This week, a post went up on r/flightsim with a screenshot of the MSFS Marketplace “Top Rated” section. Every slot was occupied by an MScenery product. F-16 Enhanced Edition, A380-800 Enhanced Edition, Typhoon Enhanced Edition, 787-8 Enhanced Edition. All priced between €17 and €22. All sitting at 4.9 stars, propped up by fake reviews.
I commented on the thread. “But to have false reviews might be at least borderline.” That was the polite version of what I was thinking.
The community was less polite. And as it turns out, none of this was new.
This isn’t a new problem
The official MSFS forum thread asking who owns MScenery opened in July 2025. It ran to 118 posts and 5,500 views. The thread asked a basic question: who actually runs this company? There is no contact page, no company listing, no findable registration. Forum user TheBusyFox compiled a broader list of developers in the same category: MSCENERY, Captain Sim, Bredok3D, DreamScenery, VirtualCol, 2Pilots, VA System. All flagged for flooding the marketplace, zero transparency, and no contact details.
Mathijs Kok from PMDG weighed in on that thread as a verified third-party developer:
“You can always just try to find the company website. You should also easily find a privacy policy and terms of service. If any of these are missing, the company is hiding something. Note that in many countries, a visible physical address is a requirement to sell something.”
That’s not just a quality complaint. That’s a legal observation. Selling commercially without a visible physical address is illegal in most of the EU. The MSFS Marketplace accepted these products anyway.
This week’s Reddit thread is the same conversation, nearly a year later, still unsolved. The difference is that the example: MScenery.
What MScenery actually is
MScenery’s products follow a pattern: minimal-effort aircraft, AI-generated screenshots that don’t represent what the sim actually renders, and review scores that appear within hours of release and climb in suspiciously synchronized patterns.
In May, MSFS Addons documented a specific case: a $30 “737-100” listing pulled apart by the community for AI screenshots, assets that appeared to be repurposed 747 geometry, and a review pattern that matched no legitimate release. MScenery operates the same playbook at scale, across dozens of products.
The Top Rated section is supposed to surface what the community thinks is worth buying. Right now it mostly surfaces MScenery.
How the botting works
The most specific analysis in yesterday’s Reddit thread came from u/InceptorOne:
“I used to think this… then I dug into it. Within hours of release they get ~15 reviews, then as the days go on, ~75, ~135, ~145 and it grows slower after that… all 5 stars. You can see this when they release two products on the same day, the number of ratings on both are the same as time passes. That many ratings on a good product is even hard to get, only a small portion of customers rate it.”
The tell is the synchronization. Two products released on the same day accumulate identical review counts at identical rates. That’s not customers. The all-time ratings across MSFS 2020 and 2024 combined are roughly double the last 30-day figures, which suggests the botting is being split across both sim versions to obscure the pattern.
u/SirDarkStar put it more directly: “Yes, they post and instantly get 100+ 5-star reviews within minutes yet you only see people complaining they got scammed.”
The refund problem nobody talks about
There is something that makes the fake review problem even worse. If a console player buys a MScenery product and finds it broken or misrepresented, they have no obvious path to a refund and no way to contact the developer.
Mathijs Kok explained the structural reason for this in the July 2025 forum thread:
“That’s simple, you bought from Microsoft, and only Microsoft can refund. Microsoft does not allow developers any access to the customers; we are only told something has sold, not to whom and not for what platform. So even if you can reach the development team, they will have no record of you being one of their customers.”
So: the developer can’t refund you because they don’t know you exist. Microsoft can refund you, but doesn’t by default on downloaded digital content. And the developer has no registered contact details anyway, so “reaching the development team” isn’t straightforward to begin with.
Forum user anon16617330 put the obvious question: “It’s a scam, it has no registered office, according to the AI it doesn’t exist, where do the taxes from these sales go, Mr. MS?”
Nobody answered that.
The console problem
PC simmers have filters. Forums, Reddit, Discord, SimMarket reputation pages, YouTube reviews. And the ability to buy directly from PMDG, FSLabs and the like. Most experienced simmers know where to look before spending €22 on an unknown developer.
Console players don’t have that experience. Xbox and PS5 users see the Marketplace as presented: Top Rated means top rated. A 4.9-star product with 140 reviews looks legitimate. There is no SimMarket to cross-reference, no r/flightsim habit to fall back on.
u/Living_Distance1720 said it plainly in the reddit thread: “Console players are probably buying it.” The Marketplace expanded to PS5 in December 2025. That’s a large new audience with even less community infrastructure than Xbox. Console players arriving from PlayStation have no SimMarket habit, no r/flightsim muscle memory. The Top Rated section is the only signal they have.
What Microsoft said at FSExpo
The Reddit thread went up on June 12. That same day, Jörg Neumann took the stage at FlightSimExpo 2026 in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Neumann announced that maliciously inflated review scores have been identified and purged. He previewed upcoming Marketplace changes: more curation in the hero, recommended, and exclusive rows, new sorting tools, and better discoverability for quality products. Simulation Daily’s coverage notes the team will continue monitoring the Marketplace to ensure review authenticity.
It’s worth noting how Neumann framed the broader keynote. He openly called the original Reno Air Races paywall a mistake. He said the first Boeing 707 release wasn’t what the team wanted. He acknowledged that pairing Aircraft and Avionics Updates with sim updates was stressing his team out. This is not a spokesperson reading from a script. When Neumann says the fake review problem is being addressed, that carries more weight than a PR statement would.
But the specifics are thin. “More curation” and “continued monitoring” describe an intent, not a mechanism. At least, for now. The July 2025 forum thread had 118 posts. The inflated scores that were “identified and purged” on June 12 were apparently visible for long enough that MScenery products dominated the Top Rated section for months. Legitimate developers still wait weeks for approval while MScenery releases appear to move faster.
The structural problem
The issue isn’t just MScenery. It’s that the Marketplace’s incentive structure currently rewards exactly this behavior.
Microsoft takes a cut of every sale. A MScenery product that fools a console player into a €22 purchase generates revenue. There’s no refund that erodes that. There’s no penalty for fake reviews, which doesn’t undo the sales made.
u/CrazychrisX put it bluntly in yesterday’s thread: “They won’t do shit, cause people are most likely buying this crap, which gives Asobo more money.” That’s cynical, and Neumann’s FSExpo comments suggest it’s not entirely fair. But it’s also not entirely wrong. The structural problem exists whether or not the team is acting in good faith, and “continued monitoring” doesn’t change the structure.
What would actually address this: a refund window on Marketplace purchases. Review verification tied to confirmed purchases. A delay between purchase and review eligibility that breaks the “100 reviews within minutes” pattern. Mandatory visible contact details and company registration as a condition of Marketplace listing, something that’s a legal requirement in the EU regardless of what Microsoft currently enforces.
None of those were announced at FSExpo.
Neumann has shown he’s willing to admit mistakes publicly. The July 2025 thread, the May 2026 “737-100” case, yesterday’s Reddit thread: the paper trail is long enough that the problem can’t be called invisible. Whether FSExpo was a turning point or just another acknowledgement depends on what comes in Sim Update 6. We will continue to obersve what is happening next – and report back to the community.
Published 14th of June 2026.
