The MSFS Marketplace has had a quality problem sitting in plain sight for several months, and the community has been loud about it. Today that long-running pressure produced something we haven’t seen before: Microsoft is removing an entire developer from the storefront.
In a forum post, the Flight Simulator team confirmed it will stop selling Mscenery content in both the MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024 in-sim Marketplaces, effective immediately. Pulling a single problematic product is one thing. Delisting a developer’s whole catalogue is a different step, and it shows that Microsoft is willing to police the storefront more directly than it has before.
According to the post, the decision followed what the team described as “a large number of complaints” across three areas: the low quality of Mscenery’s content, product descriptions that lacked information alongside images the team called misleading, and questions over the validity of the high user scores those products carried. The team said decisions like this are not made lightly and credited community feedback with prompting it.
There’s a caveat for anyone who already owns these products. Microsoft says existing purchases will keep working as normal, so the change blocks new sales but leaves already-purchased content untouched. One thing the announcement does not address is refunds. Buyers get to keep what they paid for, but there’s no offer of money back for anyone who feels they were sold something other than what the listings promised. That lines up with Microsoft’s standing Marketplace policy, which generally rules out refunds on purchases you’ve already received.
The policy makes an exception when a product is delisted at the creator’s request, and this removal came from Microsoft rather than from Mscenery, so it isn’t obvious that exception is in play here. For what it’s worth, the same support policy points owners of content that doesn’t work properly toward a support request, so simmers who think they have a real case may still want to ask.
A complaint that had been building for a year
None of this arrived out of nowhere. Concerns about Mscenery stretch back to the MSFS 2020 era, and the developer has been a regular subject of community frustration for years. Threads on the official forums, some running for dozens of pages, have repeatedly raised the same points: aircraft that community members describe as low on detail and functionality, store listings that use what look like AI-generated promotional images rather than in-sim screenshots, and a run of near-perfect ratings that many simmers found hard to square with the products themselves.
Things came to a head over the past few weeks. Forum users reported that Mscenery aircraft were dominating the Marketplace’s “top rated” sort, which pushed more serious work down the page.
We had noticed the pattern ourselves. Back in May we covered the appearance of a “737-100” listing that carried many of the same hallmarks: AI-looking promo art, a mash-up of recycled assets, and a rating sitting close to five stars on the back of what appeared to be fake scores. In that case PMDG’s Mathijs Kok publicly called on Microsoft to take the product down. That listing came from a different storefront name, so it isn’t Mscenery as such (though it appears to be the same developer under a different name), but it’s part of the same wider question about what gets through the Marketplace’s checks.
A full delisting
What stands out today is less the specific developer and more the precedent. Microsoft had already tried a lighter touch. During our FSExpo keynote coverage we noted that Mscenery aircraft were still sitting at the top of the ratings sort even after the team said it had removed inflated scores. A full delisting is a different order of response, and it suggests the team concluded that trimming fake reviews around the edges wasn’t going to be enough.
It also raises a question about consistency. The Marketplace is the only practical way for Xbox and PlayStation players to buy add-ons, since those platforms can’t use third-party stores, so the bar for what gets sold there carries real weight for console simmers in particular. Mscenery is not the only developer the community has criticised. Whether today’s decision turns out to be a one-off or the start of more active enforcement is definitely something worth watching.
