The Marketplace has been managed quite terribly so far unfortunately, and the opportunity to corner the entire PC MSFS market has been lost; this could have happened easily during the first 1.5 years of MSFS, but that momentum has now been lost.
Instead, it has progressively driven off PC buyers, for the following reasons:
- poor interface (additionally, until recently, browsing the MSFS menus would use the GPU at 100% power, very uncomfortable experience)
- encrypted products (partial encryption to allow for mods would be better)
- slow release of products, and slow updates (we’re talking about weeks to months vs. other stores). This is the main issue. Poor prioritization of products too, shovelware being released before top-notch addons.
- bugged downloads, infinite loops and crashes on decompress (this has been fixed)
This is problematic because sales on the Marketplace are a way to fund MSFS.
With that said, the Famous Flyers / Local Legends series is excellent and for many the only reason to use the Marketplace.
Finally, more than hiring more people to work on the Marketplace, it’s the ingestion process that should be revamped to solve the bottleneck.