Feedback from Unreal Marketplace publishers

Community Marketplace
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I am currently an asset developer for the Unity Marketplace and was thinking about doing some Unreal plugins to test the waters on this storefront. Before I did so I wanted to see if I could get some informal feedback from current developers on their experience thus far. I realize that things aren’t apples to apples but I’m trying to get some serious feedback and avoid any Unity vs. Unreal flame-war. In my opinion they are both great engines. Any comparisons to Unity will be only relating to the marketplace and not the engine itself. This post will be pretty long but if you only have feedback on one particular item that’s fine, I’d love to hear your feedback. Questions below:

1. Stability of API
For any 3rd party plugin developer this is the most important area. Changes to either engine happens all the time and so do breaking changes. In my experience with writing 4 plugins for Unity they do a good job at introducing only minimal breaking changes. Typically, one of my assets averages maybe 1 breaking change per year (last one was Unity scene management or Levels/Maps in UE4 nomenclature and was pretty easy to convert to the new API). I’ve been following a few UE4 plugins (Substance and a few others) and it seems the API introduces breaking changes a bit more but I wanted feedback on how often this occurs in reality. Does it seem to happen every release, every few (4.10, 4.11, 4.12, etc.)?

2. Size of Market
This is fairly straightforward on the viability of the market. For those with popular plugins is this earning a decent income? In Unity as a publisher depending on the month I usually rank about in the 200-300th most popular publisher which relates to around $1000 USD per month after Unity’s cut. I do it part time so that’s perfectly acceptable for my case and there are those who can do it as there only full time job (gut feeling is around the top 50 solo publishers). Anyone care to voluntarily provide feedback on if the Unreal Marketplace popular assets can generate a part time type income (you certainly don’t have to provide concrete numbers).

3. Are Website Improvements in the works?
When things are starting out marketplaces are small enough that you can just navigate top to bottom. However, as things get larger you start to need subcategories, advanced searches, curation, editorial features, etc. This is obviously not a problem when things are beginning but when the marketplace starts to become serious it is very important. Anyone who is contemplate making a living needs some assurances that users can find there product and that quality can cut through the noise and get visibility.

4. Unreal Customers plugin level of expectations?
I’m currently used to the general rule of thumb that to get good reviews on the Unity Asset Store your plugin better be useful but more importantly easy to use. So much so that even for code plugins you are marginally expected that a solo artist should be able to use its functionality. Specifically, this means you should be able to install from the store and have it work completely with no fuss, no extra install steps, no additional downloads, no modifying of code etc. On the unreal marketplace I downloaded some of the better reviewed plugins and many have additional pages with setup instructions and require additional steps. Is the user-base comfortable with this and I should assume only programmers generally buy the code plugins in this market (because I can’t imagine a non coder getting some of these up and running easily). I would certainly be more comfortable making a code plugin that you just install to engine and are good to go without modifying other classes or other stuff. I’m not sure if this is just a skewed picture or if since source code is provided maybe the editor API doesn’t have hooks for everything you might want to modify? Perhaps the users of the marketplace have more experience and this isn’t an issue? Granted I’m sure there are far fewer hobbyists and a lot more studios that use UE4.

5. Updates? Review Times? Demo Levels?
I’ve looked at the packaging around plugins and it feels a bit early days on this as well. If I have an update will the install to engine let you selectively only update code files that have changed? Is there an automated review and consistent review times or is this still very much manual? A couple of the plugins I bought host an example level on their own website. While I can understand that the install to engine button really isn’t really meant to host examples, is there no way to dictate or flag part of your upload as an example that would install automatically elsewhere?

That’s it for now basically trying to get a feel for the state of things because I’m interested in making a plugin or two to test this market’s viability. I’m sure that some of your responses will jar more questions that I have.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

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Anyone care to share their experience?

Perhaps this isn’t the correct subforum… Would this belong more in general discussion?

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As a developer I’m interested hearing the feedback, especially understand why unreal marketplace has not been “that much” popular since start. I thought by now there would be at least half as many as plugins as with unity.
There are so many interesting templates and plugins on unity store that I’d love to see here as well.

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I agree it’s a lot of text but I can’t say I have a simple poll form of this. So far each of the 5 questions could be it’s own poll.

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My informal sense is that both engines actually update at about the same rate nowadays. That being said stability of the API doesn’t require being tied to the frequency of updates. It just requires that the public interface methods be pretty well thought out and stay the same once they are introduced (or at least once they are reasonably mature). Implementation can change quite a bit underneath and not break a 3rd party plugin.

Is there a real reason currently for the plugin tied to engine version at the moment? As a plugin author have you migrated a plugin to new engine version and then not needed to make any changes? How often does this occur vs. encountering a breaking change?

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This is been my thought as well, and I’m certainly interested in developing some, but wanted to get feedback first for if there is actually a reason why it hasn’t taken off so much.

I have a nagging feeling that something in those bullet points is actually holding the unreal store back and I’m trying to get a sense of what in particular that might be before I jump in to the fire.

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I went back and checked out all the plugins that you mentioned and couldn’t help but notice that none of them are on the store currently. In the general niches that each of these provide there are plugins for Unity that sell very well. I would think that the same could apply for the Unreal Marketplace but yet it doesn’t seem to be going that direction. My current suspicion is that the API tends to not be stable enough to not introduce breaking changes all the time, but I would certainly love to hear from someone that would know for sure.

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C++ plugins are very slow to be approved for some reason. I understand there are security problems with raw C++ rather than script, so perhaps they are working their new system out?

The other problem I see is there is no way to have a list of favorites in the marketplace and there are no popups telling you when a sale is on. I have to find the support thread here and subscribe to that.

Are the main people buying stuff artists? I would think it would be coders, since Unity does so well with their script and people who work in IT are usually well paid, so I would think they’d have plenty of pocket money to spend. Speaking for myself, Blueprints are the reason I haven’t bought much here yet, as I struggle to read them. I bought a ton of stuff at Unity, but returned to Unreal when I heard about Unreal getting Skookum Script. Now if they made a Blueprints to C++ converter that produced readable output, I would have no hesitation buying things.

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In both cases (.Net/Mono code with Unity or c++ code with Unreal) you are essentially compiling and executing code that someone else has written. Both could be used by a malicious person to equal effect but it wouldn’t get very far. The first line of defense is the review (which I assume both companies have both an automated and human component). However, even if something slipped though the cracks the first review and/or reporting of the plugin it would be yanked not getting a wide infection rate. If someone has bad intentions they would be more effective on using the web as an attack vector vs. a plugin.

On the Unity Asset Store the Scripting (code) and Editor Extension (code) categories usually outsell the 3d models/animations/particles/etc. but not really by that big of a margin. When folks from Unity have chimed in with data at certain times its been almost even and other times the largest gap I saw was 2 to 1 (66% code / 33% art). Most of the time its pretty close. Unity due to the amount of hobbyists with little coding skill probably have more artists buying code than Unreal but Unreal does cater to the artist with blueprints so I’m not sure this actually holds up. I’m sure on both storefronts there are a diverse set of users some with disposable income and some with very little. Since the engine is at least on the front end free in both cases and assets sometimes can be found for as little as $5 I don’t really think that the user-base’s income would be the primary reason, but could be wrong. Also, the fact that the assets aren’t available versus being available and not selling at least to me makes me think the issue is something else.

I certainly could be wrong though, anyone with a plugin on the store with feedback?

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I cant tell you anything about plugins, but my asset has sold roughly 250 units since April 6th, and after Epics cut, thats about $2275 CAD for me.

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Well that’s at least a good indication that the market itself is healthy. Do you have any idea how you rank vs. the other assets in your category to get an idea on the average?

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There is nothing that explicitly tells you, but generally if you check out the ratings and comments on other similar assets it gives you an idea.

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Didn’t Epic just release plugins to the marketplace like maybe a month ago? Its pretty early…hopefully, they will be open (and they usually are) to suggestions on how to improve plugin sales…

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This is true but my question was about coding assets in general even though I’m using the word plugin. Under that umbrella I would also include blueprints which have been available on the store for awhile.

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Do you know if there are website improvements in the works? Some of the categories are starting to exceed what can be comfortably navigated from top to bottom. I would think either more fine grained subcategories or sorting by release date, popularity, etc. are going to be necessary if the marketplace wants to be able to grow.

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Good point… I do not sell anything on the marketplace so I’ve not run into any issues in terms of game breaking API changes. Its been pretty stable (at least for me). Granted, the only plugin I am actively working on is a SQLite one… not much reliance on core API.

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I’ve been roaming for about a year and I’ve seen several threads about improvements to the store… For example, I would like to be able to purchase an asset for a friend…

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Is there a roadmap posted somewhere with maybe a list of things they are already working on currently with the website and perhaps very rough timelines and/or priorities for what they want to work on first?

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You know, I don’t think so… I’ve never seen one. Just general comments. I’m searching to see if I can find anything. That is a great idea though to post their near-long term goals!

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Yeah I couldn’t find one either. I do like the fact that Unity does provide a separate roadmap for the asset store storefront. https://unity3d.com/asset-store/roadmap

Some of the items are no-brainers like any online store that goes from pretty small to larger (sorting, advanced search, subcategories, automate the review process more, etc.). Some of the base level categories are already a bit long in the tooth and if the marketplace ever takes off not having basic storefront features will definitely hinder sales and hold things back.