With MSFS 2020, I was using the in-game marketplace, because it was easy to use (the same account, easy to install, etc.), but now I realize that the stuffs I bought in MSFS 2020 aren’t available yet in 2024, or will never be. Luckily, I only had like 2-3 stuffs and not 50+.
Whatever, to prevent losing any more add-ons and being able to transfer licence from one game to another in the future, which marketplace is recommended by the community?
This is fairly subjective and will always come with a fair amount of personal bias and preference.
My personal top 5 based on purchases for FS2020 and FS2024 combined:
Shop
Purchases
Direct from developer
57
SimMarket
47
Marketplace
20
Orbx
13
Just Flight
11
Marketplace only if I want Career mode support (this means very little to me in the current state of Career mode, but I like to believe that one day it will be in a better spot.) If you prefer to buy everything in one place, nothing beats Marketplace for convenience, but their continued delays in getting addons and updates out the door in a reasonable keeps me away for the most part. otherwise
If the developer or addon is exclusive to a particular shop, that shop of course (this is rarely the case, but it happens, such as with iniBuilds or flightsim.to at times)
Direct from the developer when possible to give them the most for their work while also typically getting updates the fastest
SimMarket (Been around forever, very large selection of addons with fast updates and generally fair prices when converted to USD.) Of the shops, it’s where I’ve purchased the most addons (not counting direct from dev as shown above.)
Orbx (Good though limited selection and prices are usually great when converted to USD, especially during sales. Updates can unfortunately be kind of slow.)
Others:
Just Flight’s prices are just too high in the US most of the time, but they often have exclusivity on their in-house addons for a while, same with Black Square, so I do tend to use them for those.
Contrail has built a fairly solid reputation from what I can tell, but they unfortunately fall into the “one more shop” category for me, so I have only used them once.
All of the shops you listed would probably qualify as “recommended” to some degree as they are all established and well enough liked. My suggestion to people who plan to sim for a long while: Keep a private online spreadsheet of your addons. I’ve been running one for nearly 15 years. I has the date of purchase, platform (sim), shop used, developer, addon name, order number, license key (if present), cost, and a notes column. This way, buying from various locations is less confusing down the road because you can always remember where and when you bought what.