I have 154 items of Marketplace content that isn’t WUs, CUs, Top Gun or the Red Bull Bullseye Landing Challenge.
These are 154 individual directories — so that would include directories for each add-on plus individual directories for each of the liveries that come with the two Junkers, the An-2 and the ATR, or any other add-on made up of multiple directories.
My testing has revealed three, specific, add-ons that are adding ~1 minute each to my load time — MMGL, MGLM & S68. I do not know if these 3 are universally an issue or if they are specifically an issue for me.
However, many of the other add-ons add ~5-20 seconds to the load. Individually, a 5-20 second amount of additional time doesn’t seem like much. However, it appears that collectively those times add up to additional minutes of overall load time. In my case, even with the 3 clear offenders removed from the installation, I still have an extended amount of load time due to this collective behavior — ~2:16 without my add-ons (again with the WUs, CUs, etc. still installed) and ~6:11 with the add-ons minus the 3 offenders.
No one official has said what an acceptable load time is for both individual and collective add-ons, so I don’t know if this 6+ minutes is inside or outside the window of acceptable (It seems unacceptable to me, especially when compared to my load times in the current release version with the same add-ons is significantly less time) With the 3 add-ons installed, too, I’m seeing in excess of 9:30 to load the sim. That feels pretty unacceptable. As I said, individual add-ons adding a few seconds doesn’t seem unacceptable until they all add up to additional minutes of load time.
What is also not being talked about, as much here, is the load time from clicking Fly on the World Map until the Ready to Fly screen appears. I’m seeing horrifically long load times when my add-ons are installed — significantly longer than the times needed to load the sim. 24+ minutes to load the PMDG 737-700 at IniBuilds KLAX, for example. Three loads of a flight at those kinds of times and, “poof!” there goes 1.25 hours.
Going off the user-base that participate in this forum, most PC users have elected to purchase most of their add-ons independently of the Marketplace. Few PC users have invested heavily in Marketplace content or stuck to the Marketplace as their go-to store for add-ons. Fewer still of those PC users have registered in the beta.
Xbox users have no choice but to purchase from the Marketplace if they want add-ons. I am an ex-Xbox user who migrated to a PC, which puts me in a pretty small subset of PC users with a fairly large collection of Marketplace content.
The short answer is: it’s complicated.