Most of these games on the stat page are expected to be played more than a sim. Also there's no other real sim on there. Not even casual titles like HAWX, none of the DCS games, no Take on Helicopters, not even Wings of Prey... nothing.

Personally I believe a well written and emotional campaign would be the best selling point. Scripted, voiced over, maybe even having a few nice cutscenes.

I'd enjoy that and it's what most fan projects fail at. I wouldn't even mind if it was in native language (e.g. Russian / German with subtitles for the Moscow theatre).

But that's another topic :-P

Exactly, we need a campaign to get the newbies into the game. Just some quick missions and kludgy missions combined to a 6 mission long campaign dont bind people to the game.

Like the Deasastersoft campaigns as a stock campaign. Lovely missions with historical accuracy to make the player part of the events.
I by far prefer an accurate scripted campaign rathzer than a dynamic one which missions are one like the other.

I'm surprised that Cliffs showed up in the Steam top 100 at all.

Do you have any idea how small our niche (combat flight simulation) actually is?

I had no idea at all until I saw that list! Just had a look and The Witcher is currently at the bottom with 496 players online; that means the number playing CLoD (via Steam and not in 'Steam offline' mode) is less than that. A lot less than I thought.
Over a thousand are playing Railworks... go figure.

Graph dosen't load for me

@ sid, there you go mate:

http://i50.tinypic.com/dzjqpw.jpg

ArmA II & Arrowhead are sims and on steam but that is a smallish niche but with a huge community.

I think if you take Clod alone then its a small niche but if you take the entrie flight sim genre then that isnt so small by any means.

I wouldn't call ArmA a sim though. It's an FPS and thus attracts a lot of people "by nature".

Steam shows a sad truth about the real numbers of an extremely small but also very picky niche. Weak sales but very high expectations. An explosive mixture.

sad truth indeed, add to it costly and long term development cycle
even Microsoft has given up on this, Modern Military is now even more niche than WWs you cant imagine.

The last men standing are in Russia, Eagle Dynamics and 1C, with their programming skills they could have easily left the boat, those are passion driven projects.

Btw i'am confident complex games is the only way to go all others will end up on consoles and Ipads

Same here:confused:

So are you guys saying you are just now realising that flight sims are a niche market?

That is to say flight sims are the red headed step child of games? ;)

Welcome to 1998! ;)