Just hope that JustFlight and the other quality developers hang in there and get their products on there. As people will buy them in their droves, I’m sure of it.
At the moment most of the better 3PD products like the Just Flight and PMDG stuff are not on the marketplace.
Now personally this is not an issue as I avoid the marketplace unless it is either not available elsewhere, or a trivial $10 airport from someone obscure that you need to jump through hoops to get elsewhere. There are numerous reasons I do this including marketplace has no itemised receipt, marketplace aircraft are often nerfed with less features, marketplace DRM issues, late and erratic marketplace updates and marketplace support issues.
Unfortunately XBox users do not have the luxury of buying elsewhere they are stuck with the marketplace.
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I’m wondering what makes you think they aren’t aware of it?
By all means, continue complaining about it, but, don’t treat them like idiots. They know exactly what they’ve created.
To that end, I have no idea why the Marketplace isn’t managed better. If it were me, I’d be out there hiring somebody else to run it. But it is what it is at the moment, and, to top it off, good help is super hard to find these days.
Well, I was attempting to briefly show leniency as the marketplace has obviously been garbage since release and was perhaps wondering if they lack the necessary self-awareness to realise that. Which would be an optimistic viewpoint, I guess.
I’m just looking for reasons as to why it’s still ■■■■■. And why they’re effectively sabotaging themselves with such a poor iteration of what should be something good.
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They know what they’ve wrought.
Complain about it. Make them care enough to change it.
Unfortunately I think they’re happy to treat people who can only use the marketplace i.e. Xbox users, like idiots who are content with dumbed down, ■■■■ versions of aircraft, and garbage, lazy iterations of planes on the marketplace. They think we just want to take pretty screenshots. I don’t see that changing, I believe they view it as a success.
So I think me complaining would be like banging my head against a brick wall.
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They are not treating people like idiots. Do you feel like Target is treating you like an idiot when you walk into the store? No. They created a place for other people to sell their wares, nothing more.
They are in fact expecting you to be smart enough to do research before purchasing anything.
I’m going to keep on repeating, I have no idea why people expect them to somehow decide what is good quality and what is bad. What rules would be made in this regard? How would such decisions be made? Who are they to choose what people might like to purchase or not?
There are plenty of things to complain about the Marketplace. That is not one of them. It’s up to you to determine what level of quality you are willing to spend money on. There are people out there who are perfectly happy to buy those products.
In the meantime, it is absolutely ridiculous that they don’t give purchasers a receipt for what they purchased.
The time it takes for products to be posted in the Marketplace is another major failing of the product.
The only changes that the Marketplace makes people who are selling in the Marketplace is to remove weapons. Nothing else is “dumbed down” to be in the Marketplace.
Once you purchase a product from the Marketplace, they could not care less what you do with the product be it fly it or take screenshots. All they care about is making sure that they can take your money. After that, it’s all yours to do whatever you want. It’s the last thing they think about.
I doubt very much they see the Marketplace as a success. They are fully aware of what users are complaining about. And they know how much money they are missing out on because of it.
I’m not saying to stop complaining about it. Far from it. But, be realistic in your expectations. They will not ever judge the quality of products that are sold in the Marketplace. Not ever.
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I am diligent regarding the marketplace. I don’t buy anything unless I have read/watched reviews and seen enough opinion of a product to be satisfied it will be a good purchase. I do not expect them to vet some of the ■■■■ that appears on there, I am aware that it is my responsibility. That wasn’t my point.
Maybe my view is pessimistic. But the cynic in me thinks that they’ve had over a year to fix it, since the game released. And they show no signs of doing anything meaningful.
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Personally, I agree. We’ll never know, but, I do wonder, was the lack of personnel to work on the Marketplace after SU5, fix the problem it had, and process goods in, was that due to someone quitting in disgust from lack of support, or was someone fired, or was it just someone on vacation? The performance of the Marketplace and dealing with 3rd parties and getting the products in and out seems to actually have gotten worse as time has gone by. At best, it’s clearly not staffed appropriately.
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It should be straightforward, in theory. Obviously we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors but I think if they carry on with the status quo then an awful lot of third party developers are going to wash their hands of the marketplace, as it won’t be worth their time and money.
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Well not entirely true, “no weapons, ordinance or gunsights” is just the most obvious. Some examples.
- FSDT wanted to offer a range of higher and lower Mesh resolutions that users could choose to install, to customise the FSDT Mesh for their individual system, and were told by MS “no install options are permitted, choose a resolution and offer it for sale”
- JF themselves wanted to offer the discounts that they offer owners of existing products on their own store to marketplace purchasers and were to “no choose just one price stick to it”
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Another week passes by with no meaningful updates, no aircraft, and very little in general appearing on the Xbox marketplace. No explanation given as to why it takes so long to approve addons, or updates to existing addons. I’ve seen glaciers move quicker than Microsoft on this. I’m genuinely perplexed. Is it apathy? Incompetence? Obstination? What?
I heard it was going to the marketplace but recall no mention of whether it is also going to be available on XBox. Not everything on the marketplace works on XBox.
We did get a status update on the marketplace version a few days ago. TLDR - Microsoft claimed there were bugs that JF had never heard of and cannot reproduce so the marketplace release is on hold for the moment.
The bugs thing is very suspicious to me. The developer should be able to replicate them. That is, if the bugs actually exist. Not really sure what’s going on, but I’d bet a sizeable amount of money that there’s something else going on with Microsoft there.
Point 2 of your comment. I think you may have this the wrong way round. I think MS market place should be supporting independent developers more. I long ago stopped buying from market place. You buy direct from the developer sites and you are kept aware of updates as soon as they release, any problems you encounter and they will generally support you straight away with a resolution too. Last night for instance I had an email from Hype providing a link to the brand new updated version of their H145 to download and replace the previous version. You’re not getting that in market place.
By buying directly I’m also ensuring they get 100% of my money to support them going forward and hopefully encourage them to continue with new products.
By going to those individual independent sites that you know produce good work you know that you are assured quality add-on’s that work or, on the odd occasion when they don’t there will pretty much be a quick hot fix. Market place on the other hand peddles all manner of add on’s, ranging from top quality to absolute garbage.
Anyone fairly new to the sim can easily spend a considerable amount of money in market place, not knowing what they are getting for their money.
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I would 100% do this, but unfortunately the Xbox makes it impossible. I realise that’s my choice, to use that platform. I don’t want to use the marketplace due to the myriad of issues, more than anything. And I absolutely agree with directly supporting 3rd party devs.
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Any more updates on this? Or are Microsoft still being obstinate and talking about phantom bugs that nobody else can replicate?
We’re making slight progress with them. They are finding issues with the Xbox version and one or two with the PC version. It’s very painful but all points towards issues with their way of doing this and given the amount of custom code within our add-ons the chances of issues arising are heightened. We’re combining all that with trying to get our other products ready for release so stuff we can influence and move forward with gets precedence at the moment. Big shame.
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Thanks for the update. Yes it is a shame that. They seem so backwards with how they deal with things. Hopefully things will improve in time.
What? You guys didn’t copy paste default avionics and another aircraft’s flight model onto a purchased 3D model? No marketplace for you!
Good luck with the T1 Hawk - that aircraft looks awesome.
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