Hi folks,
This thread has meandered quite a bit from the OP and has turned into speculation of what is legal or not and accusations of “scamming” being directed towards certain third party developers and/or Microsoft.
We would like to remind everyone of the following:
- Not every product (or developer) on the Marketplace will appeal to you personally. What you like or dislike will be different from other simmers. For example, you might only be interested in expert level aircraft that attempt to model their real-world counterparts to the highest degree of realism, but other players might find those add-ons intimidating and overly complicated and therefore prefer more simple/less realistic mods. The Marketplace therefore has products that appeal to everyone, and it is not restricted to sell add-ons that appeal to one type of simmer only.
- We encourage everyone to conduct their own consumer research and make informed decisions appropriate to your individual tastes before buying (or choosing not to buy) anything from the Marketplace.
- As we have posted many times previously, Product A existing on the MP does not delay or block the release of Product B. In almost all cases, the initial Microsoft intake process for new MP products is completed within a few business days of the developer submitting their product to the MP team. It is the responsibility of the third-party developer themselves to complete functional testing of their own product. The product is launched on the Marketplace on the first Monday or Thursday after the developer has indicated that testing is complete and signed off that their product is ready for sale. Naturally, more basic/simple add-on products are quicker to test and receive sign off from their respective developers faster than more complex add-ons.
- Further to the above, Developer A releasing a dozen or more lower fidelity products on the MP each week does not in any way delay the release of Developer B releasing a higher fidelity product. This perception exists from the early days following the launch of MSFS (2020) when the Marketplace Team within Microsoft was formerly responsible for functional testing of all products which resulted in the backlog growing ever larger, but that process was changed several years ago. Now that third party developers are responsible for testing and signing off on their own products, it is no longer the case that releasing one product to the MP means the team at Microsoft was unable to approve a different product from a different developer that week. It is not a zero sum game and developers of less complex products are not “clogging up the queue” as many have people have stated.
As always, if you have specific feedback to share about the Marketplace, please post your comments in this thread. We read all of your posts carefully and routinely share your feedback (both positive and negative) with the leaders on the MSFS project.
Thanks,
MSFS Team