Using a product against your license agreement is almost the same as piracy.
As far as I know there is currently no way for third parties to ensure the addon is uninstalled from one machine before installing the same license on another, but some already have a license key management/check which blocks copying the Community folder to another machine.
JF Piper Arrow for instance has an online license check in the installer and places a license file in another folder which is required for the aircraft to work.
For the future MS/Asobo seem to plan support to further encrypt (and possibly check license) using the SDK. Will be interesting how open addons will be once this is possible.
I have issues making purchases through the marketplace although I bought some stuff from there. I gave up and just ended up using sim market,just flight,orbx and other market vendors.
This will be an issue once PMDG shows up. Currently, they have an active license that’s sitting in the FMC of the aircraft. If you want to upgrade P3D or move it, or reinstall the aircraft on another machine, you must first go into the MCDU of the PMDG aircraft and deactivate that running license then use the uninstaller to delete it. Otherwise you will have issues reactivating the license on a new P3D installation. I am curious how they will implement licensing on MSFS.
I’ve been burned a couple of times with purchases from 3rd-party developers (I will not list them here to avoid possible legal complications), but suffice to say one was a vegetation plug-in, another was an aircraft.
If, like me, you’re just an ordinary - a ‘casual’ - simmer the whole add-ons thing is a minefield. There are plenty of snakes in the grass and what might appear at first glance to be a professional, polished product might in fact be little more than a broken, half-arsed scam.
There appears to be very poor (to non-existent) quality control even on MSFS2020’s Marketplace, but if you go direct to 3rd-party sites you’re really rolling the dice.
I believe the items purchased through the market place will have encryption on some of their files. I don’t know if that is the case for those purchased from a 3rd party. So I guess it depends on how much control you want over your purchased products file system.
I’m yet to decide but I believe i will start to buy on the marketplace and forna simple reason.
Price localisation.
An example. I bought the DC6 within the first weeks on PMDG website before it get released to the marketplace and to my surprise, the price was about 5 times cheaper in my local currency when released in the marketplace as it was on PMDG.
This said, i will keep buying PMDG aircraft from their website so I can use their own software and it seems less problematic but I believe that everyone airport, scenery etc will be bought from the marketplace.
Another example, I can buy the 4 seasons packs of Bijan on the marketplace for 1/4 of the price of the full package recently released.