An open letter to third party developers

Discussion Hub Tools & Utilities
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In the glory days of Flight Simulation, long before the latest release of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Third party developers lived by the idea that they all should have their own store and management utility for easy installing of all their planes, airports, terrain, etc. And we get that. Managing add-ons could be a drag. At least for casual gamers.

But today we have Microsoft and Asobo. They where smart enough to implement their own store embedded into Flight Simulator. And by doing so we now have a management tool that cannot fail and its users doesn’t have to manage the management tools. Genius I say!

Anyway. Third party developers today still think that gamers needs an unknown number of add-on utilities and stores because we think it’s so fun to open up all these managers each time we want to “find something new” or “find out if any of my 18th add-ons needs updating” or … well, I don’t know. Because guess what - it’s not that fun.

I was just enjoying watching a review (https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/srtoNL9MdAU on DC Design’s F-14 Tomcat when the reviewer says it might not be available for X-Box because you have to buy it from an external store. Pop goes that weasel because I’m not interested in any add-ons that’s not available in the in-game Marketplace. For two reasons: The extremely easy management, and it will also be available on the X-Box if it where on the in-game Marketplace.

Now I myself isn’t that interested in getting it on the X-Box. But I would like the availability. And also my kid play Flight Simulator on the X-Box, so yeah I’m indirectly biased to wanting it on the X-Box too.

Needless to say I won’t be buying DC Design’s F-14 Tomcat.

Now I understand that, for example, another great plane I’m waiting for to hit the in-game Marketplace - PMDG’s DC-6. It’s also only available on their store with their management utility. But at least they say it will be on the Marketplace when they have ironed out most of the bugs. This is simply because Microsoft won’t allow an item on their store to be “out of date” to the same item anywhere else. So when PMDG updates the DC-6 they have to wait for it to go through a tedious prosess and wait for it to be updated on the Marketplace before they can release the update in their own manager.

And I get that. So they say that when the updated frequency is less frequent they will release it to the Marketplace. And so I wait. Because I really, really want that DC-6. The Tomcat would also be fun, but I don’t really, really need it.

What I don’t get is the willingness to loose the casual gamer that don’t want to go out and find external stores to buy add-ons. Or the inevitable loss of all X-Box gamers as external stores just don’t work.

Thank you for your time :slight_smile:

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Moved to #third-party-addon-discussion:tools-utilities

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Hi Mac.

The marketplace is fundamentally flawed at the moment. Plus it’s very slow, that is why a lot of addons haven’t yet or aren’t coming to the marketplace. Should Microsoft fix some of the major issues, then we might see more take up from third-party devs.

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I will preface what I say with this thought. I am not a developer at this time, but I was one of the very first developers for the Microsoft flight sim franchise many years ago, so I do have a little bit of skin in the game and experience under my belt.

If I was still developing, I would not place anything on the market place at this time. Here are the reasons why.

  1. There is a significant time gap between a developer creating an update, and the update arriving on the store. This means twice as much work from a support point of view for the developer. People on this forum might be upset about something in a product, but the developer may already have addressed it in an update that has not yet hit the store. Now the developer has to try to assess which version the affected customer is actually using. In other words it is taking up valuable time that the developer could be using to improve the product. For some developers this dichotomy is simply unproductive and unworkable.

  2. Sometimes the developer has to create two different products because of the demands of the marketplace. An example might be the Spitfire. The developer can create it with the visual appearance of guns, but those guns have to be removed in the version that is presented in the marketplace. This is ridiculous, it is neither accurate for historical purposes, nor conducive to the efficient creation of a product from the point of view of the developer.

  3. The products that appear on the marketplace have an encryption system added to them that is not created by the developer. Not only does this prevent users from making creative changes, but it also at times breaks something in the product itself. Now the developer has to try to fix something in their product which they themselves did not break, and over which they have no control. Once again this becomes a support nightmare.

And so I fully understand why some developers simply do not wish to sell in the marketplace. They would rather deal with a smaller and more controllable market penetration than get embroiled in the issues I have outlined above for the sake of larger numbers.

I hope this helps to present a different perspective.

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Hi there KJKerr.

You make some interesting points, but let me reply:

  1. The entire developing world have to deal with this on a daily basis from Apple Store, via Google Play and of course to Microsoft Store. If a developer doesn’t have the means to get a version number from a bug report then maybe they should be doing something else.

  2. I can see that not having guns on a fighter in the Marketplace would suck. You might even ask why since Microsoft clearly allows it for games on the Microsoft Store. Maybe someone at some point had an epiphany of Flight Simulator being friendly and now they can’t shake it off.

  3. If there is a bug in the encryption system then maybe fix the bug instead of avoiding it. And if developers want users to make creative changes, then maybe release the files to the public. I’m pretty sure the encryption system is there for developers that don’t want users to get creative - there might be one or two of those kind of developers around.

The bottom line is that just as some developers want smaller markets, I for one want easy management, and that’s about it. And yes, I want it to be available to the X-Box also.

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There are a lot of reasons why a developer might want to continue using their own store, such as retaining contact with their customer base. You can build up a good relationship over the years, and plenty of regular customers would be happy to continue this.
I’ve had my own tiny store for 15 years, but over that time I’ve got a lot older, with some health issues, and my product releases have become fewer. Now I’m at retirement age, but I’ll still keep doing this as long as I can. I’d be happy to bypass my own store and just use the Marketplace, but first I have to get access. Believe me, if you are not a big developer then getting access isn’t guaranteed!

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I have the opposite feeling. I prefer to buy direct from developer, always. Second choice would be a 3rd party sim market (which has burned me in the past), and last resort being the MSFS marketplace.

1 reason: I want the shortest distance between me and the developer when it comes to updates and support.

Someday I will curse the console gamers for taking this away from me… but not today!

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No they don’t, not to the extent that we do within MSFS.

As someone who has developed and released an app (and subsequent updates) on Google Play, the process there is painless, quick and easy.

I created my developer account which was a near-instant process. Joining up here can take forever with some people submitting their valid applications and then waiting weeks or months to find out if their application has been processed, accepted or rejected.

When it comes to releasing an application or updating my app page store, I can go to Google Play for business | Launch & monetize your apps | Google Play Console and can do pretty much everything there. When I first launched my application I created a new app on the developer console, uploaded my .apk and set up the store page. Once I was ready, I submitted it for review and in less than a week it went live. Now when I make changes to the .apk or the store page, those changes go live after an automated and/or manual review taking on average no more than 24 hours.

While I can’t speak to the process within MSFS for ~reasons~ I can tell you this.

  1. Microsoft only updates the marketplace once a week. That means at best it takes them >= 7 days to do what Google Play does in ~<=1 day.

  2. Android doesn’t have breaking changes that often, and when they do we get emails from Google way in advance giving us information about what will break and when. In MSFS if we are lucky developers find out about these changes, which can come as often as once a month

  3. Third-party developers can get an update to customers who buy through their platform as soon as it is ready. At the same time, those same developers have claimed to push an update to the marketplace at the same time, but with customers waiting seven or more days for an update (if they’re lucky).

While these types of issues exist within the marketplace, it will hurt third-party developer uptake, and that is before we get into other issues like:

  1. Losing a certain aspect of control over your addons when you release them
  2. Losing a percentage of each sale, which can be quite high depending on your turnover
  3. No control over the billing system, so you can’t confirm who has or hasn’t purchased a product or provide billing support like refunds as and where needed
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I really hope the DC6 won’t come onto official marketplace or atleast not for xbox as I’d worry that 90% of arcade xbox kids wont understand it and hence give a bad rating

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In the current state of the Marketplace, I cannot blame any developer for not wanting their products there.

As a developer you want to have control over updating your products and not have to wait a month because the mechanisms of the marketplace allow for no faster process.

If updates of MSFS and updates to the DRM of the Marketplace activily break functionality of addons, the least a developer wants is to have control over how fast he can deliver an update to his customers.

A large corporation with many departments like Microsoft moves and acts in a certain way and a small three man independent developer team moves very different.
It might simply not be very compatible.
A small independent webshop is propably more suited for the needs of a small independet developer of addons.

It took a year to have a simple Marketplace change like showing more accurate ratings that were not rounded to a full one digit rating. I mean, wow. A year for that ?

However: I would love to only buy at the marketplace. I really would. But not in it’s current state. Even though I am on Xbox now as well. The Marketplace in it’s current form is simply not suited for a continuously updated product (MSFS) and small independent vendors selling there.

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Marketplace has 3 major flaws:

  1. it is to slow in bringing new content and updates
  2. The token system is outright weird (no real proof of purchase)
  3. No add-on management possible (only delete). With the sim itself being changed and updated all the time - a perpetual Beta - I find it essential for troubleshooting that I can deactivate one or all add-ons easily.

This is why I stopped shopping at Marketplace (even though I love the idea of an in-sim one stop shop). Instead, I do my purchases at SimMarket and manage them with the freeware Add-on Linker. Simmarket has an email service to notify me if an update is available.

My 2 cents…

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Do you have a reliable source for that statement? Because reality already shows that this is not true (in practise anyway): I have at least one aircraft (I shall not name the developer in this case, to be safe ;)) where there are updates available elsewhere which are not yet in the marketplace.

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If the Marketplace were any good, the OP wouldn’t need to write an open letter. Unfortunately, the Marketplace is a case study of how not to treat your customers and how not to treat your partners (for all of the reasons outlined in this thread and more). As a customer, I will not buy from the Marketplace until the myriad issues are addressed. Moreover, there are rumors that certain “partners” have contracts that do not allow them to release updates in other stores until they are available in the Marketplace (meaning that Microsoft gets to be the gatekeeper on when customers will receive updates). Should I find out that those rumors are true, I will stop buying from those developers as as well.

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I won’t be using the marketplace again anytime soon. I tried to buy a market place item using the steam version of FS2020. They charged my steam wallet and the download failed. Steam will deny refunds on in-game content. I had to submit a zendesk ticket to get my download. The marketplace is unreliable right now.

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Jesus… you are very bias.

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Therein lies the issue with the marketplace because Microsoft insist on encryption which therefore locks “the public” out of making changes to their marketplace purchased 3rd party aircraft/scenery.

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The Marketplace is the worst place to buy addons for all the reasons already stated. I refuse to spend any money there and will always go direct to the developer if that choice is available.

Those who chose to sell exclusively on Marketplace simply wont ever get any of my money.

The Marketplace is fundamentally flawed as it is and shows no signs of changing so i’ll do my purchasing elsewhere.

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There are two topics in the current Q and A section about marketplace issues, I would encourage everyone here to vote for those topics.

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