The marketplace desperatly needs quality control ASAP

Discussion Hub General Discussion
1

This sim is incredible, which makes horrible addons from the likes of mscenery, msfscenery bredok3d and BT studio so annoying to see endorsed on the marketplace.

Flight sim is a special thing which we are all here to enjoy, i for one am fed up with the lack of accountabilty that Asobo/Microsoft has for themselves, there’s only so many times you can pump out other people’s garbage before you realise you play a part in it.

Asobo/Microsoft, stop letting cheap money milking “developers” ruin your work of art. Far too many people have bought in on products they regretted because you ‘approved’ them for your market then say you won’t curate it.

Either create an adequete refund system or police your marketplace. (preferably both)

This has happened for far too long.

You have a responsibilty to fix this problem you caused, especially with the Xbox release coming up which will expose so many more people to the storm of incompetent addons you will give them.

You need to do better.

You can do better.

So do better.

136 Likes
2

I agree, is there anything to vote?

7 Likes
3

Yeah, Jorg’s insistence that it’s not their job to police the Marketplace is nuts. I’m not suggesting Apple levels of walled gardening, but some basic QC checks are in order, especially before XBOX drops. Those people are gonna feel completely hosed by MS and blame MS with good reason.

20 Likes
4

same , when i heard that their would be a marketplace , i thought that meant the end of crappy paywares like x plane was plague with , but its even worst , some of those are pure garbage

12 Likes
5

They already police their market in terms of who can sell on it anyway so it’s really not much to ask.

They can delay updates for weeks but can’t even delay a release for a 5 minute test flight.

It’s already effected their reputation.

10 Likes
6

the least they could do is a refund policy of ‘you don’t like this? ok cool, here’s the money back but only for this market’

that’s such a common policy that it’s so far below the bare minimum their marketplace should’ve had from day one.

11 Likes
7

I’m not certain Asobo has anything to do with this and I’m certain they take a great pride on their work, which is warranted.

Besides you’re purchasing these add-ons not on the Asobo store but on the Microsoft store, thus I believe these decisions are solely a Microsoft responsibility, but I might be wrong of course.

7 Likes
8

It’s confusing to say the least, either way this applies whether Asobo or Microsoft is responsible for the marketplace.

I really hope whichever one of them is responsible for it finally does something, the reputation of the marketplace will not survive past day one of Xbox release if they do not fix it.

4 Likes
9

Do you guys really think that the future “X-BOX-fication” of MSFS will make Microsoft and/or Asobo to implement at least SOME sort of curation system for add-ons?, personally, i have not had a console since the late 90’s (SEGA Genesis), if i want to play a console only game, i use an emulator.
What i think is necessary is to create a request for a curation system to be added to the in-game store, and to upvote it.

1 Like
10

Surely it’s clearly the “MS MARKETPLACE” – not the “Asobo MARTKETPLACE”

I have always assumed, it was Microsoft that both ran it, controlled it, and decided what did and didn’t go up on it.

4 Likes
11

I have added two wishlist threads where voting can take place:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/quality-control-for-marketplace/381583

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/opportunity-to-give-back-addons-and-get-our-money-back/413445/

6 Likes
12

Thanks!, voted and voted.

1 Like
13

Wal-mart, Co$tco, BestBuy, Amazon, etc are all full of products that are good and bad. These businesses don’t police the QC of thier goods unless it starts to cost them money, and when we shop there, it is up to us to do our research before we go to the till. True that they have a return policy on physical goods, but digital goods can’t because of rampant software piracy.

So why should we expect the Marketplace to be “policing” QC when the retail world doesn’t anymore? The forums are full of posts about “high priced add-ons” and people looking for products that they don’t want to attend a ground school to figure out. That is the nature of commerce, give the buyer what they want.

Us old-time simmers with cash to burn are looking for high quality add-ons, and are savvy enough to know the good and bad of flightsim.

The new flightsim pilots are going to have to learn to research the products and companies they wish to support, it’s not up to Asobo to decide what is good and bad.

14 Likes
14

And yet, Steam does have a return policy on their digital goods. If you have played the game on Steam for less than, I believe, 2 hours, you can get your money back.

If used that a few times now and it worked great. Sure feel less reluctant to buy something from their store, because of the return policy.

If the markerplace would have such a feature, it would be great imho.

3 Likes
15

The difference being than they can see how much you actually used the product and then simply kill the access to the software you have purchased and then returned. In MSFS this is not possible. You can simply copy the product you returned to your Community folder and keep it. MS would never know. So as long as MSFS is open to easy fraud that way MS can’t offer a refund policy like Steam.

3 Likes
16

I don’t think people really understand the implication of what they’re asking here.

I’m frustrated like the next guy by the presence of certain products on the marketplace, but what Microsoft does is simply a standard certification process that is done for all digital marketplace (including Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and so forth).

What the certification process does is ensuring that products adhere with the general terms of service and don’t break the system.

Quality control is not part of that picture for very precise reasons:

1: It would require an enormous amount of human resources, and that would only grow as the sim gets bigger.
2: “quality” is a subjective thing. So how do you ensure that all developers are treated equally, and someone doesn’t get their product refused just because it was examined by someone stricter than someone else?

Ultimately, the burden of a purchasing decision lays with the customers. We have all plenty of tools to assess an addon’s quality. Reviews (and I mean longform ones, not stars on a store), videos, and so forth. People spend a lot of time and effort working on them, so take advantage of that. There’s also word of mouth. We’re in a community.

If NO information about something can be found, that should raise a red flag, and it’s definitely better to hold off until someone puts out some info.

The most Microsoft could do would be to be more open to post-relese reports and to do targeted examination (with possible removal from the marketplace) of products or developers that receive a relevant number of complaints from customers.

That’s the same PlayStation did with Cyberpunk 2077. Despite having serious quality issues, it was published as usua l on the PlayStation network because the certification process found no issues with the TOS and did not break the PlayStation network itself (nor it bricked consoles). When customers complained, then Sony examined it and removed it.

The bottomline is that many complain that Microsoft is slow at accepting new developers as partners and at publishing new add-ons on the marketplace. Adding a “quality control” on top of it (if it was even possible) would slow down the process further and would definitely not be fair to developers still in the queue.

14 Likes
17

if you had expected otherwise, thats pretty naive, its just an open market, and yes so some people will take advantage of it.i think only a good refund system, say ala steam,. refund within 2 hours without any reason, would work, for me i buy elsewhere.

18

Archer’s right, there’s no way for MS to know that you’re being honest and not keeping the software. As for “quality”, that is beyond subjective. My nephew was here a few weeks ago and desperately wanted to “play” MSFS. I explained that it wasn’t like an arcade game, but he insisted. About ten minutes later, he said flying was too hard and asked me to download a fighter jet. He didn’t care about aerodynamics, the quality of the cockpit, or whether the buttons worked – he just wanted to fly fast and easy.

So in his case, a very simple low-quality jet that WE would all write letters to MS about would have worked fine for him. And there’s a lot of “nephews” out there.

3 Likes
19

They definitely need to speed up the whole release/update process, improve QC and add refund policy, Because the Market Place is extremely crucial to the “sustainable development” of this game :worried:

20

They should have quality control on add on items that cost money, along with ensuring they are kept up to date with the game updates to remain functional. Selling them to unsuspecting people is not fair.

It would be great if they implemented an area for user created items, much like flightsim.to but instead of having to manually install items they auto download and keep updated. I am hoping flightsim.to can create something like that instead.