Fab will be a unified marketplace where creators can find, publish, and share digital assets for use in creating digital experiences. Fab will bring together a massive community where creators will earn an 88% revenue share, and the marketplace will host all types of digital content including 3D models, materials, sound, VFX, digital humans, and more.
Fab will continue UE Marketplace’s tradition of providing the best selection of assets tailored for use in Unreal Engine, and Epic will continue to release top-notch Learning Content, Sample Content, and free assets.
If you’re interested in a preview, you can check out the Alpha version of Fab as a plugin for UEFN today, which enables you to build new games and experiences that can be published in Fortnite.
As we get closer to the full launch of Fab, we will share more information about the transition and how you can begin using, buying, and selling assets on Fab.
Thank you for your feedback, and I’d like to understand more about your concern. We know this is a major change that is going to impact creators at a variety of levels, and we don’t take it lightly. What specifically is cause for your concern?
Fab will contain both free and paid content. Creators will be able to continue (or begin) to sell products, but there will also be plenty of free content available.
It sounds like that having a gigantic store, supporting multiple engines, including assets from your major products like Quixel etc, will make life very hard for sellers from the UE Marketplace. In particular, sellers of plugins will probably “disappear” in such a store. Visibility will be a major problem.
I really hope you guys make a very clear divide between content made for Unreal Engine and for UEFN.
With everything on one store I can see this becoming a nightmare of people buying assets and getting angry they don’t work/can’t be used in UEFN, this will lead to bad reviews, sellers being inundated with negative comments, constantly dealing with refunding people etc. Not to mention it would be annoying for buyers having bought something they cant use.
The reality is quite alot of people buy assets without fully reading descriptions or even what platforms the assets work with, and to be fair if your new to buying assets that info is easy to miss even now on the marketplace. So I really hope you guys have a good plan to very clearing defining what will and wont work in UEFN. More so then just a some text or icon on the store page. Things like warning promps when adding to cart/purchasing or maybe even hiding Unreal Engine content that wont work in UEFN unless that person has a compatible unreal engine version installed. Those are just a few ideas anyway
I absolutely agree that discovery is going to be key. It is a top priority since the very start of the Fab initiative. We want to make it easy for visitors to find the content they’re looking for, and be able to easily find it later when they’re ready to use it. We also plan to support sellers by giving them an easy and clear process when listing their products so that they can reach their intended audience.
Thanks for your message. You’ve identified one of the big challenges we’re going to face. We’re actively designing Fab to address this sort of issue, since we know we need to help buyers make informed decisions in order to give them the best experience possible. It also leads to a negative experience for the seller in a lot of ways, so we want to avoid it ever getting to that point. We’re doing a lot of design and focus testing around this, and plan to have a solution that avoids the pitfalls you are warning about.
We’ll be scaling up the Fab support team dramatically, and there will be different areas of expertise and focus.
Discovery (and rediscovery) has been a key part of this initiative since the beginning, and we are working on a variety of tools to help discovery. We’ll have more to share as we iterate on our design, but we know that the amount of content has little impact if people can’t find anything.
We’ll have more information to share on this topic at a future date, but this is something we’re actively talking about within Epic.
Thanks - yes I was hoping there were things to address the (re)discovery and (c)…
I just realized why I have strong feelings about this: perception.
atm I consider Epic to be a leading tech company with state of the art ideas and an ear to the ground with the latest trends on software design and implementation - not to mention some kick-■■■ games!
There was a time I considered Adobe to be like that, when photoshop was their thing.
Now I consider them a marketing company that buys up other peoples software and assimilates it into their own…
I like perceiving Epic as that innovative, invigorating company full of strength - I really would hate to see it slide into a marketing platform only…
Sounds very interesting. I also have a few questions about the new system
a. How will current reviews and written reviews be handled? Will they be carried over to the new system or will they be deleted and everyone will have to start again?
b. I currently have several asset packs that I sell on both the Unreal Marketplace and the ArtStation Marketplace. (As I have some customers who for some reason prefer to buy my packs from ArtStation rather than the Unreal Marketplace) Will duplicate packs be merged in Fab or will they remain separate?
c. Will Fab be curated like the Unreal Marketplace is now? So if someone uploads a new package or 3D model, will it still be reviewed within the guidelines? As Sketchfab and ArtStation do not seem to have such a system in place and I really like that the Unreal Marketplace provides some sort of quality control.
A lot of the FAQs seem to place emphasis on helping sellers migrate but neglect how buyers will be affected.
The FAQ for Unreal Marketplace states: “Yes, both free and paid content that you have acquired through the UE Marketplace will still be available to you when the transition to Fab is complete.”
In contrast, the FAQ for ArtStation states: “All previously purchased products will remain available through your product library. This library will remain accessible as a legacy library. All new purchases made after ArtStation Marketplace’s migration to Fab will be accessible through Fab’s product library.”
I’m concerned about my ArtStation purchases. The wording above suggests that all pre-Fab purchases on ArtStation will be only stored in a legacy library, suggesting that previously purchased products will not be flagged as purchased on Fab – unlike what is stated about purchases made on the Unreal Marketplace. This would mean that all products on ArtStation that receive updated download files will no longer be able to receive continued updates for existing buyers. Worse, buyers who have previously purchased on ArtStation will not have their purchases flagged as purchased on Fab.
In other words, the FAQ suggests that all prior purchases on ArtStation will cease to receive update support because sellers won’t even be able to update the ArtStation legacy library downloads. And sellers won’t even be able to help old buyers because all the migrated products will be flagged as unpurchased to previous buyers.
This is TERRIBLE for anyone who’s purchased anything on ArtStation. It’s as if all of our purchases are being voided and all support for those purchases dropped.
There needs to be a better way to help migrate ArtStation buyers, not just help sellers and their products.
We’ll have more information on this in the future. We are planning to update the system since we have products coming from multiple ecosystems. We want to greatly improve the way people can leave feedback in the future to allow for improved discovery and less possible toxicity. We’ll share our plans when we get closer to launch.
It will depend on the situation and the contents in each, but we want to give sellers tools and options to do what they think is best. We’ll be sharing more details with the seller communities as we finalize migration strategies and have tools available to make this as smooth as possible.
There will be curation of content, but the details may depend on the content type and how it is being shared/distributed. This is another area where we’ll share more details between now and the full product release of Fab later this year.
Site performance will certainly be important since we want to provide the best experience possible. We want creators to be able to quickly and easily find what they need, and get back to creating.
