of the lack of numbers. Fortunately they went forward with it and FSX is a success.

If you doubt me go to your nearest Game Store and look at the shelves for PC games.

Actually this your comment is incorrect. It's very relevant in the sense that companies are seeing the success of WOW and they are attemping to mimic it. WoW has broken the mold of how game companies can capture more revenue. That isn't to say WOW is the first. It's the first to be very successful at it.

In terms of quality I think you need to take a look at the list of Games put out by Blizzard. Having played WOW and a few other Titles like Star Craft War Craft 1 2 3 Blizzard bar none creates very high quality products.

If you think WOW is the McDonalds of the food industry you couldn't be farther from the truth. The quality and the depth of that game makes IL2 look pretty tiny. Granted totally different game different model different content but none the less WoW is not a crappy product. There is a reason why it's grown to 9.3 million people and it continues to grow.

I can't say the same for IL2.

I may be wrong but if you want to compare Apples and Apples take a look at the number of people still Playing Star Craft which is about as old as IL2 IRC. I think you will see there are more people playing it than IL2.

Just to comment about learning curve. Flight sims no doubt have a very large learning curve and equipment requirements that keep the Barrier of Entry pretty hard for some one new to get into. How do I know this? Look at the number of new players. Most of the guys playing are older and have been playing with Flight Sims since the 80s.

This barrier is going to be difficult to sell to a kid just picking up the game. That isn't to say there aren't any but in the US its pretty small compared to WOW. EU I think it's a different story.


Back OT.

The bottom line is we should be patient and be thankful that anyone is actually putting out a FS these days especially a WWII sim that will overshadow the reigning King of WWII sims IL2. Last time I checked it's the only new WWII PC based Flight sim expected.

You should read my post, JG27CaptStubing ;)

I posted that selling numbers and quality are NOT related, nor do they say anything about the quality of food, nor did I compare the food presented by McDonalds to WoW.

What I did say, though, was that the numbers don't compare, because these two games WoW and IL2 couldn't be further apart, just like McDo and my local Pizza-Man, because WoW serves players worldwide and lives through the masses of players (hence MMO ;) ) with literally no offline-value.
IL2 however is more like the Pizza-Man next door, who makes brilliant Pizza in a great variety and serving special wishes, but only for the few people who know this and who'd like to eat some pizza. And a lot of people will never be seen in the area of the my Pizza-Man, because they order and eat at home, just like many, many IL2-players won't ever go online.

It's numbers and area of customers, not quality, that I am speaking about (or numbers and genres, to come back to games).

Coming to quality, though, you are pretty selective with the choice of games you play and which you base your opinion upon. If you just play the games with the by far largest Budget, it's pretty clear you can't complain about the support, but there are other games published by Blizzard, too, and the overall-support and quality over the last 10 years is good, but surely not untouchable great.

IMHO it's not only the learning curve you mentioned. Infact I played IL2 with my 4 year old nephew with easy settings and he was quite good with it. But why should you invest 20 bucks or more for a medicore joystick to test a game, while you can play others with your mouse? And these mouse-controlled games like StarCraft and Warcraft are even shared and advertised by friends on LAN-parties!
The LAN-Parties I visited, I was the only one with a joystick... We've got to live with the fact that Flightsims are a Niche-Product, but knowing that, I'm even more impressed to see that SoW will bind virtual pilots from a lot of eras to a single product. That will indeed be a revolution, IMHO.

CaptStubing I think you must read my post again.
Let me repeat: Profit is a relevant concept.
1.000.000 euros might be nothing for multi-billion Microsoft corporation and thus not find a reason to make a product with such profit, but on the other hand it might be the dream of many-many...many people in the world. I guess there must be more than 6.000.000.000 (yes, six billion) people in this earth that would dream of making a million euros out of 10 years work.

Therefore I guess you understand that there will always be room for those who have the skills to make a flight simulator. It's the skills that are missing from the gaming industry to produce a new flight sim, not the small profit that comes of them.

Closing this post, I will agree that there is not much room for bad flight simulators. And that's why game companies do not risk their money on them easily. They know they can publish a bad sports game (I really wonder what kind of creatures buy EA's sports games lol), or a bad RTS game and sell millions of copies, but they also know they can't sell a bad flight sim.

Maybe it's my reading but I don't quite understand your post...

You might not know this but in the gaming industry Developers ie OM games in this case very rarely fund their own projects and products. Some have back in the day but there is quite a bit of risk to building a game for a couple years and then trying to get it to sell.

In short Publishers fund the games. They typically have the IP that will drive a game. Developers often pitch ideas based upon some technologies they've developed and or past games they've had success in developing. Publishers will then Fund the project and the developers just like with any project march to their orders. This isn't always the case but its a pretty commmon approach these days.

There are a few exceptions. ID and Valve come to mind. These guys have the horsepower to go to their Publisher and tell them they are working on a sequal to say Quake or Halflife respectively. Thats why when they are asked for deadlines etc they don't typically answer. This may be happening with IL2but I sort of doubt it.


With all that said I used WOW to illustrate two points.

1. Just how small our community really is. Even if IL2 and all their Products sold 600,000 copies it's a drop in the bucket compared to the Volume of Product sales and Revenue for WOW.

2. Publishing Giants such as UBI and Vivendi Games look at those successes and they will and dictate what a developer like OM can produce. There is a reason why OM can pitch the idea to a UBI and they listen given his success with the IL2 series however it doesn't mean UBI will listen. His numbers are tiny in comparison to other Genres and Game types.

The only thing I wanted to point out with a lot of work and a maybe not so good example is that your equation (your point 1.) is wrong as you initially put it. ;)


A market for a massive-multiplayer-game like WoW CAN never be the goal for a game that was originally intended for an offline-game with multiplayer-ability. Just as a tactical shooter like Rainbow6 can never compete with games like Quake and Unreal, though these genres are a lot closer related than Roleplaying and Flightsimulation. Any trial to create a chimera of both is doomed to fail (RB6 Lockdown/Vegas, for example).

As you posted, Flightsims are a niche-product. That's not as bad as you may think, though, considering that UBI saw the potential of IL2 pretty soon and secured their rights on the SoW-Engine.