The thread is old and not sure if everyone understands better now but i saw it got bumped for some reason so wanted to add my two cents.
What I understand about why the liveries cannot be included as part of the in game package is because of licensing agreements between the IP owners (the airline companies) and Microsoft. Since the plane is paid for and published by MS, they and their legal team won’t be green lighting adding IP from other companies without license agreements in place. That’s why MS can’t just make any plane they want to, that’s why MS have to wait a year or more to get licence agreement from Antonov to release the AN2 despite having the plane ready to sell, that’s why they can’t just release the ornithopter or whatever that dune thingy is called before the movie is released.
There are some exceptions when it comes to liveries, you might have seen KLM livery on the 787 or the S7 and ANZ livery in a320 Neo or the Silver Airways and Air Tahiti liveries bundled with the ATR. I believe these are so because Microsoft has license agreement with those IP owners.
Now, the A310 liveries for the PC version which are available from inibuilds installer or forums are no different from the liveries published in flightsim.to. I.e they are not published by Microsoft and Microsoft has nothing to do with them.
Other developers and freeware creators can do it without licensing because they don’t have the monetary backing that MS has, so the IP owners know very well that they won’t recover much monetary compensation from those people but only get some negetive PR from the flightsim community and it’s probably not worth their time. They can still send notices for cease and desist if they are desperate enough. But if MS does violate such IP laws, then they know they can sue and possibly win and get good monetary compensation.
I think the crux of the matter the non-availability of freewares in the marketplace. That’s why we have payware livery packes from 4simmers, bravoairapace and the likes. I believe if the marketplace was as open and easy to use as the Forza community liveries, then those livery packages won’t have sold much.
So yes, the Xbox users are kinda getting the raw end of the deal here but there’s some very good reasons for it, but if MS wishes, those can be worked around as well.