A32NX will not be returning to the marketplace

You’re missing a first step here: the dev must first be approved on the Market Place, and they said it can take a long time in the Q&A because of their backlog. For example, we’ve applied very early on (actually nearly as soon as they opened registrations) and our application is in process since Aug. 2020.

I think, to be more precise, it was the approval of “already approved 3rd party developer’s” , new and update products that was talked about in the Q&A is being backlogged, and that they, MS were bringing more on-board to deal with the evaluation & approval of product (not the approval of NEW Market Place Devs )

Apart form quoting numbers of approved devs, I do not recall that there was any specific mention of new Dev approvals being backlogged.

Obviously through, there are certain exceptions to that, RXP seeming to be one of them .

Has RXP tried re-applying, along with a suitable Market-Place product ?
Maybe their original application got lost somewhere ?

I won’t detail it all here but yes, an updated submission with what I can’t qualify as “suitable” but at least “different” products and especially “a new product never seen before in any simulator and perfectly suited for the Xbox users”*. I don’t believe the application got lost, it is an online form.


*which obviously and implicitly means a product built with the SDK tools only…

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Lol mate, you are right. We’ve moved on from the “mod” business. Better to address it as a separate add-on from now, given the complexity of systems we’ve achieved, and the things that are planned for the near future :laughing:

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Sorry I have read that at least 10 times, and I cannot understand what it says !!!

If you have a product “built with the SDK tools only”, why not release it from an independent “store” for the PC community, and then allow the X-Box users also wanting this product, to help support you get it approved into the MS-Store, so they can use it as well. ?

Like the A32NX, its a shame to see the X-Box community being deprived of products that the PC community can enjoy.

Baby steps

For a very simple reason you have to understand: only 3rd party developers approved on the Market Place can have access to Asobo technical support, and we need such support to bring this product to completion. So you see, RXP is an “Official 3rd Party Developer” (see my badge), but we don’t have any support at all, are not allowed to sell anything on the market place either*, and the community can’t enjoy their favourite game with their favourite add-ons, or at least if not favourite, different and answering the needs of the customers looking for something else than what is discussed here:

Dearth of genuinely appealing content in Xbox marketplace


*and to top it all, since yesterday:

The A32NX is not a product that is used by any companies for any commercial operations, so it’s therefore almost impossible that such contributions would have even happened, MIT or not.

The difference with something like say, Open vSwitch, is that Open vSwitch is used by corporations who draw a direct benefit from contributing to it. Aviation simulators have to be certified and tested, and even if we replicate the A320 to the highest accuracy ever, there is no way it would be used by anyone commercially.

I think there is even a bigger point here.

Here is a piece of code pretty much ready to go, with MIT license which has already been on the market place.

And so far not a single soul of the very vocal Xbox community has stepped up to the plate, taken leadership, assembled a team, put in the effort and even started an attempt to bring it back for Xboxers into the market place.

Instead the Xbox community gives the impression that they rather b… and moan, want everything for free, are unwilling to put in the work themselves but want others to do it for them for free.

Dear XBox community, if you want free stuff available this, is an unique opportunity to take your fate into your own hands and not have the PC users do it for you (for free). All the best.

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Thats what im trying to do. But first i want to know how everything work on the process to submit a product to the marketplace and if i have the resources to do it

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It may well be that you have identified the Biggest difference between what some call the “PC Community” and “The X-Box Community”.

However, there is one Technical stumbling block for the X-Box community to produce anything for MSFS, let alone the Market Place.

Development, can only be done on a PC … It cannot be done on an X-Box – so anyone in the X-Box community, that want to develop , needs to have a suitable MSFS PC to develop on. !!!

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But “commercial operations” could also include developers of payware flight simulator addons.

This is somewhat tangential to FBW but since ware on the topic…

How did open source contributions from commercial players including large corporations take off in areas like networking and data center infrastructure? It happened when

  1. Corporations realized they were spending a lot of development time on commoditized “must-have” functionality that was not a differentiator or a value add. That effort was a “necessary waste”, but a waste nonetheless.
  2. Corporations realized that even though their competitors would also benefit from open-source it was still a level playing field and it did not hurt their advantage in areas they wanted to differentiate in.
  3. Corporations realized that when the open-source libraries lacked functionality they needed it was far better to contribute the functionality to the open-source so they could still benefit from other’s contributions afterwards rather than forking off an internal proprietary branch. Their differentiators could be layered above, beneath, and around the open-source libraries.

Customers obviously benefitted enormously from that shift. But with GPL it would have been impossible, BSD license and similar is what enabled it to happen.

I think the flight simulation industry is in a similar place. Ten years ago full-featured FM(G)C and autoflight simulation was a big differentiator, but by now it is just a commoditized must-have hygiene feature for a “study level or just below” payware airliner project. All developers spend resources developing basically the same navigation and flight management features over and over again to replicate all the same real-world functions. It is a huge effort, and impressive that they can pull it off (and even more impressive when a hobbyist freeware group can do it as well!). The result is spectacular, but it all has to be repeated over and over and over by each company or freeware group.

What if they didn’t do that. What if there was an open-source project for Boeing FMC and autoflight, and an open-source project for Airbus FMGC and autoflight, that implemented that platform. Flightsim developers could contribute what was needed to those projects, and leverage it for their own commercial products. If someone wants to release say an A350 they contribute whatever little pieces might be missing from the Airbus open-source project, and focus their efforts on aircraft-specific systems modeling, and of course visuals, sound, and flight models.

No more repeated commodity development effort, lower barrier of entry for new entrants to develop products, freeware developers can leverage the same platforms if they want. Customers (flightsim users) would benefit enormously from the increased availability and lower prices that result from the reduced developer effort waste.

But that doesn’t work with GPL. It has to be BSD or MIT or the business model that drives the commercial open-source contributions is not there.

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Ref my much longer response above…

But the gist of it is that with permissive licenses like MIT commercial players have an incentive to contribute to open-source since they can then use those libraries in their closed-source products. The incentive is that if they fork off a proprietary branch they are on their own from thereon and cannot benefit from other’s contributions, so it is better to contribute what they need to open-source. With restrictive licenses like GPL they cannot use those libraries anyway so they have no reason to contribute.

I know but I dont think that it really matters. There will be other Airbuses for MSFS, this one seems to be heading to an ivory tower real fast.

If someone’s got the wherewithal, and the time, and the means to develop it for Xbox, and put it on the marketplace, great. If not, never mind. I have none of those things, but I’m certainly not an Xbox user that’s annoyed about the current state of this. A reasonable explanation was given, that makes sense, and I’m personally good with that.

The same arguments and puerile, back-handed comments are still being flung about though. It’s childish. We’re all after the same thing here. A great experience. Within the limits of what each platform can handle.

My two cents, anyway.

What is in for us? They get to release a commercial, proprietary product based on our code, and what exactly do we get in return besides from contributions we could have made ourselves?

This isn’t like Linux where you want someone like MS to contribute and open-source software that was proprietary before (NTFS/FAT drivers for instance), because they hold patents and licenses for those. There is none of that here.

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You are vastly exaggerating the amount of people who care about software licensing in the non-developer space.

No one stopped using the addon because of the licensing issue.

The original statement that prompted my first post was “The GPL ensures that if someone wants to do that, he needs to publish the source code again, so everyone will benefit.”

That is what I disagree with. I am convinced users benefit vastly more from permissive (MIT, BSD,) rather than restrictive (GPL) licensing, for the reasons I pointed out in those few posts, and that goes for all open-source software.

You can obviously release it under whichever license you want, or no license, or not release it. It is your work. Asking “what is in it for us” suggests permissive licensing is not for you and that is your call.

That’d what I meant too.

In principle you are free to do anything, if it is your work you could make it payware as well. I just don’t see what this move achieves except preventing someone taking the code and releasing payware (that probably no one would buy and the community would boycott the s*** out of anyway).

Here’s what I do know. I know that everything I said about the Xbox’s shortcomings are correct. The only thing that is still a somewhat unknown is whether or not the software will require more compute power 3, 4, or 5 years from now. That is a pretty safe bet, because it’s never not happened, but hey, we could be at the beginning of a whole new era where we’ve reached the absolute limits of the power we can stuff into these funny little devices we call computers.

I HIGHLY doubt that, but hey, anything’s possible, no?

That’s laughable. It’s not like they’re losing revenue from not being available on the Xbox platform. Their product is free, therefore it doesn’t hurt them if “sales” go down. Likewise, it doesn’t help them if “sales” go up, both are completely revenue neutral of a grand total of $0.00- They do this because they can, they want to, and they want others to be able to enjoy their product at no charge.

They could change it into payware at any time, and I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who would happily pay for it. But they’ve been crystal clear that they have less than no intention of doing that.

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