I think people also seem to downplay how much money LM is actually making off the civilian market versus government. Embry-Riddle, where I went to college used P3D in it's sims across both campuses. That has several thousand flight students. Prescott, where I was had 10 or 15 sims it was on for official flight training. Plus it was on ALL the open computer sim lab that had 40 machines set up on it. As did the ATC Sim Lab with all it's sims. That's them using the academic version. That's just one ERAU campus and not the dozen or more other flight schools across the country. Then you add all of us regular simmers, pilots, etc that use it. So, It's likely a pretty even split between civilian and government.
The advances in P3D likely also weren't driven on government requests, it's mostly changes noted from the civilian market. LM is really just marching to their own drum. The FSX based legacy platform can't compete with the new one, at all. LM I'm sure knows this, and they wont be. Unless they basically strip it down to bare bones like Microsoft did and rebuild it. Which I don't believe LM has the resources allotted to do something that major. You'll still probably see improvements made to Prepar3D, but once FS2020 comes out I'd imagine that will slow considerably as the vast majority of the civilian market and 3rd party developers leaves the platform for FS2020. Leaving mostly government and a considerably smaller number of civilian users of it. I mean there's already rumblings about some big developers leaving LM's platform completely when FS2020 is released. So as I said, once it comes out I'd imagine a slow down in P3D version advancements.
