I am intending to get the Just Flight Hawk T1/1A and I was about to get it direct from JF. I then noted that it was on offer from the MSFS Market Place - but for around an additional £10.
I haven’t purchased anything from the Market Place before so are there views out there with pros and cons for buying from the Market Place or JF - and what do I get for the extra tenner?
Thanks
Dave
In a word: Developer
I personally don’t bug anything from the Marketplace unless that is the only option (Carenado).
The Marketplace is behind when it comes to new releases and updates.
I purchase direct from the vendor or trusted thirds party as to have access to same day releases as well as updates.
I prefer to purchase direct from the developer. One advantage of the Marketplace is that all available updates are in one place whereas if you purchase directly from the developers, you have multiple sites to check for updates. On the other hand, when updates are available, they are usually available from the developers before they are available on the Marketplace.
I think you are better off buying from the developer, SimMarket, or Orbx. Updates come out faster. There is also a long thread claiming that the DRM used on the marketplace slows down the loading of the sim. I’m not sure how that could be possible, but you should check out the thread.
The Marketplace makes things easy but the pace of updates is just not great. The Orbx store is actually pretty good. Suggest you check it out.
MS encrypts files on the Marketplace making add-on mods impossible, developers not. The Hawk from Just Flight has added functionality as well compared to the Marketplace version.
In theory, the Marketplace sounds great. All your purchased are in one place and updated from your content manager.
In reality, the whole process is awkward and the slow approval and publishing cycles make it a terrible experience. SU8 breaks an add-on? The devs of that add-on will have an update out in a couple of days, typically. It will be weeks to months before that update lands in the marketplace. So until then, your add-on will be either not functioning right, or potentially unusable (ask those that bought the Carenado Mooney and other older planes when they first came out about those experiences).
So I’m with @skypilotYTS. If it’s a marketplace exclusive, buy it from there because you don’t have a choice if you really want it. Otherwise, buy from the devs if possible to support them.
Yup…my Mooney(market place purchase) CTD the sim now. Before that, waited forever for update on GPS screens…stick with developer sites
My Mooney’s been working fine since its last update. But there was the long 2½ month period shortly after it came out that it was out of commission. Then again another 2 month outage after SU5 where it didn’t work. All that is traced back to the ridiculously slow process of submitting updates for existing store products.
I guess I 'll try again then. Lately have been mostly flying the commercial Airliners. Wanted to do a little GA flying, JF turbo Arrow…perfect. switched to the Mooney…bam…CTD…maybe an addon?? Love the Mooney though
I was of the firm opinion that it just made more sense to buy from the Marketplace, because then XBox and PC shared the same product and you only had to buy once. I was originally XBox, and just finally got my laptop this week.
Well, I have a 25 foot HDMI cable that runs from my PC to the 75 inch TV so if I was to fly from the recliner, I can. But I love the detail on my 38 inch ultrawide monitor more than the TV now. I’ve added South African landmarks from flightsim.to (I lived in SA for 3 years) and so love flying around my old home. I’ve got the various France VFR products, enhanced roads for France, and the level of detail now for France is just nuts. I have the HP Reverb G2 so I can do VR. I’m just never going to go back to the XBox. So now, I’ve bought a product off of Orbx’s site, I bought the Global Ground Vehicles direct from LVFR, and bought an addon off of simmarket.
The only bonus that the store offers now is a centralized place to get updates, and easy notification.
Worst thing for me that I don’t see mentioned often is that you are forced to install things into the location on your disk that you initially allowed FS to create. The “Official” folder. For me this on my C Drive and I’m running out of space there. Want to leave plenty of breathing space for Windows and future FS World Updates etc.
Also with SSDs I hear it’s not good to fill more than 80% of the space up.
Not confident in moving those folders manually even though I know it’s theoretically possible but I also use addons-linker, so don’t want to confuse things.
What I like about Orbx Direct (mainly) is that you can assign the Library to any Drive letter you want and it works is much the same way as adding-linker.
Just Flight seems to force things into C Drive also but planes aren’t huge. Unless you buy a lot hehe.
I really want to upgrade my storage - it’s my next step for hardware!!
Also, some military planes from the developer have weapons systems that the market place versions do not… at least to simulate dropping or firing a weapon.
I purchase from developer > preferred vendor > backup vendors > marketplace in that order. But there’s one exception I often make: I typically buy scenery from the Marketplace. My reasoning is that I don’t really care if I get scenery updates promptly, whereas I do care about getting aircraft updates in a timely fashion.
Always the developer and never from the Marketplace for aircraft for all the reasons previously stated.
I buy generaly from the dev but since the sim is available on the cloud, marketplace is only the place where I can use them on both PC and cloud.
I wont touch the Marketplace if I was paid to. I dont buy payware (freeware does all I need) but if one day I changed my mind I’d always get it from the dev.
Advantage of buying from the developer:
Advantage of buying from the official store:
That doesn’t make sense. Official and Community are in the same location (parent folder). Also, if it bothers you - just move it somewhere else. Change the path in the config file or in the UI when the game starts up and detects missing files.
The only thing you can’t easily move is the part downloaded from the MS Store. But that’s just a few GB. All the rest (100GB+) you can move anywhere you want at any time.
Although I’m not sure why it doesn’t mention the easiest method. Just pick a different folder when it starts up.
Just Flight definitely doesn’t force anything into the C drive. Every installer always asks for the location or picks it up from the config file.
I think that message is loud and clear and seems to be pretty much universal, so thank you folks. This will be my first payware add on to MSFS. I was hoping to wait until the conditions were such that A2A climbed aboard but that doesn’t seem to be imminent and the lure of the Hawk, which I have been involved with in an engineering capacity, is just too magnetic.
Thanks again,
Dave