Marketplace in FS2020

[MatthewS 761]

1 hour ago, zemez said:

And of course, Microsoft takes 30% slice

Devs should be happy because of the exposure leading to greater sales.  

I guess devs could also sell via their own stores too, so loyal customers who are "in the know" could buy directly from the devs site (like PMDG)  and give the dev 100%?

[Chock 17,769]

If I recall correctly, when Dovetail were suggesting this, lots of people were quite vocal in being against it, including some major developers, then they changed their tune a bit but by that time the damage had been done and we know what happened then, next thing we knew FSW had been cancelled.

[WTE_Pharoah 7]

Unfortunately this is the way of the world now (micro transactions) and is the necessary evil which allows MS to make FS2020 commercially viable. It can’t be all bad though - if it’s limited to liveries and stuff you only need to pay for what you want. I’m wondering if this is MS’s version of Steam where they do get a cut out of everything sold. Like I said though, this should hopefully keep the studio in business with maintaining 2020 and allows all the third party devs to bring in new stuff. Unfortunately though to have a look at where this is a bit overdone, just have a look at DCS (where you have to purchase every aircraft, map other then default and for stuff like WW2, the asset pack that turns it into WW2).

[Theboot100 404]

5 hours ago, HughesMDflyer4 said:

Yep, always find it funny when people freak out when the idea of a marketplace is brought up. It's no different than buying from SimMarket or similar. It's probably one of the best things one could ask for - a centralized place to buy all add-ons without worrying about a bunch of installers or trying to keep track of what sites you've bought from. I'm sure traditional stores will never go away, but having the option would be nice, both from a consumer and developer standpoint.

I agree.  And then taking a cut from the developers means they can sustain there 10 year business model by still getting income.

I prefer this rather than releasing new versions of flight simulator every few years that we have to buy and then making our already bought add-ons obselete (Eg. Xplanes current model)

I do hope we can install add-ons outside the store (I think i read somewhere that was the plan) or be able to put free add-ons in the store.

But having a 1 click option to install add-ons whilst supporting the developer is a good choice. We get a great base sim already 

[Chock 17,769]

What you have to bear in mind is that MS have already had a bit of an abortive attempt at this (with Flight), which flirted with the idea of having this sort of capability built into it. To be honest, you can't blame MS for doing this; for years they watched numerous TPD companies make pretty large sums of money off the back of their product, by selling numerous product which relied on their efforts, whilst they had to be content with only having made 50 quid off everyone who bought their sim one time only whilst everyone else has had 14 years of FSX being a constant revenue stream for them. It's no wonder they wanted a piece of that action.

Moreover, since pretty much every flight simmer I know buys tons of stuff for their flight sims, we hardly need any persuading to get our hand in our pockets, but most of us are also smart enough to be discerning in what we do or do not buy, so it's not as if this is in any way nefarious and when you put it in that context, even a monthly subscription would be peanuts compared to what many of us spend for FSX/P3D/XP11 add-ons on a regular basis. This is why it annoyed the hell out of me when some developers were complaining about Dovetail or Steam taking a small percentage in return for marketing their products directly to the customer and effectively banging several nails into the coffin of FSW. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Steam has over a billion accounts registered, of which, over 90 million are active users. Can you imagine how much those devs would have had to pay to get that kind of advertising exposure? And instead of realising what a golden opportunity was being handed to them, they were whining about having five percent of the RRP taken off them for what was potentially many thousands of sales.

The only real issue with this sort of thing (in general and not specifically related to flight sims) is when there have been instances where young kids have had a parent buy an in-game add-on for them, and then the kid has subsequently been able to buy additional stuff without their parent's consent because the transaction system stored the unwitting parent's credit card details.

Aside from that issue (which can easily be addressed with more stringent security), I've absolutely no problem with it as a system of delivery and in many cases it's actually way more convenient. Steam is a prime example of this. I've been using that for years and last time I checked I had 205 products in my Steam library. Not all of those are expensive payware, but a good many of them are, and considering that some of them are massive downloads, it's great that I can choose to completely wipe them off my system or reinstall them at will and not have to worry about storing them or storing product keys, backing stuff up etc. Just taking the example of one computer game on there which I have (Kingdom Come Deliverance), that thing is 44.2 Gigabytes in size, so you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that with 205 products in my personal library on Steam, it wouldn't take much to clutter up my HD with stuff if I had to store it all myself as opposed to having all that stuff easily deletable/installable within the game (or sim).

I say bring it on. So long as we're not getting ads popping up on screen when we're on short finals, it's not a big deal.

 

Edited March 28, 2020 by Chock

[Jazz 1,046]

12 hours ago, ca_metal said:

They will give us live weather, live AI traffic and a lot of other things you would have to pay on the other sims (clouds, aiports etc), all that included in the base sim, and you think they would charge for liveries? Well, I don't think so.

The marketplace is probably an embedded store like any other we have for the other sims. They will probably sell aircrafts, aiports and other add-ons from 3rd parties and maybe their own add-ons.

That was what I was saying. Liveries was just an example. My concern with this is that it could be used to force developers to release their product on this marketplace so Microsoft can take a slice of the pie. This could be good or bad for the sim depending on the percentage they demand and would effect the the add-ons that make it to market. I'm not saying that IS the plan. Not for now at least and as far as I'm aware it has been made clear that you will be able to buy direct from third party developers like PMDG. I just hope that plan is stuck to because that's all I'm into.

I'm hoping this marketplace will just be a place to buy new mission packs, liveries and stuff like that for the peeps who will use it more like a game.  I sincerely hope it isn't used to extort monies from other developers and suffocate the sim of the kind of content I will use it for. I have yet to find an in game marketplace that isn't a synical load of tripe so I'm hoping that this one will be different. I suppose my experience with game marketplaces makes me not trust them. They have thoroughly earned their reputation as far as I'm concerned.

[GlideBy 324]

I may be the only one here, but I don't plan on buying any 3rd party addons.  I don't need special planes, as the already announced planes will be fine for me.  And I don't buy scenery or airport packs. 

[Lorby_SI 2,036]

Marketplace sounds good.

As a customer I don't much like having to maintain dozens of different logins and credentials, plus issuing my payment data every time. I lost a ton of stuff when FSS and FSPilotShop recently went out of business, and I had my credit card data stolen once, right after an addon purchase. I for one welcome the option to have it all in one safe place.

As a small developer I like the idea too. I can't afford to run my own shop.

And then there is the XBox to consider. I imagine that buying addons for that platform in 3rd party shops won't really work, so it has to be in-game?

I wonder if freeware will also be in that Marketplace, or if there will be something like the Steam workshop.

Best regards

Edited March 28, 2020 by Lorby_SI

[suncoastflyer 685]

6 hours ago, Jazz said:

My concern with this is that it could be used to force developers to release their product on this marketplace so Microsoft can take a slice of the pie.

They didn't do all this hard work to make the same stupid mistake that Flight was. I wouldn't worry at all about that.

[Pastaiolo 1,686]

I don't see what the big deal is. We have DLCs in FS9, FSX, P3D, XP10, XP11, Aerofly FS2, DCS, basically everywhere. This is no different. And most of them are sold on different distributing platforms (Steam, aerosoft, Orbx, Threshold, Simmarket and so on) which takes a cut. Nothing different here.

Edited March 28, 2020 by Pastaiolo

[ryanbatc 12,774]

17 hours ago, zemez said:

And of course, Microsoft takes 30% slice...

For user it it would be great to have one place to get the goods.

Probably true however we're talking sales volume.  Our little add-ons are kind of a niche of a niche market.  I think devs will sell a lot more product if it's at the MS marketplace.

[Air1 136]

11 hours ago, GlideBy said:

I may be the only one here, but I don't plan on buying any 3rd party addons.  I don't need special planes, as the already announced planes will be fine for me.  And I don't buy scenery or airport packs. 

you are not the only one, I see plenty here already to keep me very busy, 

[n4gix 4,947]

15 hours ago, Chock said:

This is why it annoyed the hell out of me when some developers were complaining about Dovetail or Steam taking a small percentage in return for marketing their products directly to the customer and effectively banging several nails into the coffin of FSW.

Alan, the actual facts were that your "small percentage" in reality was Dovetail wanting 30% of gross sales, and Steam demanding yet another 30% of gross sales. That left the hard working developer a slim 40% of gross sales.

From that paltry 40% the developer had to hope he could cover his/her expenses in producing the aircraft or scenery product! That is why there was so much blow-back from many (most?) developers.

Not all development companies are one of two person concerns who are part-time and happily counting on some percentage commission based on sales. Some dev houses have many modelers, texture artists and coders on staff, most of whom are drawing a salary.

Every developer had to make a hard decision, and for many only getting 40% of the gross sales but whose projected expenses would exceed that 40% gross earnings simply had no choice but to reject such an arrangement. No matter how many potential "millions of sales" might be made, they still would receive only a negative net-net as a result!

Edited March 28, 2020 by n4gix
Correct minor speeling arrors... ;)

[in2tech 588]

3 hours ago, n4gix said:

Alan, the actual facts were that your "small percentage" in reality was Dovetail wanting 30% of gross sales, and Steam demanding yet another 30% of gross sales. That left the hard working developer a slim 40% of gross sales.

I'm the first to admit that I am not good at math. But if Dovetail was 30% of say $100.00 wouldn't that leave 70% for the developer, same with Steam. Why are you adding the two together to get they each take 60% of sales, leaving said developer with 40%.

Confused in math land, sorry if I read it wrong? I said I am not good at math 🙂 And no matter what the percentage at any sim market, doesn't each developer make that decision? Like people have said most already sale in market places, I or most of us just don't know what the split is. I do know most of us want the good developers to make enough for their business, or enough on the side if it is part time development for them.

Confused by the Fuzzy Math! And I am easily confused by math!

[goates 576]

1 hour ago, in2tech said:

I'm the first to admit that I am not good at math. But if Dovetail was 30% of say $100.00 wouldn't that leave 70% for the developer, same with Steam. Why are you adding the two together to get they each take 60% of sales, leaving said developer with 40%.

What he is saying is that Dovetail would take a 30% cut and then Steam would take an additional 30% on top of that, leaving the developer with 40%.

Edited March 28, 2020 by goates