It’s maddening enough for me on behalf of OTHER people. I purchased the Wilga on day 1 direct from their site and people are STILL waiting to fly that thing via MS Store. Quite frankly it’s ridiculous and is not fair on developers to have to wait that long and THEN additional payout time (I don’t know what that is but if it’s like Apple / Nintendo etc it’s 30-45 days) before they can earn revenue for their hard work and invest that in, you know, living. And hopefully their next killer project.
In the rare case that you get a refund:
You can still use the bought product!
So there is NO connection between the Add-Ons you purchased on the MP and the Add-Ons in your Content Manager.
Or a connection between your account and the Add-Ons you bought on the MP.
In other “Marketplaces” I know there is such a connection.
This fact alone is an indicator for me that something was hastily designed, developed and published here.
Or indeed as mentioned elsewhere on this forum, you never get a receipt for the actual airport you bought. Just for the marketplace credits you paid for to buy it.
Just about all the products on ORBX I am interested in are more expensive now on the ORBX platform than they are direct from 3rd Parties or from my other preferred sellers.
I’m from the UK so maybe it’s something to do with the exchange rate (£GB to $AUS) but I hardly buy anything from them now for this reason.
This is the constantly fluctuating exchange rate. The fact that you don’t see price correction is fault of the developer not platform.
Most devs don’t update their pricing to match. We (//42) do, and just did so a few days ago again to match the market.
The future Orbx store/backend coming sometime this year will support multi currency allowing us to set our static MSRP in USD and it will auto adjust to the consumer side. We are a primary partner leading some of the changes in the future store, it’s great to FEEL like a partner.
Slight overexaggerating I think. I consider myself a long time simmer and I try and use the Marketplace when I can. What are all of these many issues. The only issue most of us come back to is the turn-around of new products and updates into the Marketplace which is super frustrating. Microsoft know this but we need these posts so the issue gets better.
As for the service costs, well that’s how they make there living. Third-party can chose not to use the Marketplace and that’s ok too, there was concern that third-party selling outside the Marketplace wouldn’t even be a thing but that was quashed pretty quickly and thankfully so.
This has been a really interesting thread. As a consumer I don’t often buy from the FS marketplace but the only advantage I’ve seen in the past is that it is easier to keep things updated. You’re in the sim and you get that little notification saying an update is available.
I know a lot of the bigger third party devs have their own installers now to make it easier to update things but you still have to remember to go round them all looking for updates. If you’ve got a lot of content you might be getting email notifications every other day saying a new version of something is available.
As we all know keeping third party add ons updated is an absolute nightmare and as far as I’m concerned the absolute worst part of over all FS experience.
Why is that only a fiver on fs.to then? I checked the price again before posting so is that still the old price on Orbx? I would prefer to buy from there. But not if it means I can get two airfields for the price of one.
GSX can read and use Marketplace airports since last October, when SU10 came out, and GSX has been quickly updated to support the new SU10 Navdata API, which allows add-ons to get the airport data through Simconnect, instead of reading it from the airport .BGL.
However, it’s true the SU10 Navdata API is still not complete, and compared to reading the .BGL, it give us less data to work with, for example Jetways data is missing ( location, names, etc. ), which currently makes GSX working less reliably with jetways on Marketplace airports.
This should hopefully be fixed (and even improved compared to what we can get from .BGL) with the SU12 SDK, which should give us all the data we need about jetways, even for encrypted airports.
An interesting thing I noticed, in the ‘topics being discussed on the Feb 1 Dev Stream’, they have ‘Localization’ listed. I remember a few Q/As back, when this was brought up, mentioning something about the real delay esp for new products was around all of the localizations they had to do for every submission, for every store/language they support, and they had to be done and ready for all before they’d publish it for any, even the native language it was submitted in.
I wonder if these concerns might be addressed in that section on Wend.
Good to know, thanks. I’m using the SU10 Navdata API ‘beta’ in GSX and so far it’s been fine. I was just making the point that the in sim marketplace are selling a notably different product from what is available externally. They may look the same in sim, but are encrypted which can restrict their use. I’m glad you found a way around this as I have quite a lot of marketplace airports.
I don’t believe I’d breach any agreement by saying we’ve had quite a few products published without localization at launch. This allowed the product to see the light, but localization remained in the queue.
Release and Localization are not hard-linked, as this method was not a request //42 made.
Ah thanks for the clarification. I do remember Jorg saying that sometime last year, so maybe they already broke that apart, or maybe it was for a dev that specifically requested the extra localizations.
Edit: I do like the idea of the highest rated add-ons and their Devs getting a ‘front of the line’ privilege that could exist for a specified period of time. I understand MS not wanting to go anywhere near a ‘qualitative’ type metric, because MS legal would never allow that in a TOS. But there’s nothing stopping them from using specific community ratings to determine the devs that work the hardest and provide the best value to teh community.
