Multiple charges of identical amounts were incurred by me following 3 purchases from the Marketplace in a single day. All purchases eventually installed correctly.
Clearly some kind of problem happened but all attempts to get Steam to investigate have failed.
I now have absolutely no faith or trust in making any more purchases involving Steam.
Is there a way of making future Marketplace purchases direct from Microsoft excluding Steam ?
Have any others had similar problems relating to the Steam version of MSFS ?
You can get a refund here: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us
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Not for Steam, you can’t. Nor will Steam refund it.
The system is messed up, but on Microsoft’s end. It’s been an issue since the sim launched and as far as I can tell, they haven’t done jack to fix it.
You don’t actually buy the item from Steam. You buy “Flight Sim Credits” from Steam. Those are then “consumed” by Microsoft. Sometimes, MS will grant you your purchase after consuming said credits, sometimes not.
As far as Steam is concerned, you got what you paid for. They delivered the credits, and MS “consumed” them. It’s out of their hands. They won’t refund you.
And MS won’t refund anything purchased through the Steam store. As far as they’re concerned (even though they’re at fault), if you purchased from Steam, it’s an issue between you and Steam.
If your purchase fails and then you report it immediately via zendesk, MS will fix it by manually granting you what you purchased. But if you manually purchase the item multiple times until it works, then that complicates matters. And to my knowledge, they won’t refund you anything.
In my experience, the only surefire way to avoid this issue is to have the money in your Steam wallet BEFORE making a purchase. To me it appears there’s something wiht the timeout where you ahve to add your money to the wallet to complete the purchase that breaks on the MS side of things and you don’t receive the item you purchased.
Nope. If you’re on Steam, you’re stuck with Steam. Overall, it’s a much better platform for the sim as a whole as you don’t have to deal with all the extra side apps, DLC encryption, etc associated with MS Store software. But this problem is a nasty one. And it’s up to MS to fix it, not Steam.
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Thanks for responding and for the advice.
The amounts involved were small fortunately and Paypal appear to have resolved the problem.
My hangar is full to overflowing anyway and I’ll be favouring more trusted sites such as PMDG and Orbx in future.
Thank goodness for contributors such as FlyByWire and the wealth of freeware available.
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That’s exactly the issue that’s not being addressed.
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Steam delivered what was paid for (Flight sim credits). They have no record of what a user purchased in the marketplace. All they know is they delivered the credits you paid for.
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Said credits were consumed by Microsoft, even though products weren’t delivered by Microsoft. As far as Steam is concerned, the transaction was completed successfully as they can’t see what happens on the MS end of things, where the problem actually lies.
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Steam will NOT refund nor support this, and redirect users with this issue to MS support.
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MS support won’t touch it because it’s a Steam transaction and redirects to Steam
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Repeat cycle
That leaves Steam users with zero support when a transaction fails.
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I have been able to fix a purchase issue as a steam user, and asking at zendesk, just had to attach a screenshot of my payment I did via steam in the ticket here my exchange I had with support and when you open a ticket there is a specific scenario for multiple payment been charged via steam (see the link at the end of my post)
also I have been using paypal minutes before my purchase look like that has been causing a content delivery issue and on microsoft side they are aware of the issue
check this section for duplicate charges https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405565721618-Purchase-issues-I-ve-been-charged-twice-for-the-same-Marketplace-purchase
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