All the competition folded due to lack of profit.
So you can either fly modded 20 year old games or you have to soldier on with DCS.
Every other possible competitor has been primarily one-man teams (Strike Fighters, CAP2, that Apache sim that was Unity I think) that have fallen by the wayside because with ONE person they weren’t making enough money.
You need expertise in coding and flight, physics and tactics, AI and history, geography and gaming, just to attempt to make a product. That requires money up front to pay for things before first release, and getting people to invest with a reasonable ROI is not easy.
When Microsoft, Microsoft, keeps trying and quitting because they weren’t making enough back, you know the marketing issues are serious. MS could afford to throw money at the problem to fix it, but they won’t back a money-losing product anymore. So we got MS Flight…yeah…
They appear to have “cracked the code” with 2020, but I have no idea how that and 2024 have done vs the old FSX that was its main competition.