I was thinking about buying my first 3rd party airport and I’m a bit dubious on where to buy (to be specific I’m thinking about EHAM by flytampa)
I do know that for aircraft is better (at least in terms of quickness of updates) to purchase directly from devs when possible
Is the same for airports? or the need for updates is way less so marketplace is a good option?
I’d like to go with the marketplace for airports just to save me the tedium of registering to x websites and so on, but given it will be a first for me i do not know if it’s wise choice
Marketplace is fine for airports. They are not updated as often and usually never break to the point of being unusable. I’ve found they are often cheaper on the in-game store as well.
If you want to avoid the Marketplace, here is my list of other providers ordered in terms of quality of purchase experience, installation, updates etc.:
The marketplace airports are encrypted so if you have GSX it has a hard time working with those. I will also assume this may be an issue in the near future with a new highly anticipated add-on called “Beyond ATC”. If airport files are encrypted then these addons cannot read parking spots and other vital custom information about the airport.
Once you have a large collection of 3rd party airports, its good practice to only turn “ON” the ones you are going to fly to for that session. If you have all airports installed then the simulator takes longer to start. By not using the marketplace its super easy to do this. If you are comfortable moving files around on your PC then I recommend placing airports on another folder or drive (not community) and then use “Addon Linker” program: MSFS Addons Linker for Microsoft Flight Simulator | MSFS
Then there is another advantage to the developer if you buy it directly from their website they avoid having to pay up to 30% from each sale to the hosting website. Not all developers have a direct website but some do. More money for the developers pocket is always good for their hard work.
The encryption is also a problem for tools such as Little Nav Map. I bought Belfast, Newcastle and Edinburgh from Marketplace originally. I couldn’t figure out why start positions for my flight plans etc where always wrong, and then realised it was because they are encrypted. I had to re-buy everything from the developer and haven’t looked back.
Its probably ok if you only ever use Xbox as external tools don’t work on that platform, but its a nightmare on PC.
Conversely, the commissions from Marketplace purchases are used by Asobo to fund World and Sim Updates. I can empathise with those who’d rather use devs’ own stores — why not give them the full amount for their hard work? — but there is merit to buying from the in-sim store.
It’s a catch 22 situation: no Marketplace purchases means fewer or no further updates to the core sim; but devs paying commission might lead to some feeling it’s no longer worth the R&D costs.
Some devs have no store of their own so obviously they’re fine paying whatever commission Marketplace, Contrail, Orbx et al stipulate.
Today I saw the announcement on Marketplace for a number of promotions on (among others ) French airports from Pilot experience. After reading the comments in this topic, I decided to look for those airports on the Pilot Experience website, but somewhat to my surprise there were no discounts at all on their own website!
This is strange: so Pilot Experience allow that their products are sold in the Marketplace with a 50% discount and from the remaining 50% they even have to give 30% to Asobo/Microsoft??
And on their own website they still ask 100% for these airports…
Yes, this is also what happened to me. Microsoft control the promotions within their marketplace, and when they go on sale. Developers will sometimes run their own on their own website, of indeed sometimes you will find products on sale on other third party websites. This is no new, and is the way it has always worked (even back in FS9 days). Different stores can have different pricing at different times.
I assume the developers have to reach an agreement with Asobo/MS beforehand that their products can be sold at the marketplace with a 50% reduction, otherwise they could still demand Asobo to pay the full price to them (even when Asobo sells it for only 50%).
Why would a developer accept that a 3th party can sell their products at 50% discount when their net revenue (after paying commission to Asobo) will still be higher if they give a 50% at their own website also??
Without any discount on their own website, I don’t think they will have many direct sales.
Yes thats right, but its the same with ketchup. On any day I can buy the same bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup from any one of a number of shops, some weeks that might be discounted in one of them, but not the others. Its no different.
This is no longer true. GSX now uses only official sim APIs for data on the airports, and I expect other sim tools to do the same in the future.
GSX still has its own profiles for extra customisation, but these have to be installed manually by the user regardless.
This is also possible with marketplace purchases. I use add-ons linker for both Community and OneStore folders and it manages both marketplace and external content exactly the same way. It’s really convenient to be able to just turn on add-ons for a single region, or however you organise them. I also have WU spilt using addons linker, so with a couple of clicks I can run the simulator completely vanilla, great for testing.
I even set up addons linker to enable/disable GSX, so if I’m flying VFR then I can click to turn off GSX directly in add-ons linker and the sim starts nearly 2 minutes quicker.
Normally I go with the marketplace, mostly now since they announced that basically all marketplace addons will be available in FS2024, this gives me less headache for future reinstall.
Only addon linker doesn’t work with marketplace addons. That could be a minus.
Flytampa is great detail wise.
I have Copenhagen and love it.
It works fine, read my post immediately before yours!
While the slow updates on the marketplace can be annoying, if you are patient enough to wait then it does have the advantage that you can update everything all in one place, and don’t have to run a whole bunch of different store apps to update everything.
