As many of you know, Airline Empires calculates passenger demand for routes based on the number of passengers traveling through the origin and destination airports, among other factors. While this formula can serve as a proxy in the absence of real-world data, its limitations quickly become apparent when you set up routes in regions you’re familiar with in real life.
Today, we are pleased to announce the imminent availability of real-world demand data in the game. Our initial dataset covers approximately 29,000 routes, including the most popular ones you’ll likely come across. If you’ve always wanted to run an island-hopper service and the demand simply wasn’t there in the game, you may now be in luck.
The real-world demand data is current as of the beginning of 2020 (before the collapse from the pandemic). In the game, you may not see exactly the same figures because demand grows over time. For example, a given route in a world in the year 1990 would have lower demand than in the year 2020.
Special thanks go to Viero for his extensive data collection efforts that made this feature possible.
Rollout Plan
Games already in progress will not be affected by this demand data change. The real-world dataset will be introduced to each game world at its next scheduled reset.
Explore the Data in New Sandbox World S4C
For now, you can explore the new demand data in the sandbox world S4C, which will only be available until S4B and S4E are reset, at which point those sandbox worlds will have the new demand data available and S4C will no longer be needed.