There are plenty of threads around for other marketplace issues so I’m only going to discuss here about few things that have always bugged me personally and I’d really hope Epic would do something about these as they are serious issues. If some of these issues have been already corrected then good but otherwise I’ll just assume you run business like you’ve done so far.
But to get to the points, here’s my list:
- How Epic’s staff deals with piracy / unlicensed content.
This is easily on top of my list because it’s what makes me stay away from the marketplace the most. There’s been items in the marketplace that sellers haven’t had permission to sell and Epic’s marketplace staff has just silently removed them.
First of all, it’s good that they do remove content like this quickly but they completely lacked all the rest that should be involved in the process. In past at least, there wasn’t any mechanism to inform people who had bought pirated/unlicensed content, nor was there a mechanism to automatically refund these purchases from Epics side. This means that people who bought these things wouldn’t get informed what happened unless they started wondering themselves where there actual store page went (items would still be in the vault). When asked about this from official marketplace staff, the response was “Anyone who’s purchased it will be given a refund upon request” (direct quote). They also mentioned that they didn’t even used to have any tracking for customers in past (WHAT??) so they couldn’t even have informed people who bought things that weren’t legit, but apparently they do have some tracking now. No idea if they’ve changed their policy though.
It’s also bad enough that this has happened by 3rd party sellers but Epic itself has been guilty of this. I’m talking about Infinity Blade sound pack here now. They did have sounds in the pack they had no right to distribute so they just silently removed the pack from marketplace, but they didn’t inform anyone officially why that happened. I still had these sound assets on my vault 1 year after they removed them from marketplace. Had I not known they were not legit, I could have used them in my commercial projects.
The core issue here is that Epics Marketplace staffs actions or rather, actions they don’t do, put everyone who uses this marketplace in danger. We pay for marketplace assets so that they are legit but even if they are not, they’ll just keep our money and tell nothing by their default action (used to, hope they’ve at least changed the refund policy).
- Vague licensing terms where nobody, literally nobody really knows the right terms.
Well, Epics legal might know but it doesn’t really matter since sellers don’t know them, buyers don’t know them and even marketplace staff doesn’t know them. There’s been many times where marketplace staff has told things about their licensing when actual license text didn’t have the things they said.
EULA version 10 added: “Introduces per-seat paid plug-in licensing to the Marketplace”, but no plugin seller I’ve talked with knew about even that, nor does the marketplace indicate that in any way. If I had to assume, that would be just an optional licensing scheme that isn’t yet used by anyone but since the text is in the EULA, it really isn’t clear at all. At the moment, we might have a lot of per seat licensed plugins out there that people assume are licensed by teams.
- UE4 EULA and Marketplace EULA should be two different legal documents
UE4 EULA was nice and easy to understand until marketplace arrived. After that it has cluttered the EULA and now it’s really hard to follow. Every other marketplace out there has their own separate marketplace terms where anyone can understand the terms without legal training. In UE Marketplace’s case, terms are hidden in legal gibberish and also things get mixed with the actual engine license.
Core issue is however that marketplace itself doesn’t have a link anywhere to the legal terms nor any human readable version of the actual terms for their purchases. Would you really buy a license if you didn’t even know what the license covered?
- Marketplace sellers don’t get invoice IDs from the sales
This is bit out of the legal issues mentioned but it is the main reason why I’ve never submitted any of my work in the marketplace. This is really absurd as the only stat that sellers get is amount of sales they had in a day. There’s been lots of oddities in how these sales numbers fluctuate in past. Epic used to give the sales numbers more in real time but since people started asking why the numbers kept changing, they just chose to publish the sales figures once per day.
Anyway, they ask us to blindly trust in their numbers, yet the go and hide even more stats so people wouldn’t question their numbers. They do have purchase IDs themselves, only reason they don’t want to give them to sellers can only be if there’s something behind it that they don’t want to tell us. Also as far as I know, at the moment, only way for seller to verify a customer approaching for support is to ask the marketplace staff separately if said person bought the asset.