Long time ago, we launched a survey to define the profile of the Simutrans average player and recently the results have been published at the wiki. Let’s take a look…


First of all, I shoud say that the results fit with other polls done before at the forum but It’s interesting to see the results as a whole.

The average Simutrans player is male, between 20 and 40, who has been playing since at least a year ago, he knew the game through the online media (forums and software directories), uses Windows and he consider himself as a advanced and even expert player.

In terms of gender, the result is the expected, as for example, at the forum most the users are male and the little amount of girls hardly ever participate. However, we shouldn’t considerd Simutrans as a game specially designed or focused on a concrete gender. It doesn’t have the typical features of male games like insane competition, violence, frenetic intensity, etc…

The average age of player fits more or less with the typical old school player. People who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s with classics like Simcity and TTD, and now they have recovered the illusion thanks to Simutrans. It’s curious that the fifth part is under 20, beating the people older than 40. This may indicate that the players base is relatively young.

In terms of gameplay, it’s normal that people on the forum to take at least a year before they encourage to participate in any aspect of the community. People try to gain experience and play a lot, before taking part in the community. However, every day more and more inexperienced players join and participate, asking questions, contributing with their savegames games, items, etc …

There’s an interesting detail related with how people get to know the game. More than a third come through the online media like forums and software directories, meanwhile a quarter come from offline media like magazines and word-of-mouth. This indicates how important the promotion is, in order to reach as many potential players as possible. The Sourceforge Awards nomination from last year help in that sense.

Now, let’s go with operating systems and game knowledge. In the first case, although Simutrans supports the main platforms and arquitectures, Windows is still the dominant operating system in the market and most of the Simutrans precursors are windows only, so it makes sense that most players use Windows. However, nearly a quarter use linux, which reflects the positive reception of the game after the license change and its inclusion in the repostories of the major linux distributions.

Finally, about the experience level, it’s directly related with the previous experience mentioned above. Simutrans may be a little complicated at the begining but after several days, the game mechanics reveals its simplicity and you can turn into a master just with a little practice. Therefore, it’s normal that the average level of players would be high.

You have more details at Simutrans wiki.