The MSFS-product manager (Marketplace) is not up-to-date. The main problem with Marketplace is it’s product & update verification time. Good products and updates are sold by vendors and developers 2 to 3 weeks earlier than in the Marketplace. Nobody wants to wait for 2-3 weeks to buy a good product, or update it, when they can get it much earlier somewhere else!
Checking products from known and reliable developers is a waste of time, since Microsoft technicians won’t probably find any unknown bugs in a short verification time. The only sense of Asobo verifing products lays within checking the quality of relative unknown developers or trash products.
It would have been wiser to only allow renown and reliable developers to sell their products in the Marketplace, without any time consuming verification. Lesser known product developers should go through a thorough check to achieve Marketplace sales access. That way, Microsoft could offer new products and needed updates simultaneously with the developer releases. That means better sales for MSFS, because of the full sales overview and automatic update monitoring contained in the Marketplace purchases!
Wake up guys, and transform Marketplace to a feature worthy of your great flight simulator!
agree 100%
i guess marketplace was built in only to make easy $$$ for Microsobo.
keeping in mind the number of complaints only on this forum re download, payment, installation and other issues i will never ever use marketplace even if they would promise that it is fixed.
however they might force devs to only publish via marketplace thus i wont buy it, only direct from devs …
Would not buy outside of market place. Have no problem waiting 2-3 weeks, and finding out if the product is any good here on the forum in the meantime.
Also updates are thus centralized.
The MS cut keep them financially interested in the project over time.
Remember this is not FSX. Without MS servers there are no sim.
On the other side a more speedily process would not be amiss.
I’m also another one who wouldn’t buy outside of the market place.
Yes it is true that there is a lag with new products and updates but for me it is worth the wait. I’ve had enough of buying a multitude of products from different websites, remembering different login details and hunting around for updates.
I tend to agree with all of the sentiments expressed in this thread. The value in the marketplace is that it consolidates all purchases and makes it (theoretically) easy to keep them up to date. However, the lag time that is added to the process is very frustrating and reduces overall value proposition. I don’t have any knowledge of why the process of adding content to the marketplace takes so long, but if there is any vetting going on (security or otherwise), I don’t consider that to be a value add. I would trust Microsoft to have the necessary contracts in place to ensure minimum quality standards are met and prevent the uploading of malware. That is enough for me. Waiting beyond the release dates of new add-ons or much needed updates to owned products is immensely frustrating. At the moment, I really want to purchase Princess Julianna through the market place, but having to wait for it is extremely annoying. I was very much hoping to see it appear today, since rumor has it that Fridays are the day for marketplace updates. I went through the same thing with CYVR; albeit at the time that I decided that I wanted it, I believed (correctly) that it would appear in the marketplace on the upcoming Friday.
The other related problem with the market place is the fact that the content manager is very lacking in functionality. Having to search the entire list of content to see if possibly anything needs to be updated is onerous. Ideally, the content manager should proactively notify the user whenever there is an available update. It also desperately needs some sort options; i.e. Asobo, third party payware, freeware, updates available, etc.
To be clear, I wouldn’t prioritize the content manager fixes above sim and aircraft fixes, but IMO eventually content manager should be finished.