It’s now well known that sceneries and aircraft are encrypted when bought from marketplace. But it was not known by me when I have bought several of them. Now I cannot use those airports with other products like GSX PRO or FSHud. Why I wasn’t warned about this upon purchase?
Where I can get support for marketplace? Where are my receipts? I want my money back so I can repurchase products from decent resellers. How can I get refund?
Why don’t you listen to your customers. How hard it would be to let customer to download .cfg and .bgl files without encryption. Other resellers can do it!
This has been known about since day one, it’s nothing new nor was it ever some kind of secret. It’s why many folk try to purchase elsewhere if they can.
Really? Where Microsoft has said that? Not in the marketplace at least. It just common knowledge learned either hard way or by reading forums. They cannot assume that customers spend all their time in forums to get the information they should have provided in the first place. There should have clearly stated upon purchase that this product is locked and cannot be together with other addons. They cannot even provide proper receipt that shows items I have purchased, just a order number, date and price. Just bad bad customer care.
All the information they provide:
PS. I learned about the infamous encryption after I found encrypted files in my folders. I thought that’s ok for fighting against piracy, but I didn’t know it also prevents me to use the product properly.
And yes, I’ll never buy from MP again… (unless complete removal of encryption)
Google “msfs marketplace encryption”. You’ll find page after page of articles / comments about it. It’s not a secret, not something Microsoft have ever tried to hide.
i have to assume this is a 3rd party software or scenery? since they just un encrypted the Premium aircraft files for their own software so we can mod those now
scenery your not really supposed to Reverse Engineer to modify or use elsewhere, same with 3rd party stuff that undoubtedly has further copy right restrictions
frankly i think its INCREDIBLE that they give us as much leeway to use their Own Copyrighted Software in ‘their gaming environment’ as they do
we can not reasonably expect all 3rd party software developers to do the same since its not ‘their environment’ per say, its just another platform to them
but its certainly your right to purchase from where ever you like
Your comment is ridiculous, as neither GSX PRO or FSHud existed when the Marketplace was launched with encrypted files.
If you feel that you must complain, it would make more sense to complain to the developers of those two products for not announcing that their products do not work with encrypted files.
However, FSDT at least, did indeed make this clear, so that complaint, if made, would be ridiculous as well.
Yes, I am talking about 3rd party sceneries and aircraft. I know Asobo’s aircraft.cfg files are now unencrypted but it does not help much. Bgl’s are still encrypted and all the 3rd party products.
Encrypting is done in MS/MP end and 3rd party developer can do nothing about it, as far as I know. Of course if developer want their product to be locked it’s their right, but I am not sure if many developer is pleased if the user experience of their product differs weather it’s purchased from MP or elsewhere.
Developers of GSX PRO and FSHud maybe a little ■■■■■■ for the fact that this nice little marketplace feature prevented me to buy their product.
maybe find another app that works correctly within the framework of the current game? if only for a short while
neither of these apps are unique afaik yet i have not heard of others (like AIG, FSLTL, toolbar pushback etc) having this problem, maybe not exact replacements but …
if those few extra addons that your apps wont use is totally game breaking these or others may help
im no coder but i would be surprised if there is no possible way to make them work using wasm or w/e
in the end not all 3rd party apps/mods/custom setups will Always work with every other 3rd party stuff
i get your concern and hope ms/Asobo can oblige within their partnership agreements with these 3rd party Dev Partners (this would obviously require collaboration to Remove a security that was already put in place) so that may take some time
iirc there was a ‘wishlist’ suggestion for making this optional for the Partners already
if you could find that it may have better results than just posting here
To be fair:
while it’s true that MS has never hidden the fact that they encrypt everything in the marketplace, and this information is readily available on the internet, I still think it’s not reasonable to assume in advance that the products sold on the marketplace might be any different from the stuff sold elsewhere.
In a world where standardisation of products is the absolute norm, it is simply not natural for a normal customer to assume that products from the same producer, for more or less the same price and with the same name and discription, are different just because you buy them somewhere else. So naturally one wouldn’t even bother look for information that it might be. Why should one?
If I go into a supermarket to buy a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke, I would never assume that it is any different than any other 1.5 litre bottle of Coke in any other supermarket.
Also if you search the internet to buy e.g. a new camera, you would expect it to be exactly the same no matter which online shop you buy it from, wouldn’t you?
That said:
The prime reason for using encryption isn’t to hinder people using certain addons or make it more difficult to mod the addons. And when MSFS started the encryption there where no programs like GSXPro or FSHUD that might have been affected.
Encryption is basic protection against theft and piracy. And MS use it because they can get away with it, because the encryption mechanism is embedded directly in MSFS. Most users will never know it’s even there. As with every other encryption: this one has been cracked, and there are unencrypted addons available on the internet.
Several developers have tried to use encryption, but since they have to use an external program to make the encryption work, they have encountered massive resistance because people simply don’t want to have a bunch of extra programs running in the background just to ensure that the encryption works. So they’ve dropped it.
I have had issues with marketplace a couple of times & the only way anything was solved was either via the forums (community) and via a very good product developer who allowed me to update their product directly upon proof of purchase. I find the customer service to be very lacking & not too helpful at all. I now will only purchase via the developers sales systems or through ORBX or similar, Marketplace is the last option if I can’t get a product from other sources.
I also have problems with the .exe file being locked as I cannot use reshade & had issues with other addon software which I was lucky enough to find a work around to link the .exe file.
Totally agree… months ago (long before GSX came out) i bought all my airports again on the external shops selling them… main reason was to get instant updates… it was a expensive but worthy decission especially when using gsx…
