With the amount of low effort cash grab releases on the marketplace, and the apparent massively long queue for releases, I would propose the following;
-Prioritize new releases from developers based on their average marketplace star ratings.
Low average rating? The community doesn’t particularly like your products, to the back of the queue you go.
4-5 star average rated developer with a new product? - The community loves your products, right to the front of the queue you go.
Let the customers opinion have an effect on what gets to the marketplace first.
edit: unrated new developer? Let’s not punish anyone for being new to the ecosystem. No bias on those.
While I understand the thought process behind this, there’s a hypothetical scenario I want to bring up: Let’s say you’re a well-meaning developer with only one or two products on the Marketplace. But something happens and one of your products starts CTDing. A bunch of people start rating your product a 1, dropping your average rating.
You identify the problem and release a fix for ingestion. But because your average rating has dropped, it now takes weeks for your fix to come through.
Personally I think Microsoft marketplace should have, at the very least, a minimum level of quality control to be put in the marketplace in the first place.
At the very least, all aircraft should have original component parts - Not copied Cockpits, flight models or sounds from the base game. The 3D Model should be comparable, or better than the aircraft from the base game.
MSFS owe it to their customers to protect them from ‘one and done’ con artists taking advantage of this immense player base, and not just cash in themselves with their cut from sales.
I don’t trust anything in the marketplace on face value. I shouldn’t have to rely on the streamers/Youtubers out there to provide me with their opinions on new aircraft as a starting point for whether I can trust the item in the marketplace.
There should also be an option for a refund on Marketplace products.
There’s plenty of wishlist topics about quality control. That’s not what I’m after here. I’m looking to see if new products from reputable third parties can get prioritized for release.
This might also tempt other developers to improve the quality of their products as a side effect though.
Wouldn’t that ultimately come down to No. of sales?
Not forgetting, of course, that no matter how many systems are put in place, ultimately how quickly something goes to the marketplace will come down to human bias.
What I’m meaning, is. Even if there is a good system in place, a ‘favourite’ seller will almost always jump the queue due to human intervention. It’s just the way things are - everywhere.
If a quality standard is put in place, this process will take longer as what’s to say someone ‘reputable’ doesn’t make a trash-worthy item as a swansong?
The other question that comes to mind is - If everyone is reputable who gets priority? If everyone is special then noone is.
Maybe the solution to getting items to the marketplace faster is having more people employed in that department - after all it is where the money is generated.
from what I understand, the current system is strictly ‘FIFO’ (first in, first out), with category priority (patches first, planes second, airports and the rest after that, or something along those lines based on Jorg’s comments from the most recent Q&A dev stream).
To avoid the arbitrary nature of ‘what is good’, or what a certain person likes, I would like the only customer satisfaction metric currently available (the star rating) to be employed to prioritize new products.
Yes, I saw the stream last night. But my question is, how would you determine what’s quality? Isn’t beauty determined only by the eye of the beholder?
What if there’s people that will filter these products lack passion or knowledge of what is quality?
Quality control means you need to prevent half of the creators who are part of the marketplace and most have sold a tremendously large amount of aircraft’s, to not be able to sale their current creations because, let’s say hypothetically, that I’m not impressed with most of the liveries and aircraft’s available. So there is a risk for these developers to continue to sell low quality products because they are already in. Perhaps I’m complicating my thoughts but I’ll explain a bit more.
For 1/4 of the crowd they seem to be pleased with the helicopters available and 1/4 are looking the other way, the rest are waiting for quality. It’s an endless circle of conundrums for the Microsoft team to organize.
What’s quality to you, may not work out for me and vice versa.
What’s fair is, at least to me, first come first serve. FIFO.
Stick to the testings. And let people vote with their wallets.
They’re not going to disclose how they set the priority, since that would only lead to developers trying to game the system (just like the developers that submitted empty packages in the previous FIFO system to ‘reserve a spot in the queue’ with a non-product).
Im gonna agree with @bravoair here developers who break the rules need to suffer the consequences… MS is surely aware of the developers doing this by looking at the customer feedback but for some reason are still getting away with it. In my opinion the only developers that are suffering are the genuine ones
Speed up the process for the Bestsellers or Top Rated third-party Aircraft.
Initial Tablet Built Installed to PMDG 737 MSFS Fleet on 30/10/2023.
The new builds have been submitted to MS Marketplace as of 0100Z/29OCT23.
Today is 30/11/2023 and we didn’t get the update yet in the Content Manager.
I know the builds must go through a multi-phase approval process with Marketplace before they will come live but something need to change here because that is frustrating.
