Is X-Plane 11 steam or direct download from X-Plane's website better?

Question

After looking long and hard for the best option of flight simulator I choose X-Plane. So as X-Plane 11 came out today (wooo!), Im looking to get it. 

So, this leads me to my question. Is getting it from steam or direct from their website better?  Are there pros and cons. 

Things to think about for me:

• Playing for fun on my mac while really flying on my PC. Would the key the website gives me allow me to use it twice? In steam I would be able to log into my steam account and download on to devices (correct me if Im wrong). 
•  Would betas and patches be available on steam? As I think they are for direct downloads from the website using keys.

 

Thank you everyone! As always have a safe flight!

 

-Justin

Answer 1

You can download X-Plane on both computers with either version. LR does not require you to buy a second key to use X-Plane on another computer unless you network the two together to use at the same time.

As a member of the LR team, I would recommend buying direct from us as a larger % of your purchase supports us directly. ;)  I would only recommend the Steam version over our direct download if you live in an area where our CDN has low or poor coverage because that could make your download slow. We hear about this most often in areas around Australia, China or Russia.

Comments

Forgot to answer:

Steam gets all the same updates, but it only gets betas once they're to release candidate stage. So you'd have access to fewer beta versions, but the ones you get should be more stable.

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Ok thank you! If you guys get more out of it, I will buy straight from yall. I live in Chicago with a way above average internet connection, so speed is not an issue. Thanks for your help!

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CDN has low or poor coverage because that could make your download slow. We hear about this most often in areas around Australia, China or Russia.

I don't know how many Steam servers are in Australia but apparently, speeds 2.5 years ago weren't all that flash either (https://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/01/aussies-download-from-steam-at-under-a-megabyte-per-second/) - it appears that your CDN will have a Melbourne server soon, and the density of them doesn't appear all that different to those in the US/Europe.

Anyway, I've been thinking hard about whether to buy through Steam or direct and after migrating from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Fedora 26 and running into extra setup complications with Steam at first, it's clear to me that buying and running it directly (as I can do with the demo successfully right now) removes potential unnecessary complications.

It's just tidier to not have to open up Steam and be faced with its own updates, et al first. I don't recall how fast the download speeds were on my 12Mbps connection but I know that the initial download took a little while but eventually got done without a problem.

So, the greatest advantage I see of going direct is in being able to test the demo installation and know that the full version will work exactly the same without additional downloads and overhead through Steam.