Any news about the most important question?
Sales model against game and asset piracy. - #30 by Krabworks
Is it safe for us developers? Since so far the market sells pirated assets which end up in projects.
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Thanks for the answers Josh.
That’s disappointing, I have a friend who wanted to sell 2D handpainted sprites and background images on the Unreal Marketplace, but when he looked at it he just gave up that idea, because his content would be drowned out by all the AI generated assets that are currently flooding the marketplace.
Will you at least give us an option to “hide” AI generated content then? Otherwise eventually the 2D section of the marketplace will contain nothing but AI generated stuff, I’m not sure if that is something you guys would find preferable.
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If you are not taking action directly yourself, the review abuse will just continue in FAB, regardless of the rules.
I personally know of certain sellers that KNOW reviews for Discord access is not allowed, yet they continue to ask their users for it. There will always be people who abuse a system for their own benefit.
And I also know of a bunch of marketplace sellers who actually do NOT know that reviews for Discord access is against the rules, despite them being sellers for over a year already.
I hope you can take that into consideration when you are planning the review system and prevention of abuse in FAB.
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If you carry over reviews, please only carry over the new “written” reviews and their ratings.
The “legacy” reviews should just be abandoned, as a user / customer can not understand why an asset has 5 positive ratings but only one written review, which is negative / critical of the asset.
The legacy ratings do not represent the current state of an asset anymore and it’s bad if they make it seem an asset is perfect, while the asset isn’t properly working anymore in UE5 for example or the support has stopped.
Preferably, a review should contain a minimum amount of text and be “multi-staged”, aka rate different parts of an asset like documentation, support or “clean code”.
That would be a first step towards preventing review abuse.
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That sounds like good news, I am looking forward to see what changes in this regard.
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Some other questions:
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Will developers have mechanisms to verify a user’s authenticity other than the key next to the name?
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Is there a possibility of having communication tools between the buyers and the developer? (some kind of chat) The current system requires that we respond by email or that we create some server on discord (discord is often closed to those who are verified, which makes the comment session a very spammy place for verification)
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Is it possible that there is some kind of tool that can review user reviews (like a report feature but something that works, different than the current system)? There are many users who give low ratings in exchange for adding features (which is a kind of blackmail and which brings some harm to the developer’s mental health).
Thanks for your time, Josh!
Oh and please do NOT promote old time sellers more than new sellers.
Unity is doing that and it’s making it near impossible for new sellers to compete with older ones, as they have much more reviews already AND more visibility due to the promotion.
A simple “badge of honor” on the sellers profile should be enough and would be a fair gesture towards the old sellers, without negatively impacting newer sellers.
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That’s what I was afraid of. This change is likely very sad for really small indie studios developers.
ArtStation for example has licenses limited to 5 developers. But what happens in case of offering modding support for a title where those assets are used? Do I need to buy the license for a big company then to offer modding support where people are using the assets of the game?
I hope this is a question the Epic (FAB) team is thinking about.
The Unreal Marketplace has an easy to understand license but with changing the license model to offer several licenses it is a slap in the face of the developers which don’t have a lawyer team behind.
Might be a good decision for the sellers (in case that the sales don’t lessen because of a license chaos) and a sad decision for developers.
We plan to continue to make free content available, though the focus won’t just be on uassets.
Another sad decision for those who are using Unreal Engine also because of that opportunity.
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For those who haven’t seen it, here’s what appears today in the alpha version of the plugin that is currently in UEFN:
Personal - Referenced Only
For an individual creator or small team. Includes the referenced asset only.
Personal
For an individual creator or small team. Includes the referenced asset and modifiable Unreal Engine asset.
Professional
For studios or other business entities with >$100k in revenue or funding in the past 12 months. Includes the referenced asset and modifiable Unreal Engine asset.
We’re looking at options for further customizations to a license, and will have more information prior to launch. With multiple options, things need to be clear, both at the point of purchase as well as when looking back at past purchases. And we want to give sellers into what types of licenses are being purchased, so work will continue as we move towards our launch.
We will refine a maximum price as we get closer to launch, but recognize that it’s important to provide enough options and flexibility for it to make sense for sellers to be on Fab when their target market is major companies like movie studios or car companies.
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I have some questions. Firstly, how will the transition be handled? E.g., ownership of marketplace assets currently has a one-license solution, but how will you move them over and how are you determining licenses for users on the new platform? I foresee potential for a huge screwing-over of indie developers here.
Secondly - the marketplace is currently fraught with piracy and there is no solution (or even public talk about) indemnification for asset-purchasers or stricter moderation of illegal/stolen content. Right now using anything from the marketplace is a risk for indie developers, and Epic’s approach so far on this has been to stay silent on the issue. Will this be addressed in the new platform?
$100k in 12 month does not sound much compared to the $1m for the engine itself before 5% of royalties have to be paid
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It’s on the list of things that the team wants to provide in Fab. We know it’s manual for sellers, and it’s also manual for our team, so we want to provide sellers with more control.
That’s a longstanding request from our backlog that we brought over to Fab. I’m not sure if it will make it to our initial release, but it’s on the list of things we want to address.
There are certain decisions and actions that sellers will need to make. I expect a new distribution agreement acceptance, more licensing and pricing options that sellers will need to choose, and an updated taxonomy for content to allow for better discovery. We want to streamline it as much as we can for sellers. However, UE Marketplace sellers have already done Tax Identification and Hyperwallet setup, so I don’t expect sellers to need to go through those steps again.
The Fab team wants to give buyers improved discovery tools in general, and being able to exclude certain things from searches is part of that. I expect that buyers will have the ability to exclude content tagged as CreatedWithAI from their searches.
If you have knowledge of this, please report it privately to us, and we’ll investigate.
Yes, it’s very high on the list of features we want to add.
We’re exploring this.
We are looking at options to remove abuse or gamification of the Review system in the future. I agree that the behavior you describe isn’t healthy to our community.
I appreciate the suggestion. We’re looking at how we can balance the earned trust and reviews that sellers have earned, but making sure that we’re welcoming to new sellers.
The Fab team is working on the details internally, but have no intention of doing anything that will disrupt ongoing development for teams that have used the UE Marketplace to acquire content.
While I disagree with the statement that we’re fraught with piracy, it is true that there’s been a few high profile products that have recently been in IP disputes. I imagine we’ll have more to say on this topic in the future, but for now, please know that I see the concern of you and others on this topic.
I appreciate the comment, and I’ll pass your feedback along.
I think we’re caught up for the moment. Thanks to those of you participating in this thread, and to those who came by the Fab booth at GDC to say hello, ask questions, and give feedback. I’ve tried to answer your questions to the best of my ability, but please know that we’re in active development, and things will change. We also won’t have 100% of all the features that we want on Day 1, and some features will come online after our initial launch.
As we go through this process, we’ll have more to say to buyers and sellers to help prepare for the Fab launch later this year.
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Someone had to do it. Find a positive before a negative.
Hello
The art community has been extremely disappointed with how you are handling rights of artists on Artstation. Now you say that AI HAS a place on your marketplace!! That is really messed up since no one serious can make a game with stolen art. No company that is trying to do things legally would touch that with a stick. Instead of improving ease of use you are moving to merge all your content in to one big database creating more complication and work for your users and yourself. Where is the benefit?
Questions -
How will this ease the process of creating, buying, maintaining assets?
Are you going to extract data from the assets, feed it to ai models without consent or with forced consent?
How will you protect your partners and users from data theft?
Are you gonna sell this library?
When I was working in customer support that kind of sentence was what I had to tell the customers when they gave feedback and finally had to just “trash” it. 
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I cannot find Fab Marketplace in UE 5.2.0 Preview 1 and I didn’t find any documentation or tutorial about it (except for UEFN ones). Is it currently unavailable in UE 5.2.0 Preview 1?
You can read about our position here, which should answer some of your questions.
Thanks 
there have been at least four packs that I have removed from my work recently (just within the past 8-12 weeks), and I am more or less a solo dev working on a small project. I think it is a lot more common than Epic maybe realizes.
The fact that two pirated assets made it into the monthly free content in a single month should be raising huge red flags for you. 
In any case, glad that it is on your radar. I don’t think anyone expects you to be the watchdog of content detecting every time it happens, but currently the license has no protections for purchasers that might unwittingly receive stolen content.
P.S. Thanks for all of your follow up in this thread, we appreciate it - communication goes a long way.
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Fab will launch later this year, so there isn’t anything available yet for UE.
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May I asked which ones these are?
Of course.
- Orca Games - Full Animations Bundle
- Cafofo music - Magic & spell sounds PRO
Then on top of that, the other ones we pulled for the same reason were:
- Cafofo music - Dynamic village ambience
- Sidearm studios - Castle village town *Note below about this
- Sidearm studios - Animal sounds pro
- Sidearm studios - Ultimate SFX Bundle (see here Beware of Stolen Sound Effects Packs - YouTube)
*I will note that both Sidearm and Cafofo were very good about the issues and removed/replaced any stolen assets. However…they both have the issue that they subcontracted assets creation out (i.e., they did not make the content directly themselves) and subcontractors gave them stolen good misrepresented as their own work.
For sidearm, the assets were directly stolen from Skyrim (one of the most well known IPs in gaming; see https://i.imgur.com/BOwxzYz.png and https://i.imgur.com/VoOWTSY.png) and so…it was so blatantly obvious to anyone that’s ever gamed before that it’s a bit hard to believe they didn’t know these were ripped.
When we were looking for other assets we also found the same 3D models for Donkeys and horses available from 4 different sellers that were apparently all stealing from each other (nothing reported or taken down since we were never able to identify the real original creator!).
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I took the time to dive a little deeper on this, hopefully it adds something positive:
While I did not take formal psychology/sociology classes, I did investigate such subjects in the past, so I immediately clicked that what’s also going on here is people feeling a sense of loss, understandably, but this still isn’t something too uncommon in general, so in my view I’m just pointing it out what should be common knowledge.
I’ll expand and include my proposition to help alleviate this issue, if it does indeed turn out to be greater issue. Currently I do not have a gauge of how many people feel attached to their specific marketplaces in the way I’m mentioning here, this may need some further analytics by Epic.
It is likely, but not necessary, that in addition to all the technical and practical reasons and doubts the publishers may have over such a merge/transition (and in general), there is a psychological (emotional) attachement to the specific existing place each group of these publishers called their home. For a set of people it can be subconscious, so they wouldn’t exactly realize that the consequence of feeling sad about losing something might make them unintentionally not like the new thing, sort out of spite, until the emotional consequence of that passes which may take some time. However time alone can’t solve if the new replacement is not better or at least same in it’s capabilities. On the other hand there may be a subset of people who have such a personality by nature which doesn’t make them too emotionally attached, and/or they can tolerate and have little negative psychological consequence, faster recovery.
Currently I (we?) understand that the names, logos, trademarks, UIs, GUIs, UX of these separate marketplaces will be replaced by the new FAB design, so it is infact a destruction or loss of these front-facing characteristics and a creation of new, except the content and other user data ofcourse, with the details yet to be determined.
As people have naturally attached themselfs to these unique characteristics, the unique community, it’s norms, habits and behavior, merger of many (with some overlap) communities creates something completely new, and it is natural for these people to doubt whether the new will be better.
The term “merge” is very broad and relative so it’s all in the details.
I have a proposition I wish Epic could give a serious consideration to. Not a must that needs to happen, but it does deserve to be looked into. For example like how much additional work would this add, maintainability over time, and how much would it reduce the sadness in the community and thus negative feedback, etc. Perhasp even ask a real psychologist and ask them whether my assesment is accurate, they might even add more to this that I out of my experience.
It should be entirely possible to transfer and actually merge this emotional “homey” feeling from all of these marketplaces into FAB, by recycling and transferring these separate logos/fonts/GFX/UI/UX (except trademarks ofcourse) into FAB, thus emulating the legacy front-facing experience to some or great extent. This may significantly decrease the conscious or subconscious doubts, hesitation or bitter-sweet feeling of the exiting communities.
While there would be a neutral FAB design, default for new users, which could navigate and view, search, discover all assets, as this will be an engine-agnostic service, there could also be, as one of the proposed implementations, asset types group selectors that would work as fancy master filters which would not be just ordinary filters in a search bar, but actual buttons on a side or top panel, opening up a dedicated page that would work as a “storefront” for those type or types of assets, which I’ll continue to name as “assetfront” from now on, while simply hiding everything else. Publishers that specialize for a particular type of asset-s could set their default view on that “assetfront” page and not be bothered by any other assets or their communities.
It would most likely be way too messy if each and every extension had it’s own assetfront but I’m currently merely speculating, still I envision they would be sensibly grouped so you’d get much less of these assetfronts, a much easily manageable amount.
These assetfront pages could have some aspects separated (if they would exist) such as “featured”, “top-rated”, “free-for-the-month”, and other things I can’t think of right now but you know what I mean … , and now ofcourse, their own separate themes, UI and UX, the main part I was trying to get to all this time!
For example Blueprints and Code assetfront could have it’s theme and UX inspired by the current Unreal Engine Marketplace and the Epic Games Launcher theming.
The 3D models assetfront theme and UI could be recycled from (or inspired by) Sketchfab.
Audios assetfront could have some kind of a completely new theme, etc.
To remind, publishers wouldn’t post any content onto these assetfronts as something completely separate, in my proposition these would be just modes of user/publisher visibility of everything that’s under the hood equally on FAB.
However, importantly, it is not a must that the theme/UI/UX would need to be 1:1 transfer, this is unrealistic to expect and demand, but ofcourse improved-where-necessary and adjusted, infused ontop, modifying the flexible core UI desing of the new FAB, but the FABs frontend would need to be built with this in mind to support such flexible UI customizations, but because they would be part of the desing and official flavors, it’s perhaps not proper to call them customizations.
This would surely help give that feeling of separation and focus, this is general psychology and I do not like to be in large cities or eat lunch outside where too many people walk by, sometimes lesser is better, that’s why people would prefer smaller separate marketplaces, but this feeling (which I just realized actually also includes the privacy aspect) could be emulated inside a larger overall marketplace given enough effort and design. The asset UI/UX would be a sort of the spirit and a paying-of-respects to the legacy
What I mean by UI in this case is nothign that significant, a bit element rearrangement and graphics design, size of previews, etc, with each assetfront taking separate feedback from their community and shaping it up to look and behave in a unique flavor.
Now that I think about it, different assets would warrant different previews wouldn’t they?
You most likely do not need big icons or tiles for audio and blueprints previews while viewing a lists of assets, because in the case of audio it wouldn’t matter whether the symbollic picture of a waveform is big or small. In case FAB would auto-parse all audio and generate actual waveform preview icons (costly backend service) you might only get some better idea how loud the audio is and such, but even that it would be truncated for what would be a square icon, and similarly with blueprints, you wouldn’t be able to read the code any much better if it’s a larger icon.
However you would want to have an assetfront for 3D models and such have a different UI which is designed for these types of assets in mind and has larger element sizes and arrangements that improves the visibility of previews and so forth.
This example could actually work as a strong technical reason (argument) for having assetfronts have their own UI design. There you go, something I might not have figured out without spending 30+ mins writing all of the above.
Infact, even some of the staff from the existing marketplaces could migrate over to caretake these spiritual successor assetfronts in FAB if they wish.
All while not interfering with the core underpinnings and modern backends that Epic intends to do with FAB.
Bonus thought: There could be a global top bar area visible in all subpages (assetfronts or otherwise) that would work as a notification of significant events and new stuff that is happening elsewhere, because all publishers and users alike will ofcourse have some overlap with other assets and this would give them a heads up right there, in addition to receiving notifications on their profile about the stuff they’re “following” or favourited if that’ll be a feature.
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You advised me to check out your policy on the tag NOAI. Artist will have to specify that they don’t want their stuff included in databases, aka robbed? Am I getting it right? That falls under the forced consent 
Why will the creators have to stay so vigilant against you guys harming their livelihood?
You said as well in the other post:
“Per our upcoming Content License Agreement update, we will not use your artwork or license it to other companies for use with generative AI programs.”
Will you use it in your own company ai models, and in the other marketplaces you create?
Are you creating a 3d database to feed the 3d ai model?