I just watched the FS Expo 2024 livestream about the MSFS 2024 Marketplace improvements. (I’ll post a link once they post the recording). It is nice to see a refresh of the interface…
… However, there are quite a few things I REALLY hoped Microsoft would review and improve - from a customer perspective - but so far have not mentioned:
(Note, I’m on Xbox, so Marketplace is the only option for DLC)
- Overhaul refund policy - the current policy keeps me from buying more, simply because I’m so uncertain about compatibility, even when I try to do research. So I just don’t buy things.
- Try before you buy option (let developers choose to offer on per item basis)
- Nutrition Label, showing at minimum:
- Publication Date / Update Date
- Version
- Version of sim tested (ie, SU15)
… For Aircraft …
- Works with native ATC or not
- Works with native Nav Data or not
- Import flights from World Map or not
- Nav Data updates require external subscription, or not
- A separate streamlined pathway for developers to submit updates and fixes, as well as edit their descriptions, much faster - especially after Sim Updates.
- As part of the above, offer developers a way to offer a beta test of an update before marking it as an official update (with some basic telemetry feedback?)
- A pathway for developers to post FREE content - MSFS was supposed to be a platform for developers, after all, and lots of 3rd party fixes are NOT available on Xbox simply because of some random decision that Marketplace must charge money for each item… except, there ARE a few free items, so the logic is broken.
- Make it easier to “gift” items. I once tried to gift MSFS for Christmas, and it was an experience I will never go through again.
I’m sure others will have many other things to add. Thanks for your consideration.
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Quite interesting presentation to me.
I appreciate especially that stats, just to know about purchases, times and other things. To your marks, I can tell you - impossible. Some of them I see also good to have but some are really specific user cfg depended and due some probably errors at cfg, not possible to be claimed as functional as example. Only my personal no pro opinion.
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The refund policy isn’t just for MSFS, its for XBox completely. They don’t want people playing through a 5 hour marathon session, then returning the product. (This obviously applies to other games). So it is set at a Microsoft level as 3 returns per year.
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Was hoping to see a web based market place that didn’t require the game to me booted up
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There was something in this presentation that doesn’t bode well for 2024: existing add-ons will not be available in the new sim unless developers manually sign them off again.
Does the marketplace team seriously think that every single developer will go through all of the 3000+ products in all, and manually test them again? How has this come up at all? Add-ons should be automatically compatible and available as soon as 2024 is released. Players will go in expecting their add-ons waiting for them. What do you expect when they don’t find them because the developers haven’t had the time or ability to re-test?
And another thing:
Paid upgrades. I’m sorry? I buy something on the marketplace today and then I should pay again if it’s updated with 2024 stuff?
There should be absolutely no two separate versions of the same product. If something is updated with 2024 specs, it should be an automatic update for users in 2024 and that’s it. For free.
The labeling of the 2020 and 2024 products on the preview image is also very hard to distinguish. It should be color coded or something. The new marketplace UI looked even more confusing as a result.
I hope they change these horrific policies before release otherwise they’ll just alienate players and developers. Or is this a deliberate move to cash in even more, seeing how Xbox is growing and knowing there’s no alternative on that platform?
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I have to put my hand up. When I heard that I definitely stuck my head in the sand.
I was hoping for this, too.
The only consolation is the SDK will release two months prior to launch, so that will give devs some time to do compatibility checks, maybe? I dunno how they do that without actually being able to load their product in the actual sim, though.
Maybe I really did pick a good time to get reacquainted with the default aircraft…
(Puts head back in sand)
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That too. Even with the SDK out in September. Two months to re-sign thousands of add-ons and the marketplace team also expects to go through them and approve for “release”? Or will that part be at least automatic? I just don’t understand the philosophy behind this.
I know you’re on Xbox, so this won’t be an issue for you, but I bought the Wing42 Boeing 247D in the Marketplace. The dev disappeared shortly after it was released. However, it still, after multiple SUs, works great.
Does this mean I am not going to be able to bring that into 2024 since he is either dead or has just 100% abandoned his work? He won’t be testing it for 2024, unless he pulls a Lazarus.
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All software has paid upgrades. I think it’s reasonable to ask developers to test and sign off on either a free or paid upgrade. For the few things I use in the sim, I get years of enjoyment for not much money - certainly more enjoyment than I get from Microsoft Office 
I’m happy to pay a few bucks for an update that has some improvements, and support development.
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I’m very happy the team at Microsoft decided to try and make products backwards compatible; however, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect all 3,000+ products to work without issues.
We know from yesterday’s stream that several things are changing, especially things to do with the living world and it’s quite reasonable that some of these changes may break addons in novel ways.
Requiring developers to do a quick test and then click a button before releasing their addon in FS24 means:
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We don’t have to wait for Microsoft to test 3,000+ items - which would take forever.
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The product experts will be doing the tests, and not the marketplace team. This is important as the developers have much better knowledge about their product than the marketplace team ever will.
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We can hopefully avoid selling products in FS24 that have unfortunate bugs that weren’t caught by automatic testing.
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If the decision is made to release a product with a bug, the right people know what it is so they can start work on a fix ASAP.
Companies who care about customer retention (you continuing to give them money) shouldn’t have an issue doing a few quick tests. If a company doesn’t want to re-test a product, then you should want to run as far away from them as possible.
I do hope they are given early access to FS24 under an NDA so they can start testing before release.
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I took that to mean something else.
All addons will be ported over like with a new SU and SDK, but devs will have to sign off this time because it is a new game and therefore a new contract.
MS doesn’t have the rights to sell their content outside of 2020 until they get permission, but they are looking to make the process more like a new SU for devs, rather than re-applying to become trusted devs and re-submitting all of their addons for new testing.
In fact, I thought the presenter made this pretty clear. But perhaps we both heard what we wanted to hear.
I took it to mean, unless the dev died between 2020 and 2024, all they needed to do was sign a new contract and make sure their content is still compliant in 2024 to sell their addons on Marketplace.
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I’m mostly the same. Most of the products I own were purchased before FS24 was announced. They were products developed for FS20, that I purchased for FS20.
It is entirely reasonable that if a Dev has to do any work to get their product ready for FS24 (e.g., add-ons that target biomes, specifically mentioned by the team) I should have to pay a small amount for the FS24 version. That said, companies can choose to provide a free update, and again this speaks to my previous post - you will see which companies care about customer retention and which companies you should stay away from.
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From what was said they’re already in the partner program (the thing that would require a contract), so it sounds like all they have to do is play-test and approve their product for release in FS24. Granted this is the company giving Microsoft their permission to sell/distribute it within another product.
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All in all, it sounds much easier and more streamlined than it was in 2020. And I really think devs will pounce at the opportunity to sell their content in 2024 because there are more players when a game is new, and the Marketplace wasn’t really thriving when 2020 was new, and it was VERY limited on Xbox until WASM was sorted out.
So 2024 is the first time devs will have a chance to sell their addons on Marketplace while an MSFS title is new and player count is at its peak.
On a side note, the craziest surprise I heard today is Xbox is currently selling more addons than Steam Marketplace, Windows Marketplace, or Cloud Marketplace.
That said, if you combine Steam and Windows into total PC players, PC still has the most sales today.
But once WASM was sorted, Xbox caught up!
There will be some content that will not get migrated, yes. Like for example, the one plane that the developer has dropped off the face of the earth and no one knows what happened to him. Is that all that bad? At least it isn’t setting an expectation that the product will be updated. You migrate the content in, and perhaps it doesn’t meet the new 2024 bar for quality, you would have lots of people complaining about un-updated content.
Some content is just going to be in the base sim. Truthfully, I don’t even want to have that content cluttering my Content Manager. In fact, I would love to hide some content that I don’t want anymore. Like, I can remember one airport I bought by one of those airplane developers that people groan. The pictures of the content in the marketplace actually looked pretty good. I had no experience with the developer at the time. So I bought it. Only to find out the pictures concentrated on the center of the airport, the sides weren’t detailed at all, auxillary buildings we just plain and hardly any texturing, etc. I would love to never see that content in my Content Manager again. Or the first plane released by a developer known to release 2 helicoptors a week, I bought the plane and the front wheels were on backwards and it steered horrendously. Thats content I never want to load again.
Some developers may decide to not release the old content, but create a newer version they want to charge full price for. I’m sure the repuation of those developers will be known.
So all in all, I don’t think its necessarily bad that things don’t come in automatically. The truth is, the quality bar has been raised. Most your content over the next year or two will be upgraded or replaced.
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There are many developers with A LOT of products. They’re also often relatively small teams and probably deep in development for something new. Expecting them to suddenly go back and re-evaluate their past four years of catalogue (whatever it will mean in practice) seems like an extraordinary burden on them, especially after it was said that add-ons will be “compatible”, which I’m sure most of us interpreted as they will just work out of the box.
Now it’s possible that on release, many things will not be there and devs will be bombarded by players and scramble to try and make things available again. Seeing how many delays are in add-on development and how much we have to wait for some product updates, this all-sweeping extra step seems daunting.
Yeah, I’m gonna be honest. If any developer I’ve purchased aircraft from requires a fee to upgrade their product to MSFS24 standards, I will both never upgrade and also never buy anything else from that developer again. I don’t care how others feel, but I refuse.
I’m definitely already starting to regret purchasing aircraft from the marketplace over the past year.
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So if a developer spends a significant amount of time making a major upgrade to a product they should not be compensated for it all?
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