Where can I read product reviews in the Marketplace

[andradef 59]

I feel like this is a very dumb question, but when I am browsing available products through the in-game marketplace, I can see the star rating but I can't find the actual reviews anywhere. What am I missing?

[marsman2020 1,310]

There aren't any

[Chock 17,769]

If you own a product - but only if bought via the in-game marketplace so the sim knows you have bought it (MSFS has no way to detect things bought outside of the in-game marketplace for inclusion in its review system) - then you will have the option in MSFS to click on the product page for an add-on, and there you would see an option to rate the thing (between 1 and 5 stars). This ensures only people which the sim knows own a product can rate it in the sim, but as noted, it is misleading as an overall rating because if you bought something outside of the MSFS market, you can't rate it in the sim, even though you own it.

Here for example, is the product page for the Kitfox add-on aeroplane, which is one I did buy in the sim. You can see it has no star rating here on the right because I have not chosen to give it one (take a wild guess why that is, although I did do a very quick preview of it on my youtube channel)

So there is no 'review' in the sense of a written opinion when you rate something using this rating system, it's just a simple 'How many stars would you give it?' option for people who own things bought via the in-game marketplace.

Thus if you really want to see a detailed review of something, you're better off either reading the reviews on external sites, or watching things such as youtube videos. Or even going off your own judgement of the consensus here at Avsim and other forums and websites.

But be careful with such recommendations if they are not the typical consensus. Not all external stores where you can buy stuff exclude people who have not purchased the product from making a review of a product (which means people could be mean and put a malicious review on the site) and sometimes people will get their friends or employees of the development team to write glowing reviews of things too. To get past this, as noted, it's best go off 'what most people' are saying, since this is more likely to be closer to the truth. 

With youtube review videos, that can be risky too. Lots of youtube reviewers are more interested in gaining views and subscribers than doing honest or informative reviews - in fairness, you can usually tell these types of 'reviews' because they will generally be made quickly, often on the day of release for the product, with the intention of gaining channel views for the hot topic of the moment, so the production values of them will be poor, with little thought going into them, and even less in the way of really useful information - since these 'reviews' are geared toward earning advertising revenue via numbers of subscribers and/or channel view statistics. You can be your own judge of things like this, since it will be obvious if a video is poor or rushed. Witness the amount of MSFS videos there were on youtube in the run up to the release of MSFS. Where are all the people who were making these now? They've moved on to the next big thing of course, because they were never really interested in MSFS, it was all about gaining channel views and advertising revenue.

Less obviously nefarious, is the reviews from people who have got 'freebies' from a developer. It's quite common for reviewers to get free copies of stuff, and on the face of it there is nothing wrong with that, but you should be aware that in many cases this will either make the reviewer feel somewhat compelled to be positive about a product they got for free, or at least not as negative as they perhaps should be if they are being honest. Some of this is to guard against the possibility of not being excluded from getting free stuff in the future. Personally, I can never understand this myself, because if a reviewer's only motivation is to get loads of free stuff all the time, then they're probably never going to have time to actually use the stuff, so it becomes a pointlessly self-serving exercise. But in any case, just be aware that it goes on.

Anyway, not all reviewers are like this, but be on the lookout for those who are never critical of stuff and who churn out content at a very high rate, as these can (not always) be signs that integrity is erm, not that reviewer's strong point, shall we say? It's at this point that if I was cheeky, I'd plug my own youtube review channel, but if you really want to see it I'm sure you can figure out how to get there.

 

Edited March 25, 2021 by Chock

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,799]

4 hours ago, Chock said:

If you own a product - but only if bought via the in-game marketplace so the sim knows you have bought it (MSFS has no way to detect things bought outside of the in-game marketplace for inclusion in its review system) - then you will have the option in MSFS to click on the product page for an add-on, and there you would see an option to rate the thing (between 1 and 5 stars). This ensures only people which the sim knows own a product can rate it in the sim, but as noted, it is misleading as an overall rating because if you bought something outside of the MSFS market, you can't rate it in the sim, even though you own it.

Here for example, is the product page for the Kitfox add-on aeroplane, which is one I did buy in the sim. You can see it has no star rating here on the right because I have not chosen to give it one (take a wild guess why that is, although I did do a very quick preview of it on my youtube channel)

So there is no 'review' in the sense of a written opinion when you rate something using this rating system, it's just a simple 'How many stars would you give it?' option for people who own things bought via the in-game marketplace.

Thus if you really want to see a detailed review of something, you're better off either reading the reviews on external sites, or watching things such as youtube videos. Or even going off your own judgement of the consensus here at Avsim and other forums and websites.

But be careful with such recommendations if they are not the typical consensus. Not all external stores where you can buy stuff exclude people who have not purchased the product from making a review of a product (which means people could be mean and put a malicious review on the site) and sometimes people will get their friends or employees of the development team to write glowing reviews of things too. To get past this, as noted, it's best go off 'what most people' are saying, since this is more likely to be closer to the truth. 

With youtube review videos, that can be risky too. Lots of youtube reviewers are more interested in gaining views and subscribers than doing honest or informative reviews - in fairness, you can usually tell these types of 'reviews' because they will generally be made quickly, often on the day of release for the product, with the intention of gaining channel views for the hot topic of the moment, so the production values of them will be poor, with little thought going into them, and even less in the way of really useful information - since these 'reviews' are geared toward earning advertising revenue via numbers of subscribers and/or channel view statistics. You can be your own judge of things like this, since it will be obvious if a video is poor or rushed. Witness the amount of MSFS videos there were on youtube in the run up to the release of MSFS. Where are all the people who were making these now? They've moved on to the next big thing of course, because they were never really interested in MSFS, it was all about gaining channel views and advertising revenue.

Less obviously nefarious, is the reviews from people who have got 'freebies' from a developer. It's quite common for reviewers to get free copies of stuff, and on the face of it there is nothing wrong with that, but you should be aware that in many cases this will either make the reviewer feel somewhat compelled to be positive about a product they got for free, or at least not as negative as they perhaps should be if they are being honest. Some of this is to guard against the possibility of not being excluded from getting free stuff in the future. Personally, I can never understand this myself, because if a reviewer's only motivation is to get loads of free stuff all the time, then they're probably never going to have time to actually use the stuff, so it becomes a pointlessly self-serving exercise. But in any case, just be aware that it goes on.

Anyway, not all reviewers are like this, but be on the lookout for those who are never critical of stuff and who churn out content at a very high rate, as these can (not always) be signs that integrity is erm, not that reviewer's strong point, shall we say? It's at this point that if I was cheeky, I'd plug my own youtube review channel, but if you really want to see it I'm sure you can figure out how to get there.

 

 

The biggest issue with online reviews is they often tend to be either glowing reports or total rants about minor bugs that are really only annoyance.

Then you have people who have an axe to grind and hate on MSFS in general, or dislike GA aircraft and think we have too many already or dislike airliners and complex aircraft or hate steam gauges or cannot stand glass cockpits or maybe just in general hate on anything that is not made by a particular country or manufacturer.

The there are people who blame a product or game for hardware issues (like inadequate cooling that does not show up in other games as they never stress the system) or in some cases their own incompetence in working the systems, or people that just want everything for free right now with instant 24/7 support.

Then add to that the massive rants you find about what may have been genuine issues with a product that the developer fixed almost instantly.

Actually not sure why I read product reviews at all 😄

Edited March 25, 2021 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[andradef 59]

14 hours ago, Chock said:

With youtube review videos, that can be risky too. Lots of youtube reviewers are more interested in gaining views and subscribers than doing honest or informative reviews - in fairness, you can usually tell these types of 'reviews' because they will generally be made quickly, often on the day of release for the product, with the intention of gaining channel views for the hot topic of the moment, so the production values of them will be poor, with little thought going into them, and even less in the way of really useful information...

 

Not to mention the fact that they milk 2 minutes worth of content into a 10-minute video to ensure they make more money.