Will we get a license disaster like in other stores in FAB?
I love the Unreal Marketplace for its clear, precise, understandable licensing.
I dread other marketplaces. For example this, just grabbed from Artstation, a random product that I could be interested in, offers this license:
Stock Assets
For personal use and one commercial project (up to 2,000 sales or 20,000 views).
And this license ONLY.
This is ONE asset. I would have to track my project, over multiple stores (Steam, itch.io, EGS, whatever).
I would have to contact the creator individually if my game sold over 2000 copies, to get a personal individual license (or, way before, because at 2000 copies I’d already be a thief, legally).
ONE asset. In a project I can use a dozen, a hundred, or thousands or ten thousands of assets. I would need to track the licensing for each individually.
I do not have the tools or the time for that.
I do not have to worry about this with the Unreal Marketplace.
To say it again: I do not have to worry about this with ANY of the products I licensed in the Unreal Marketplace - none of literally THOUSANDS.
Will it be the same in the future? If not, will we have the TOOLS at launch to sort, filter by licenses quickly and easily?
Since we get the new unified store, are there any plans to fix the ■■■■ login system? Nearly every single thing Epic owns is incapable of reliably storing the login session, and requires extremely painful relogging process which includes fishing a password from password manager and waiting for and typing in the 2FA code. Only Epic services that ever manage to retain login session for me is the marketplace publisher portal and Epic Launcher. But nothing else. I have to log in weekly to Bridge (both built in and standalone), Forum, Mixer, and ArtStation ever since Epic acquired it.
I suspect that the session gets invalidated every single time IP changes, which is insane considering the majority of people are likely behind NAT these days.
The security excuse would not be applicable there, because then it would not make sense for the most sensitive service, the Marketplace Seller Portal, to be able to retain the login session, while the relatively insensitive ones, like MS Bridge or Forum account logging out spontaneously once a week or so.
Very excited for this news. Just have a few questions and suggestions:
Which product review system will FAB end up having? As you know, the curation teams from Sketchfab, Artstation and UEMarketplace are completely different. Many of them favor vets and big name companies and a few ones do actually give unknown sellers a chance to compete. This is probably the top concern: FAB being Bias vs newcomers. As I was reading the past comments, those old vets and game companies all want to be recognized and have some special treatment in the store. I can understand that but they also need to give room to fair competition. Many solo, unknown artists have more talent than their whole teams and that is a fact they may not like. So, my suggestion and plead is to be fair to all and not give them a special throne in the FAB store. Let us all compete fair and square. This takes me to question N2:
How will Epic supervise BIAS product Reviewers? I’m talking about < possible discrimination (race, country, etc), < possible fraud (taking money in exchange to approve big name/vets products only) and having an appeal system to report those Bias.
Finally, product reviews. I mean, this is by far the most bullied and ignored area in the UE marketplace. Competition trashes your product publicly and we can’t do nothing about it. This should be in the priority list for FAB.
That’s it. Again, super excited about this merge and hoping to have a fair non-exclusive treatment FAB store with opportunities to all.
If you put a product review system similar to what is currently used on the Unreal Marketplace, people will try to bypass it.
If you put a system to increase top rated products visibility, people will try to bypass it.
If you put a seller reputation system, people will try to bypass it.
If you put a system to increase top rated seller visibility, people will try to bypass it.
The quality of a product should matter the most. If Epic keeps the system simple, it can be fair for everyone. In this way, sellers who have a higher number of products and maintain a better quality will likely sell more, and success will not be determined by who can bypass the systems.
Let’s not complain about problems that don’t yet exist. They made a commitment in the current document to refrain from using work for generative AI, is this not what the art community asked for?
I think it’s good to expose the BIAS many artist are facing due to it’s location, race, not being a company, etc. It’s a dark subject that Epic won’t recognize yet it’s a reality.
The product reviewers are the gatekeepers and by doing so, should be held responsible and supervised by an external team.
Besides the constant Bias we face with reviewers, another big issue is their permanent enforcement to only accept “Realism” products. This is a lack of culture and mainly of Art. Lots of models are not meant to have this awesome realistic skin that you get from Texture Softwares. Some of them are hand painted, meant to be unperfected with flaws… but no, these guys want all realism and it’s pain in the butt to change every product cause it’s not real enough.
I’m leery about dealing with any of the multiple license nonsense from other places like ArtStation. I very much so liked that the license was the same for everything and set at the door. There was nothing to consider but the product itself and it’s cost.
I hope there’s some considerations for making a change log a standard part of the product pages. As well as making updates more visible when they happen beside find the orange dot in the sea of your Vault from within the launcher.
I also feel inclined to ask if character related censoring is going to change as a result of this and UEFN. It feels like it’s been an inconsistent moving target for a while now considering everything is already required to be a featureless doll. I’m unfamiliar with the rules for the other sites involved.
Since I’m guessing launcher changes will follow with this. Please make plugins not require a launcher build of the engine to be installed. This has been requested for a long time.
Not being able to report very clear use of ripped assets is also a headache for everyone involved but is only going to bite the unknowing purchaser later. I know several models are using animations ripped straight out of World of Warcraft for 2 years now. It’s trivial to see with any of the numerous model viewers. Yes, they were reported to Blizzard. They’re still there.
@Unreal_Josh So some people are already selling on FAB, which is clearly going to be an advantage for these early sellers, yet there isn’t a clear way for other people to sign up as a seller.
How did these people manage to already start selling on FAB?
And isn’t this going against the “equal treatment” of all sellers that you promised?
I just hope that there will be a clean, understandable and easy license available which grants the same rights and possibilities as the one on the current Unreal Engine Marketplace. Otherwise it’s getting very chaotic and hard for smaller Indie Studios and they might lose customers then.
So seeing the silence from UnrealJosh about the people already selling on FAB, I guess we can all consider the promises made like “equal treatment for everyone” to be just empty PR talk. Such a shame…
Am I correct in assuming that I can use FAB as a private asset browser for all of my assets with easy UE integration? Will I be able to host it on FAB or will it be more of a point to my own directory kind of deal?
If new marketplace - FAB will not have filters… this will be bad.
I dont see any sence… to create this if we will not be able to filter all assets by…
Engine version
Tags (custom and/or predefined)
Name filter
Type filter
FAVOURITE assets
Now when you have 100+ assets - it is hard to find out … which plugin / assets support 5.2 or 5.1, you need always to HOVER asset and SEE. This is bad.
And will be good if we can see which assets / plugins used if ENGINES / projects.
With the understandable concerns and questions about a new marketplace, licenses, security, honesty, UX and UI and everything mentioned already, have some of you decided to put your own webshop online instead?
Sure your own webshop is also “new”, raising similar concerns with potential buyers of your plugins there but you’d have a ton of control. EPIC UX + UI alone (forums, launcher, marketplace, Unreal Engine) I give a 4 out of 10 score. It’s just not in their skills or interest it seems… Feedback here on the fora is ignored and I see weekly “tests” on the forum design which just gets messier by the week. Of course I don’t expect anything to be better on Fab. Besides game dev I am a fullstack website developer.
