is correct, Marketplace will be growing into a place for content creators to upload assets, code - all sorts of things I’m stoked to see what people end up bringing to it.
Is this not selling short of what the Marketplace could potentially be? A bigger vision?
I see this as the first part of a bigger vision……
The Epic Store - Your “one stop shop” for all your gaming needs, whether you are a developer, modder, artist and/or gamer the Epic Store has everything you need.
This was the impression I got when reading the UT4 dev forums, listening and watching the twitch / podcasts.
In particular this post: The Future of Unreal Tournament! (Had to explicitly put URL, as it is a different forum)
Just to reiterate the key point that Steve Polge said:
This is what I thought the Marketplace was going to be, not just an asset store like Unity currently has.
Unity is already looking to expand their domain to not just the asset store, they are also now a publisher - Announcing Unity Games Publishing - 2013-09.
Once this gathers momentum I have no doubt that Unity will integrate this publishing endeavour back into the asset store. Why bother with two platforms, when one will suffice?
So the question is, will Epic follow Unity’s lead or will Epic take the lead from Unity and try to be more like Valve’s Steam store? From Steve’s post it look like Epic is trying to lead and duplicate Valve Steam store, from the reply’s in this thread, it would look like Epic will just follow Unity.
UT4 is a game from a AAA studio, which not only showcases the amazing UE4, but will also be a great game to play with an immense and enthusiastic community. This puts Epic in a prime position to maximise its exposure for its own Epic store. When UT4 launches, the world will be watching.
As indie developers, we can capitalise off this. By putting up content within the asset store, which can then be purchased by gamers, not just other content creators (developer, modder, artist), as UT4 grows, so does the ecosystems of both the Epic store and UE4.
Apple and Google both have a 30% share of revenue on apps and content from their respective stores.
Epic is only taking 5%. If Epic was to eventually host Google APKs (Like Amazon currently does), then I guarantee a lot of indie developers would find ways and means to get their customers to buy direct from Epic, such that they can have that additional 25%.
Maybe even selling the content at a discounted price on the Epic store. The indie would still make more profit then through Apple and Google.
I hope I am seeing the glimpse of this bigger vision.
Disclaimer: My view might be skewed as when I first heard about the Epic Marketplace I automatically thought that Epic was going to create their own Steam store, using UE4 as the basis. I thought this was pure genius!!
I thought to myself, finally another company that gets what Gabe Newell gets (See Reflections of a Video Game Maker).
After watching this I could clearly see that he has a deep understanding and appreciation of the interdependencies within game, community, content and store. It’s a long video, at one hour, but definitely worth an hour of your life
He did not become a Billionaire (Current estimate is $1.3 Billion](Gabe Newell)) from just Half-Life alone!
So this is why I jumped to the conclusion that the Epic Store was going to be just like Steam store, using UT4 / UE4 as the catalyst. My current observation is that Epic is using plays from Gabe’s Steam 2002 playbook: Triumph of the mod
If I am wrong, I hope this post has been somewhat insightful and will make people within Epic and the community do a double take.
This is just my perspective and conclusions which I have drawn with the information I had at hand.
Thanks for reading my ramblings, there is a conducive argument in there somewhere….I’m sure of it.
Hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it.
Hey laernut, thanks for the highly detailed post It was a good read!
While I’m sure Unreal Tournament has some really great plans for use of the marketplace, we are talking about the uses for the Unreal Engine group of developers making their own games from scratch with using UE4. We aim to help enable the development of great games with Marketplace by providing tools and content to help make developers successful. Though you do have some really cool ideas in there :).
Ahh, I see now! The light bulb just came on…
This was just an interface (overlap) issue of me not having clear direction as to where I should have posted this thread.
To me it was a bit ambiguous as to where this thread should go and as I hate duplication of effort / waste, I thought the thread would fit better in the UE4 forum.
I reasoned that as the UE4 team provide the engine to the UT team to do their thing, the UT team would then provide feedback to UE4 team for feature requests etc…
Thanks for the clearing this up for me Chance, I have a post in the UT forum pointing to this post, but I’ll copy and paste my original post into there and continue the discussion there.
hmm… this brought me a simpler idea that would fit your vision of the marketplace (as I have understood it, and my understanding has been wrong before :P):
You could set up a simple shop for games made on UE4, you could either have the store accesable for developers only (for sharing your early alpha builds, and giving people an option to support you, as accepting donations directly is illegal in many countries), or have it on your website.
Of course the traffic wouldn’t be massive, but it would allow for an easy platform to distribute your first game. Having the royalty fee deducted straight from the sales would also reduce “the legal mess” (it may not be all that big, but the idea can be terrifying to some people :P), and would be a very clear reason for indies to choose Unreal over competing engines -30% royalty you pay on steam is a lot, and especially early on you may want to rather have fever customers (in early access type of cases, they will be likely to be also more understanding, as customerbase would probably have much more fellow developers in it). Of course you could make the epic royalty in the marketplace a bit bigger (preferably still below the total 35% you will be likely to pay in the mainstream market), depending if you want to use it as a tool to attract more developers, or rather go for straight cash.
Of course shovelware could be a problem, but maybe having a “greenlight mimic”, in which the product is only visible for UE4 licencees, until those licencees have rated it to be a decent product, that has at least some effort put into it, after which it could be opened to the “main store”.
Just a concept, feel free to find the weak spots of the idea and puncture them, I am interested to see what flaws does it have
-Thanks
It was a good read!