IL2-Sturmovik is my love. Wouldn't it be fun to try one of these with some nice joystick and VR headsets?

Maybe after 9/11 they were secretly banned. Jokes aside IL2 is a great dogfight simulator, FSX is on steam as is X-Planes. However they don't seem indeed as popular as they used to be.

The only flight sim I play these days is FSX. I'm not "super-into" this niche in the same way I am with racing games, so I only really need one of these. And FSX has a crazy number of locations in the game and tonnes of free add-ons/mods.

Sims like FSX and Prepar3D seem to attract a large number of views on YouTube sim channels. So I think there is a large-ish consumer base for this niche. Perhaps bigger than sim racing even.

Yet there is a lack of interest with these sims among "general" gamers, where even the combat-and multiplayer-orinted sims don't seem to attract that many players.

'Pricing' and 'the mandatory learning process' are probably the biggest obstacles to this genre being really popular again.

Add-ons can be very expensive, and not just the planes; for example, the best visual update mod for FSX costs €40.
Prepar3D costs $200 to buy. If you are really going for it, you also need a good (but expensive) flight-stick set.
And then you have to learn how to fly the thing, which is different with each plane.

FlightGear still exists, and was updated quite recently. Not sure if that scratches your itch.

Indeed I do.

Here is a Gogmix I made with the best flight sims that you can get from GOG. :)

Many of those games are Space sims or flying games. Flying games are not necessarily flight sims.

Love them, ever since way back with F-19 and . Later I enjoyed the Novalogic flightsims, specifically F-16 and F-22, and I think the last combat flight sim I played was [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBnOMqREP4g]Lock On: Modern Air Combat. I stopped playing because I wanted a proper joystick to play the games right, but I never got round to looking for one.

Flightsims got either too realistic (Falcon 4, DCS) or too superficial (Ace Combat, Hawkx).

Just play any old Sierra, DID or Microprose sim from the dos era and compare it to something made recently (DCS for example). The old flightsimulators knew how to make something that is in real life pretty boring fun by spicing it up with a bit of strategy or other gameplay elements (like squadron management in Falcon 3).

I'm going to be honest, its 9/11 no joke... Because of 9/11 that all went away.... MS Flight Simulator was redesigned JANE's stopped making them and many others went to a pure arcade style instead of realistic.

Yeah loved them once, carn't play them anymore.
For now i'm stuck on terra firma, long to play lock-on again or even IL2....

It's zero gravity, of course, but Lunar Flight is really good, especially in VR. Pretty intense learning curve, though.

People may find this hard to believe (or maybe not), but one reason why modern flight sims of modern subjects has fallen away is licensing. Somewhere along the way the aircraft industry, just like the car industry, decided you cannot go around making things using their products without paying them for the honor. And since realistic modern flight sims do not generally sell by the truckload, developers are less inclined to pay for licensing.

And since pretty much all American aviation, apart from Lockheed, is now owned by Boeing- and Boeing being a pack of assholes...you can see the problem. For example, Boeing owns the WW2 Mustang fighter. Despite the fact that it was paid for in wartime by tax payers, not just in the USA, but the Commonwealth as well. It should be public domain. But small companies can not afford to make plastic model kits of the Mustang because they cannot afford the Boeing license. So what would Boeing now charge for a license for the Falcon? It's not just Boeing either. I've worked in the aircraft industry for 25 years, and I assure you it is one of the dirtiest industries in the world.

My fondest flight sim memory.

Gamepads replaced joysticks as standard gaming devices, is what happened to flight sims.