On Xbox, there’s definitely no other choice. Marketplace or get bent.
On PC, it’s a tough one.
The marketplace promises easy, 1-stop shopping for everything. Get it all in 1 place. No need to have multiple accounts from multiple different vendors, etc. And all the addons get managed via the content manager. It makes it stupid easy.
But…
-
Both initial releases and product updates can be stupid slow. Things can be out on other vendors sometimes days to weeks in advance. Although in fairness, that’s reduced significantly. It used to be 8-12 weeks. Now it’s down to a couple of weeks at most. Often less than that. So I’ll give the marketplace credit. It’s improving.
-
This is what guarantees I’ll never buy another airport add-on via the marketplace - the encrypted filesystem. This prevents external programs from being able to read airport data. So as an example, when I run makerwys so I can extract the sim data to import into Pilot2ATC, it can’t open the encrypted 3rd party airports. So I don’t get any data on my purchased airports. I know this affects other external tools and utilities as well. If marketplace items actively block external tools from working with them, that completely kills the point of shopping in the marketplace for me.