Dear all,
my name is Michael Wimmer and I am a developer and one of the owners of the 3rd party addon developer RW Profiles. Recently, we noticed a sudden change in how much our product, KSGF Springfield-Branson National Airport, costs on the MSFS Marketplace without us changing the price. According to a recent dev stream, this is due to the new regional pricing scheme Microsoft introduced. However, after we got some reports from friends and other developers, I started to realise that there is more behind the recent increase than regional pricing. Something is majorly messed up with the MSFS Marketplace pricing at the moment and customers often have to pay way more than what we developers ask for. And, in some instances, also way less. This is firstly and most importantly unfair towards customers and I would like more clarity on what’s going on.
What’s actually going on and why I got suspicious, I will outline in the following thread.
Together with another developer I got together and gathered data and evidence for 2 different sceneries to show you that pricing does not match whatsoever across the globe.
For those who do not know the core of MSFS pricing and how it works, here is a quick overview. There really is not much to it. The only thing we developers can do is to set the price for the product in USD; that’s it. Everything else is done by MS.
I will not talk about or go into commissions, fees, or any of the sort in this thread because this is not what this is about. I don’t mind getting a bit less than what I asked for. This is purely because we want fair and equal pricing for all customers, and also because we don’t want that they have to pay more than what we ask for.
The two sceneries analysed are KSGF and EDAQ. In the following table, I have listed the MSFS marketplace price from users of the listed countries and convered them to USD so we can compare it to the price we developers set.
As you can see here, apart from the USA, our products are more expensive in all countries (except for Turkey and KSGF). In addition to that, they are more expensive by a significant amount compared to the set price. The difference is even more obvious if you compare the most expensive country, the UK, to the cheapest country, Turkey, for KSGF: the difference is almost 5 USD! (4,94 USD)
But it doesn’t stop there and gets even more confusing: let’s talk taxes.
So, in Austria we have 20% VAT (value added tax). In Sweden, for example, they have 25% VAT. However, the marketplace price is the same at 21.74 USD. So if taxes played a role in this, the scenery should be 5% more expensive in Sweden compared to Austria, but they are the exact same price.
In addition to that, the VAT in Italy is 22%, so 2% more than it is in Austria. Meaning the scenery should be 2% more in Italy than it is in Austria, right? Well, in reality, it is actually 11% cheaper!
This means that the different VAT values cannot be the reason for the price variations.
Let’s move on to an even more bizarre observation: Turkey. Turkey is the only place where KSGF is actually cheaper in USD than the asked price of 17.99 USD at 16.99 USD. I would understand this because of the current inflation rate of Turkey, however, if we now compare KSGF to EDAQ, it again doesn’t add up anymore. In Turkey EDAQ is actually more expensive than the set price and, in fact, it is the most expensive out of all countries analysed at 14.53 USD.
So, in short, KSGF costs 94%, and EDAQ 121% of the asked price set by the developer. A fluctuation of 27%!
It gets even more confusing if we convert this to €. With the current exchange rate 17.99 USD, the set price for KSGF, are 16,62€. However, KSGF costs 20.09€ for countries in which the marketplaye is set to € (except for Italy where it costs only 17.99€) This shows us 2 phenomena: first, the price in the same currency, Euros, varies from country to country. Secondly, even though Italy has 2% more VAT than Austria, the scenery is 11% cheaper.
Even if we account for VAT, KSGF should be 19.95€ in Austria, not 20.09€, and in Italy 20.27€, not 17.99€.
I expect a few % variation between countries due to exchange rate fluctuation, but as you can see, the prices vary within 23% and 21% for KSGF and EDAQ respectively.
As a developer, and especially for customers, I would appreciate if Microsoft and the Marketplace team could comment on this and explain where these vast variations come from. This is unfair for customers and also for us developers because customers are paying way more than we want them to pay! Currently, in the EU some customers have to pay almost 4€ more than what we ask them to pay! This is not right and needs to be rectified!
Edit:
Today I received another report of the prices being different even within the same country. This is also discussed further in the comments, but I wanted to add it to the overview here, too.
(Both pictures taken from simmers in the UK, no VPN)
EDIT: I would also like to encourage you to report back what the price of these two addons (KSGF and EDAQ) is for you in the Marketplace. I will then update the list and add your respective countries to it. The more data we can get the better! 
If you do report, please report country, platform, and a screenshot of the Marketplace page. Thank you very much in advance!
Best,
Michael Wimmer.
