For a while I thought that combat flight sims were also dead, only barely holding on to the glory of Falcon 4. But DCS have raised the bar beyond anything thought possible with both Blackshark and A-10. Microsoft is also rebooting the flight simulator. It would be really stupid to sink the flight sims now that we're so close to Helmet Mounted Displays.
Unfortunately for naval sims, we've never had a Falcon 4. And it's a damn shame. At the moment, there is absolutely no naval simulator anywhere on the market that can allow real navigation practice (Virtual Sailor came close though). And you'd be fools if you thought that wouldn't be enough to sell a game. Not only are there tens of thousands of deck cadets in naval universities around the world that would welcome such a game, but even during day to day practice aboard real ships, dead reckoning navigation is impossible in the era of GPS and celestial navigation is only used to check up on instruments. While GPS has eased the work of officers, anyone of them would gladly pay a few bucks to practice their skills from time to time.
As Silent Hunter is the only naval sim to feature the entire globe, it was a hugely missed opportunity to implement such a feature. And you'd smack your heads on walls if you knew just how easy it actually was to implement. Everything is derived from well established formulas. Tides, currents, wind factor, magnetic variation, even magnetic deviation are all either published annually or based on formulas. Plus, course correction would make torpedo targeting 10 times harder.
The devs have suggested that they did think about it, even using real maps instead of a single zoomable one. But they backed off because they "didn't want to scare newbies".
Unlike a flight sim, in a naval sim you have an entire crew that can fulfill every role, including navigation and targeting. In the end, as a commander, all you need to do in a well made naval sim is tell them were to go and who to shoot. How deep you want to involve yourself into the game and its details would be completely up to you.
And as simulators go, the best naval simulator would be a sub simulator based on WW2. No other era and no other class of ship would test you this much. Ballasting a sub would be harder than a Heavy Lift ship. Trimming for spent torpedoes would be harder than discharging a tanker. You can bet that I'd welcome a new sub sim. But only and only if it's done properly, only if it resembles the DCS A-10 in depth. I HIGHLY doubt that Ubisoft would get involved in such a project and it's a damn shame. They have 80% of the game done. They only need a few hundred mathematical formulas and a few buttons more.