Hi,
first of all this is my experience and my personal view.
its now another two weeks and NONE of my marketplace products i bought has been updated to the latest engine version… some are for 4.7
The only one which is up to date is ultradynamic sky which has been released when 4.9 came out so i can not tell if it will get updated fast and the seller is doing a better job.
its not ok to make quick and good money and telling at the same time epic will handle support and then they are out and thats it… so nothing happens
**This is the first time i can say both thumbs down! (usually i say, all thumbs up to you)
In this case:
Shame on you lazy sellers!
**
You are fooling good people here as they pay the money to you.
its your own name of course but you are making more shame than honor with that. for me as a buyer its very easy… i can choose where i will buy and i always act/buy on my experience.
a bad thing is that the unreal marketplace suffers with your lazyness as it is not epics job to update your products!
Another thing which is really annoying:
I work with a team of international developers so we are talking about the marketplace prices…
for now i can tell, if you want it cheap you should move to the U.S.
Its not my price politics but i think this is not very effective, in my opinion its a step backwards for a company which is usually a step in front of others,
people will talk about it and when they notice it they will feel bad threated… and hey we are talking about virtual products, in my experience (im selling virtual products since 10 years now, just did not do the step to the marketplace yet as i want to concentrate on games) a virtual product is very flexible and no pain as a seller!
For Germany it is about 50% more in cost when we last checked it.
Of course people in teams can let other people buy the stuff to save some money but its more shame than honor again…
this is not acceptable and im very disappointed by those sellers and i won’t buy ANY marketplace items anymore until ALL items are up to date…
thats it, the product can be very very cool but why should i buy when not usable in the latest version?
you money, just my opinion
It is my understanding that prices change outside of the US due to VAT. This isn’t under anyone’s control but the country where the product is being purchased. Its unfair to blame that on sellers, or Epic as they have to adhere to each nations tax laws.
As far as updates go, if someone has exceeded the ten day window then contact them and let them know you are waiting for the update. If you hear nothing, contact the marketplace team and inform them you have tried to request compatibility support but it was ignored. They will then handle it. =)
I’m sorry to hear about this. I can assure you that sellers are still sending in updates and we are working through them as quickly as we can. If you could PM a list of the ones you’re missing I’ll look into what’s happening with them. I am pleased to say that we are working on a way to make updates much faster and easier for both the sellers and the buyers so this situation should not arise in the future. If you have any other questions just let me know.
Smarkoff has addressed the rest, but I’ll take the VAT question:
All of our pricing in EU territories includes a VAT tax added onto the purchase price, which is a legal requirement that all businesses doing business in these territories are required to follow. If you’re purchasing the content as a legally incorporated business, then we have an invoicing process that may be able to refund the VAT after purchase. If your team is legally incorporated in the EU and you’d like to inquire further about the VAT invoicing refund, you can contact us at marketplace-support@unrealengine.com for further information.
thanks for your reply, i don’t want to blame anybody so i didn’t tell the products and didn’t tell names in a bad way.
but you are right, maybe i was a bit quick and forgot the VAT, but as i said its a virtual product so you can change the price for that country as a seller to make it fair to everybody… this is the way i managed it myself in the past.
i contacted some sellers and they didn’t sound very interested into updating it in future so i posted on answerhub…and after another 2 weeks nothing changed
thank you, i will write you a PM
thank you, this is exactly what i was looking for! So i can just send those business papers to this e-mail and get all VAT’s refunded?
For the UE marketplace, the sellers can select the pricing…once. Not per country/region/anything, but just “thats the price”. Everything else is done by Epic automatically to adhere to the individual country’s tax laws. So, no chance to blame this on the sellers.
Thats indeed quite bad and i would suggest talking with Epic about that. Sellers MUST support their product for at least the current engine version.
Please also note that because of the amount of updates that came in, it took quite a while for Epic to update all of the assets (not sure if the process is finished for all updates already), so it could well be that the update was already submitted by the seller some time ago, but is still in the queue to be published.
From what I have heard from Sellers they don’t want to update their content each time new version is coming. Comparing to Unity Store - something that was added year ago is still working correctly and Unity Team is handling it so it’s big plus for Sellers.
If you are a legally incorporated business that we can verify, yes, I believe so. If you can email us with more details at marketplace-support@unrealengine.com we can look into this with you.
That is correct. I’ve removed some content from the Marketplace recently because it has not been updated. It’s still available to paying customers, but it’s not available for purchase until the updates are made.
And yes, we had approximately 450 updates to process by hand in order to bring everything up to compatibility with 4.9. It’s been extraordinarily time-consuming and we’re still finishing the updates. Fortunately, there is very good news! Just this week we’ve developed a system for automating testing for most Marketplace content, so that by the time 4.10 comes out, we’ll be able to safely and automatically update the majority of the content on the Marketplace to the latest engine version shortly after release. For content that is not compatible between versions, we’ll notify them and request updates within ten days. When 4.10 comes out, this entire process should be complete in a matter of days.
That sounds really interesting! So when this goes live, that means we don’t have to manually check and send in updates unless we receive notification from you that your system flagged it as incompatible?
Maybe Sweeney programmed an AI entity to do the whole self-testing, and maybe she will become self-aware soon and start deleting engine comparison threads.
Correct. We’re still testing it and making sure it fully works and so we can work out the kinks, but that’s the idea. To be totally honest, it’s been a tough couple months doing this manually, so this automation is extremely welcome. heh.
Some of the stuff I bought are gone from the store as well; if they never update, those will never come back to store I guess.
The problem, I believe is something like this:
Guy begins game making course; guy is curious and want to learn about it.
Guy learns how to make chess/chat/dialog ‘system’ or some basic AI, basic materials.
Guy tries luck and see if any bucks are made.
Epic didn’t ask for Folio, can’t know if Guy really knows his stuff or just trying a quick cash in off of new stuff he learned in school.
Guy goes with life and never look back after realising that can’t sustain his financial needs; buyer wasted monies :S
haha, not exactly. In our content reviews we recognize and look for the end results of popular tutorials, standard school coursework, art tests from other video game companies, or something stolen from another pack or from popular online sources of free content. We frequently look at peoples’ websites and portfolios to see what else they’ve done and to understand better where they’re coming from and what their skillsets are. It’s also very obvious when someone is presenting something that’s basically a standard engine feature, plus one tweak to try to make a quick buck. We reject a lot of content like this. You’d be surprised. On average we reject 4 out of 5 submissions for quality reasons, including these.
If the work is good enough to justify a closer look, we request their files, then examine them in the editor and check to make sure it works as advertised, that there are no technical errors with the content, and that you can reasonably expect to produce the results that it claims. If it does, then we move on to the point of publishing. Occasionally there will be a problem with the content, at which point we contact the seller and request that they fix it immediately. Then we update our internal QA checklist to make sure that we look for that kind of problem again, so it won’t make it past our initial filters. We’ve gotten much better at this over time. Every once in a while something will sneak by that we weren’t able to spot in time, at which point we try to correct it, offer refunds when appropriate, and take it off the Marketplace entirely if it can’t \ won’t be fixed.
It’s very, very rare that we remove content from the store. To date, we’ve only permanently removed three pieces of content due to quality concerns. We have temporarily removed content for support and quality reasons, but it’s usually resolved quickly and put back online without a fuss. When that kind of content removal happens, I make no public announcement or statement. This is to give the seller an opportunity to resolve the issue, and then to let everything go back to normal as quietly and professionally as possible. I know some people like naming and shaming, or want someone to be made an example of, but that’s bad business. These are business relationships that I manage with our sellers that I value very much, and it’s not a zero sum game. I just want people to make cool stuff they support, so I can then promote it and show people how cool it is and make sure everyone is happy.
In QA I’m sure you guys also check if the product won’t break user’s Shipping builds then.
I imagine this would be a common issue since many tools I tried from demos out there work in editor but can’t be packaged to final build and I don’t see them in Marketplace, maybe because of issue like that, but going Gumroad instead.
You guys are doing a great job, keep it up
Can you PM me with more details on this? I’d like to make sure that our QA checklist is robust enough to be able to test for that and minimize the occurrence of that type of issue.
Oh I maybe didn’t express myself well; sorry no native english speaker here.
I meant, some tools that I tried aren’t sold in UE4’s Marketplace maybe because they didn’t pass QA battery of tests?!
Because when I tried these tools out there, many of them just breaks packaging. But those are not sold in Marketplace, I was just wondering if you guys check that and it’s a reason why these tools are unable to reach Marketplace?! (but they are still selling somewhere else i.e gumroad.com)
Authors of such tools say they’d release the tool in Marketplace, but they never do it and sell in Gumroad instead and make me wonder if they cannot enter Marketplace is because didn’t pass QA and there’s something very wrong hidden in the tool
For me buying from Marketplace is a signal the product is functional, I trust Marketplace but I don’t trust stuff sold in Gumroad or solo stores.
***However ***buying blueprint/code from Marketplace is still scary for me because a .exe demo can be proof that the code works, but a video shot inside UE4 Editor: I’ve learned not to trust these videos that much anymore.
In Unity’s store back in the days when people was serious about their stuff they used to post demo webplayers to prove their C# code was functional; I think a similar approach (requiring a HTML5 or EXE demo) would be awesome to rise buyer’s trust
For non code stuff, we have here in forums Embedded Sketchfab panel, but in Marketplace it’s only a small photo and a edited video.
Would be awesome if we could check the models and materials in more dynamic way…
Do you have any examples of the tools you’re using that aren’t on the Marketplace? And are they Blueprint-based or C++\code plugins? We’re still working on providing code plugin support, and I’m in talks with quite a few providers right now so we can publish them on the Marketplace. We’re getting close.
As for more dynamic previews, we do have a partial HTML5 exporter solution, and I’m also talking with Sketchfab about how we can work together. That’s all going to be dependent on the Chromium integration for the launcher, which means all web features (search, comments + ratings, bigger images, etc) will be available in the launcher. I don’t have an ETA on when that will be ready, but it will be the start of many great and interesting things.
