@Ben_Cykyria
While this model is extremely easy for buyers (buy once, never look at the licenses again) it is not that simple for the seller. The terms and conditions for the seller state that you need to support the 3 latest major versions of unreal engine. This means that the seller needs to perform constant maintenance on the product. Buyers also expect to get free support through the Epic marketplace. The costs of both maintenance and support can not be covered by a one time payment of the product. This is why some great plugins simply quit many versions of UE ago, with the developer realizing that they need to sell their own kidney to pay for their own product. Increasing the price of such product there is not an option if plenty of other sellers sell their hobby / school projects (of questionable quality) for few dollars. Having the option to provide different sales models or licenses can greatly help serious sellers. I’d like my products to scale with the big businesses, which a one time payment of 50 dollars to a 200 person company doesn’t cover.
@Unreal_Josh Would you like to share your view on this?
Making sure your product still works every 7-9 months and fixing issues requires selling a kidney now? This is an opportunity cost of being able to continue to make sales on the marketplace. As well as being relevant, at all, to users on new versions.
You don’t need to give one on one support, but you should probably have some form documentation (where relevant) and fix actual issues that are brought up. People will cling onto you for support for free because you helped them with a single issue on Discord. This isn’t unique to the marketplace, much like open hostility to the end user.
It depends on the size of your product and the amount of users requesting support. Don’t forget that the current license on the marketplace is “buy once, get lifetime support forever” which is a very very long time for that price, usually a few dollars. I’m not against customer support, not at all 
. I’ve already spent hundreds if not thousands of hours of personal support already on the forums and on my previous projects such as https://road-to-the-north.com/ which were not made to pay my rent with but it would be amazing to make plugins and games as a fulltime job, wouldn’t it?
If you are curious about my experiences, ask away! If you wonder why I am cautious about their terms and conditions which state you need to support the latest 3 major versions of the engine as a seller, then take a look at my request for LTS and why:
If your product is not sustainable and you are loosing money with it, it is a wise decision to either stop selling it, or raise the price significantly.
Most of the assets are too cheap anyway in my opinion, and do not reflect the value they provide.
However, addressing the “support problem” is really something the Epic should do. We sellers should have an easy way to verify if someone is a legit customer or not (like people did posting their Discord tags to review/questions sections, so the seller could see the key icon).
But, I guess, whatever we discuss here is not of concern anymore, since the last time any of the Epic staff made a comment was on April 3rd. Or is there another thread that I have missed?
Quality control is lacking on the current marketplace. There’s often no way of telling wether a product was made by a professional or made as a learning project before you bought it and inspect the assets / code. The prices of course not reflect quality. Marketplace service such as the refund policy and perhaps improved quality control could avoid damages to trust with serious sellers and buyers. Buyer behavior is complex but if you work on any serious project then you simply don’t wat to waste time on testing out 20 10 dollar plugins if you could get one profesionally made right away. Worst case you simply can’t tell who to contact on the marketplace and decide to make your own copycat product, reinventing the wheel. As a developer it hurts to see how much time is lost when people reinvent things. There should be at least the option to request rapports on sellers (payment behavior, reputation, product quality tests). I could talk about real value all day but this post is getting lengthy.
Yes definitely, I’ve heard there are quite some pirates who even dare to ask for customer support.
Well, best we can hope for is that the voice of the community is heard by EPIC. Even though more than often there’s no sign of life, the community is active and we can make whatever we want to make. If the marketplace doesn’t work out there’s plenty of other options.
Thank you for answering many of our concerns @Unreal_Josh!
From reading many of the questions and answers, Fab seems to be a separate thing from the Unreal Engine, as it will focus on assets for other engines as well.
Will my Marketplace Seller Portal be removed from Unreal Engine’s website once Fab is up and running? Also, will I have to setup a new account, create a new W-8 Form, registering for tax again, or will I be able to convert my seller account into a Fab account?
Finally, will Fab continue using Hyperwallet?
Thank you for all of the support!
The biggest question is, will the new Vault and Marketplace be usable?
We all know the current Epic Games Launcher is a bucket of vomit someone mistakenly labeled as “software” and the Vault and Marketplace are the biggest offenders. Will FAB take less than a week to load? Will the vault allow for some actual organization instead of dumping everything to a single screen and making my PC try to fly away using the CPU fan when making attempts to load all the content?
I have to agree. Given Epic’s track record with the launcher, I am very skeptical about how Fab will be executed.
I Completely Agree with Roy Here.
I get where buyers are coming from, but with their take, they completely disregard the needs of the seller. So yes to multiple license options.
Although the current licensing model favours you as the buyer, it does not favour the Seller at all.
Imagine this.
I have a plugin i would like to sell to individual for $50. Because that’s affordable, and it’s one person who will have access to the plugin.
With the current system/license, both the Individual, and a large enterprise like Activition or others will buy it for $50.
The large enterprise has 200 employees but only paid $50. 200 people just got access to your plugin for the price of 1.
(they are not supposed to , but its happening).
How is this fair to the seller?
Let’s also think about people spending months and months building products/ plugins.
Getting lifetime support for $20 one time doesn’t seem right. A lot of people wouldn’t work for $20 a day. now imagine $20 for lifetime.
I get you may say “just raise the price”.
If I raise my plugin’s price to $500 , who’s going to buy it? Large enterprises only? what about smaller players like individuals? shouldn’t we offer it to them at $50 instead of just removing them from the equation.?
There’s two sides of the equation. Buyers and Sellers. Lets consider both and find a balance and not just one sided.
The logic is flawed.
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You are not obligated to give lifetime support. Nowhere in the marketplace EULA it says that. Point me to the appropriate section if you think otherwise, please (really).
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If you think you are obligated to giving lifetime support, you’re still going to give lifetime support, no matter if you sold a “cheap” license to the individual or an “expensive” license to a cooperation. Over years, your profit will always go down to ZERO and below. It’s simple math. You can’t win.
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You should raise prices if you want to give support for free, or keep prices low and charge for support. Yes, that is your time, it is worth something as you stated, so charge for it. Selling stuff on the marketplace is business, start acting like one.
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Hence, sellers need tools to VERIFY PURCHASES. So they can track support costs. Nothing’s wrong with helping someone getting started with your product for free. Things get abusive once people expect you to program their game for them.
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As a compromise between seller and buyer interests, would you think that two licenses could be enough? For example, entities with less than $ 100k revenue per year and entities with >100k / year?
And again, I do not think anything we discuss here matters. Epic staff has been silent for months on this topic.
I’m not sure if point 1 and 2 are an attempt at trolling or something so i’ll just ignore them.
- It would be nice to offer support without prejudice. Why should i punish Individual buyers with a higher price when they could pay their fair share. Emphasis on fair share. If you’re an individual and i sold the plugin to you at $50 , i don’t not mind providing support to. The $50 pricing could be having this in mind: 1 individual, 1 person to provide support/interact with.
What i mind though is providing support to 50 employees who contributed only $50 to my business. In this scenario , the individual is paying 10x the cost for support , compared to the enterprise. how does that make sense? Flawed.
You’ll have more than one person from the company trying to get support cause they are working together and need different things, and yet only paid $50.
Please , lets be serious…
Point 4. Agreed. Also people are asking for verification because they don’t want to assist anyone who did not ligitimately buy their plugin/asset. There are websites out there that are offering paid unreal engine plugins illegally and for Free. What happens is the people who download these assets, then come to you to ask for support. That’s why sellers are fighting for easy verification system, not because they don’t want to support buyers.
5.Yes ATLEAST 2 licenses. The 1 License for All model is very flawed and grossly unfair to sellers. I see why Buyers would not complain. They can grow their business from 1 to 30 employees without any additional cost, and would still expect you to provide support to their newly onboarded employees. Comeon guys.
This is the very reason there are some excellent plugins in the marketplace that are abandoned and not getting updated. It’s not worth it to the seller.
If you want quality products that are regularly and highly maintained, this is the only way. There’s no alternative. Rising prices won’t work for obvious reasons.
1., 2., 3., 5.: You need to consider so many external factors that lead to the decision of what personalized licenses / contracts / models etc you are going to offer. I have another topic here which explores sales / business models on the topic “how to reduce the cost damage of piracy through licenses / models” alone. In the linked post I gave an example of 20 sales models of which the EPIC marketplace only seems to support 1 for 99% of what is on the market, which happens to be costly and vulnerable.
Sales model against game and asset piracy. - #56 by Roy_Wierer.Seda145
You can’t offer your service on the marketplace for X euro an hour to make specialized models, you can only sell an asset of say a fantasy monster that people maybe buy. maybe 3 times if they don’t want to look like X other games. If you totally want to break away from that system you either can’t offer your service on the marketplace or you are selling a plugin which communicates with an external environment, like an AI in the cloud which does translations for you. You can count the amount of marketplace plugins which have such an external functionality on one hand.
Terms and conditions for marketplace sellers state you must support the latest 3 major versions of the engine. Unreal Engine constantly receives updates which break basic functionality and they do not offer an LTS version. This leaves the seller with a potential X amount of bugs to work around per version per product and deal with the reports, regardless of if you have 3 customers or 5000. I’ve been with UE4 from the start, now UE5 and I can exactly tell how many hours go into fixing nonsense EPIC breaks.
Considering that many people are not using the latest version of the engine, but expect to finalize their project on say version 4.26 (because why turn the core upside down when at 70% of a big game)… This is not something you can support without offering some sort of support subscription or other model for additional income.
Personally I hope the new marketplace will be highly customizable, so that you can show what you want and offer what you want. I like the approach of Fiverr where you can offer a silver / gold package for a service (just one interesting model :)).
Silver: “Get 5 designs, prototype project, source files, 1 hour personal consultant”.
Gold (30% off): “Includes Silver. Let me implement the plugin in your project”.
Because people look for a solution, not all the steps in between. They just want to get the job done and paying for it is usually the fastest + cheapest. That is already one reason why selling asset by asset is not ideal.
I am considering using the sketchfab viewer API.
Can I continue to use this API as before after the integration?
It’s also largely talking about having a working as advertised product and fixing actual issues brought up with those versions by your customers with that functionality. Not being a lifetime babysitter.
To be fair, and you may not have realized it because of how great these new forums are. The Unreal Engine forum doesn’t have a place to post bugs. Most of your posts are going to the UEFN category now. Engine bugs were being directed here for quite a while now.
Adding more licenses isn’t going to change anything in your theoretical situation when it’s already not allowed. If they were making it this obvious in support requests you would report them to Epic. All I agree with is buyer verification in a not invasive manner handled by Epic.
/e
I put the wrong link at the bottom.
I like how you just ignored the point that “What i mind though is providing support to 50 employees who contributed only $50 to my business…” which IS ALLOWED as evidenced by the link you just shared trying to refute my claims
“Yes, you can share Marketplace content products for the limited purpose of the project(s) that you are developing within your team, organization, or company and its subsidiaries.”
Are you aware of how many subsidiaries some companies have?? a ridiculous amount? some companies have subsidiaries in Canada , USA etc. Are you are aware that it says Projects too? Plural.
Please read both my reply and the link you shared, slowly and carefully, and think about what that means for the seller. Please let’s not reply just for the sake of arguing…
Also, buyers need to think if what they want is cheap products that exploit sellers which would leave them with poorly developed assets, or they want the best assets or plugins developed by top tier developers around the world. You either create an environment that’s conducive for these top tier developer to come develop for the marketplace , or create one that encourages subpar products cause no one find it worth it to work on anymore.
Freya is arguably one of the best game mathematicians you’ll encounter in the game dev industry, and your way of thinking or reasoning pushes this kind of developers away from developing for the marketplace, not towards it. we want and need this kind of developer’s products in the marketplace.
See this tweet for more information as we both share the same sentiments despite different engines.:
https://twitter.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1697359367366983791?s=20
I don’t want to run subpar code cause we pushed stellar sellers away with a grossly unfair marketplace policy/license.
And she mentions
" anyway - the reason I keep the price at $100 and usually not higher, is because I do want to make it more accessible to smaller indie developers a solo dev can’t afford enterprise licensing costs, and I do want to make my tools available for smaller devs too"
And I can almost guarantee, that’s the sentiments of most of us sellers who spend months and months and sometimes years developing plugin. this is how we feel. We don’t set these prices because we are stupid or idiots or not business minded. Its because of the marketplace policy / license before us, that’s twisting our arms…
Lets read to understand , not to respond.
I’m not trying anything. Nor did I ignore anything. I replied to exactly what you posted. Your sales/support scenario and disregarding the license doesn’t exist without the other.
Yes. It does say projects. Nothing on the marketplace is limited in the number of times the buyer can use it. That changes a whole lot of nothing.
If 10 people out of this business of 50 are using the plugin. That’s intended to be 10 sales. If another project is using the same or slightly different people. The intention is only going to be the difference. There was never going to be 50 out of 50 using it. That goes for everyone using it, in any part (team, organization, or company and its subsidiaries) of the project. That’s also only if they didn’t own it in the first place.
I’m not here to argue perceived worth.
I’m sorry, I can’t make any sense out of anything you just said so let’s just agree to disagree. Perhaps someone else who understands it better will respond.
Hi Guys! Do you have any idea when FAB will launch? Yes, I know, later this year…but when?