9 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

OK ... so if you have a lot of updates (like 10 or more airports and planes) from the same supplier or maybe someone from like orbx who offer stuff from multiple suppliers you might be better buying direct - but if you have a mish mash of stuff from all over the place the marketplace might work better.

That is a fair statement.

I don't have that many add ons yet, but so far I have add ons from:

FSDT - Key West (Market)

Orbx - (Direct) KITW and their freebee
Orbx - (Market) London Landmarks

Latin VFR - Miami and Bradley (Market)

DRZEWIECKI Design - Washington DC (Direct)

Flightbeam - KDEN (Market)

Aerosoft - EDLP Freebee  (Direct - then transferred to Market)

If I didn't use the marketplace I would need 6 separate places to keep track of.  As of now I have two, (for my two external Orbx and my Drzewiecki ones).  And part of my OCD wants to buy KITW and Washington DC again just to put them under the same umbrella.  

Now there is that argument that the marketplace sceneries are "encrypted" and data from those airports may not be able to be extracted from external apps, but I don't run any external apps yet, and I haven't seen any documented case where this is an actual problem, only conjecture that it is a potential one.  I would think that Asobo and 3PD should be able to address that should it be a huge problem, or even as a workaround put the data files needed by the external apps in the Community folder.

I know that there is a strong argument for giving directly to the 3PD so they can avoid the MS vig.  But to be honest, the above 3PD's got my business BECAUSE I saw their stuff on the Marketplace.  So they are getting business that they normally wouldn't because I don't normally scour the internet for 3rd Party sceneries.

As far as updates, I can be patient.  I never had a "people floating" issue with 1.0 of Key West and enjoyed it quite a bit.  I was simply waiting for the graphical goodies (such as Fort Jefferson).  And again, I know that if the 3PD issued an update to external customers that the update will find it's way to the marketplace.  Like I said, I can be patient as long as I know the fix is in the pipeline.

Edited October 28, 20205 yr by wthomas33065

after buying London landmarks on release day from ORBX, then having to wait ages for the update I've decided to buy everything from them or partners using the ORBX central.

all other add-ons are from the market place (except UK2000).

 

the only problem I have is that my content manager won't run unless I remove a bunch of free stuff out of my community folder each time 

 

7 minutes ago, hanhamreds said:

the only problem I have is that my content manager won't run unless I remove a bunch of free stuff out of my community folder each time

This is most likely due to the freeware developer having a formatting error in the manifest.json file. A misconfigured manifest.jason file in one addon can prevent content manager from displaying any data at all.   I had two liveries that had this problem.  I would go back to where you got the freebies and see if the author updated their freebie to correct the error.  If not, you can follow this fix procedure I posted in the tips and tricks.  I had identified the liveries and corrected them, then noticed the freeware author had already posted an update (facepalm)

Also, if you have a "community folder" utility that allows you to disable and enable sceneries using symbolic links, you can identify the offending freebies much easier.  It also allows you to easily disable some of the larger add-ons like Yosemite or Monument Valley that can lengthen your loading time unless you actually plan on flying in that area.