Installing Aircraft through FS2020 Marketplace of from developers site?

Can anyone please explain what possible differences are between installing a plane from the Marketplace and installing as a download form the developer’s website? I can imagine differences in:

  • price
  • reliability (I expect the MP planes are tested by Microsoft)
  • upgrades (what happens when a developer is upgrading a plane, are MP planes handled the same way as downloaded from the devsite planes?

But perhaps there are more considerations to take into account.

To be specific: I do like to have a Spitfire, eg the FlyingIron plane. Should I wait or can I buy it immediately?

Thanks for reading.

Gerard

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One thing I can tell you is that when a developer sends a plane to the MSFS Store, it takes much longer before it’s made available to users.

More tests? Heavier structure? Laziness? I have no clue.

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  • price - yes, there can be differences
  • reliability - no, MS / Asobo don’t test third party planes. They’re simply providing the marketplace for them
  • upgrades - right now, yes. You can expect updates to be available from the developers websites sooner. I hope they will eventually get the option to inject their updated versions into the marketplace themselves.

What you didn’t mention, and could be a pro for the marketplace, is the licensing. Since your purchase is linked to your XBox account when buying from the marketplace, you shouldn’t have any issues with the product license. Not sure, but maybe that could be an issue when migrating to a new PC? not sure. Anyways, it’s nice to have all your content from a single source.

Could also be a con since Marketplace downloads are usually encrypted, and thus are at least harder (or even impossible) to mod.

See also this thread, all of it applies to marketplace purchases as well:

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You make a valid point. Are you able to mod third party planes though? I would expect them to have a form of DRM as well, since otherwise one person purchasing the plane could just copy and send it to all his friends/discord servers etc? Like for example the CRJ? For around 50 dollars I would bet there are plenty of people willing to pirate that?

Well, most parts of it since the game cannot read foreign DRM in the community folder.
There’s people fixing aircraft performance etc. without issues, I released a exterior lights mod for the JF Piper Arrow etc.
Main parts of the most complex aspect of the JF Piper Arrow - the panel and autopilot logic - is WebAssembly which is compiled and thus cannot be modded, but that’s fine.

I’m not sure how other companies handle that, but JF has an installer that checks your license upon installation and that’s it.

JF checks your license also in game. If it’s missing you’ll get a security error. It’s part of the wasm module they use.

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Okay cool :slight_smile: I’m totally fine with such solutions, and still the aircraft except for the panel/EFB logic is moddable. Win-win scenario.

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  • Price is one thing. It pays to compare. Many 3rd party addons available at two or three of the big sites (Flightsim.com, Simmarket.com and Orbx) and most of the time there’s one that’s cheaper than the marketplace
  • it has already been said that most addons take longer to be published on the marketplace, however what I find more important is the fact that updates to the mod also take far longer to be published. Simmarket and Orbx are much faster to publish updates and hotfixes.
  • thirdly: marketplace items go into the main folder of the sim not in the community folder. So either they will slow down you startup time, or you will have to manually move them to the community folder (which will deactivate updates). Not sure if addon managers can deal with stuff that’s not in the Community folder.
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Yes indeed, but wasm protection isn’t perfect yet though. The DRM on the marketplace is pretty secure. Which is a problem for modding, a ‘simple’ light mod for flying at nights is impposible on the Aerolite 103 because the main model is locked and since their publisher doesn’t gaf we are stuck with a limited plane.

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