Every week the Special Offers category in the marketplace is filled with the same addons. It seems certain developers (Deimos) has all their stuff on constant «sale» so that they are always showing up in the category. If an addon is always on sale, it is never on sale! That is the correct price then. This basically spams the category and makes it harder to see actual discounted addons each week.
Why does Microsoft allow these developers to manipulate the Marketplace like this? They should force them to set the discounted price as the new normal price.
I think part of the reason they do it is because MS have a minimum price for each kind of add-on. eg. Livery packs at 4.99 USD, aeroplanes higher than that. MS won’t let them start off with the discount but seem OK with the discount becoming semipermanent post launch, and this way the developer can sell for less than the MS floor price.
It’s entirely possible that the developer wanted to price their work this low from the outset and they are doing this as a workaround to MS’s restrictive pricing practices. MS sure know how to extract the $.
Fake sales are nothing new. They’re used everywhere because they work. People see x% off, lose their minds, and buy stuff they don’t need or wouldn’t otherwise buy.
Try tracking prices on stuff on Amazon for example. The day before big sales events like Prime Day or Boxing day, all of a sudden the “regular” price jumps up by 10-25%, and then they apply a “discount” that makes it look like it’s a huge saving, but in reality, you end up at best saving a couple of percent off the regular price. In some cases, the “sale” discount doesn’t even lower the price past it’s regular everyday price.
I use Honey to track stuff I’m interested in on Amazon. I can see these price fluctuations all the time.
One distinct one I can remember was about 2 years back shopping for a second 1TB NVMe drive.
Regular price over several weeks hovered around the $300 Cdn mark. It would fluctuate by a few dollars back and forth, likely due to the value of the dollar, but was always at roughly $300.
Along came the big Prime Day sale. The “regular” price was jacked to $340, and a new “sale price” of $295 was posted. Then 2 weeks after Prime Day, the price dropped to $260. That’s when I bought it.
So yeah, whether on Amazon, another site, or the MSFS Marketplace, fake sales will generate transactions. That’s why sellers do it. They wouldn’t do it everywhere if it didn’t work. Too many people don’t do their research before buying.
I feel like maybe we agree that this is annoying, but you’re still kind of missing the point here. This is not some vast, free and unruly marketplace. This is a relatively small marketplace where Microsoft has tight control and the sales category for example has about 100 items on sale this week. They approve access for every developer. They can do something about this. And we are in their forum That this is common elsewhere is obvious and not really all that interesting or relevant.
So given that, would you prefer:
A: Microsoft stops this kind of behavior on the marketplace
or
B: Microsoft keep ignoring this and let a few developers manipulate the special offers category every week.
Obviously A, and I don’t think anyone was suggesting anything different. But I’m not sure this is a case pf them ever having their price, at one value, jacking it up, the discounting it a tiny amount to give the impression of a saving.
A. is obviously the preferable option. But if this is how MS run their store, that’s how they run it. They can either stop this and have these low demand products not sell (and thereby lose their cut), or keep it as is and make money. The marketing team’s job is to ensure maximum revenue. And they’ll run the store in the way that makes the most money, regardless how we feel about it.
The simple solution is if you don’t like the way the marketplace is run, don’t shop there. I don’t like the marketplace at all. Not the way it looks, works, its UI, its policies, or how it’s run in general. So I don’t use it unless there’s an exclusive product I really want and can’t get elsewhere (Vision Jet for example). As long as people keep pouring money into it, there’s no incentive for MS to change anything.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for Xbox users, which I can bet are the majority share of the marketplace revenue since they don’t have options. And MS will cater to that demographic in the most profitable way possible.
I appreciate that! It just seemed you were doubting that this developer were doing this maliciously. To me it’s obvious considering they never have a single product not on sale. You can go into marketplace and filter for Deimos any week. Everything they sell is on sale every week, which to me doesn’t look like a good deal. It looks like fake marketing. These products are obviously not worth the full price despite not being completely awful like say Mscenery’s stuff. Still, I guess I can’t fault you for giving them the benefit of the doubt.
It would be interesting to see how buying habits changed during the last big sale (spring sale, back end of April). More interesting still to know how the experiment went by the dev who offered that boxy bush plane at 93% discount! I bought a ton in that sale but have only made two purchases since.
It seems so easily forgotten that our FREE World/Sim/Avionics Updates are paid for by Marketplace commissions…
