Are you doing anything about all the theft and copyright infringment?

Loden-Heathen · December 9, 2024, 8:30am

I don’t think Epic understood or perhaps still doesn’t understand that it is NOT a retail market

It is a professional market, licensing should reflect that in the same they never have had and still don’t have the means to cover ongoing development and support.

They expect everything on the market to be a 1 time purchase and to get life time updates and support with no concept of a maintenance plan, major update path or similar. UE Marketplace was never sustainable and FAB suffers from those very same issues.

This post however was about the immediate show-stopping problem of theft and copyright infringement. It should have never been a problem, I am NOT excusing the very poor behaviour of merging in the flood of crap. Them having a response and a voiced plan is however “good enough” … “for now” … if we don’t see real action soon though we will have to pull our tools off the store.

Aside from that there is no way for us to properly support our tools on FAB so even if they act on the theft and copyright infringement issues we likely still won’t be on FAB come 1st JAN simply because there is no way for us to offer the updates that should be life now for the current host of tools.

Epic in all its lack of wisdom thinks either every major update should be full-priced for everyone or that every tool should be free for life updates. The problem is Epic thinks FAB is for pictures and models, static content that doesn’t have on going costs in development and support which is insane to me from a company who by the way makes virtually of its revenue from software and the on going nature of it.

@Unreal_Josh You really do have a major problem on your hands with FAB
One that means it just cant survive a generation … hope you get that sorted ASAP Epic has already blown that first impressions opportunity it would be a shame to evaporate the remaining chances it has.

hadenep · December 9, 2024, 11:25pm

+1
I think this was not a problem on the old MarketPlace, atleast I never noticed any obvious stolen content, pokemon, spiderman, ai-generated crap, etc there…
I wonder what happened to quality control when FAB was launched.

This topic is very closely related to this other one:

Loden-Heathen · December 10, 2024, 2:28am

It was present but not to this volume

The issue is FAB is not just Unreal Marketplace
They blindly merged in frankly a lot of trash from Sketch and a couple other “shops”

Those resources where notorious for containing a lot of crap rips from games, and so on … they should have NEVER merged that mess in especially not without vetting each and every item they planned on brining in

But we live in an era where companies are shoveling crap and then shrugging when it all blows up in there face.

Doing something fast, but wrong … is not doing anything

Take your time and do a quality job … or dont do it at all

Saddly that is not where we are in the world at the moment, its not just Epic but that is the issue here. Someone wanted to Go GO GO … and did so without any checks and balances and here we are. We have an inferior store, bloated with shuvleware and trash a fair bit of which is outright stolen or copyright infringement that is going to get someone in real trouble sooner or later

Loden-Heathen · December 15, 2024, 3:12pm

The French do love to revolt but their issue was/is the opposite

They have a really split government (3 way split) at the moment so they can’t agree on a budget each side is just being a [To Spicy for Epic Forums] refusing to agree with the other 2 on ANYTHING. The result is no budget which means services and social suffers.

The PM tried to force a solution which I mean sort of worked, the 3 idiot groups that refused to agree on anything … did agree on smacking him hard LOL so at least they agreed on something lol.

Here in Ireland, we have yet a different issue, multiple fiscal crises, housing, utility, medical, etc. all boiling down to insufficient resources/funds yet at the same time the country has a HUGE surplus but the way our gov works its just sitting there doing nothing. And of course, when they finally do manage to free things up they will do so in the least efficient manner possible with the maximum amount of greed and corruption to ensure that only a tiny fraction of the good that could be done is done.

These are all small fish though when you consider the multiple hugely impacting conflicts running at the moment. Because people are so short-sighted at the moment owing to the turbulent state of each gov in its own way the proper attention isn’t being paid to these global impacts so that will come to bite us all in the [Wow Epic Forums clutching some pearls] soon enough.

That said all of that is huge geopolitical issues that we cant really do much about here.

What we can do though is insist that Epic gets its act together

That Epic puts forth real effort to clean up FAB

and importantly that Epic is making it a critical priority to do that while also bringing features into FAB that are REQUIRED for us to actually use FAB things like a Major Update option or Subscription option, etc.

So while the world may be burning the issues we are all panicked about most are not as bad as they seem and things we are discounting like the war in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, etc. are all far more important to each of us than we want to admit right now.

But Epic and at least our little company Heathen … cant do anything about that … we can however hold apply what little pressure we are worth to Epic and I hope you will join us in that so we can at least try and get FAB to a workable state.

ScamBot45 · December 16, 2024, 8:17am

Well, the most that we can do is report stuff and hope that the relevant team is up to date with their pop culture references. They said that they’ve took down the two Vulture Droid props that I found, but at least one of them is still up.

And I hope that Ireland (or wherever else that you guys lives) doesn’t get burnt to the ground through the actions of your politicians

PO_art · December 17, 2024, 10:57am

@Unreal_Josh Here are some search results as of today. This is not acceptable, and only cheapens the work of actual Unreal Marketplace creators.

All assets/Fab as a whole needs to be manually curated, there’s just no way around it.

eatmylazer · December 17, 2024, 8:04pm

I second this. Make everyone go through QA once again with a manual overview or just send a 2 strike notice to each account doing that, being the first contact the 1st one already. That sheer amount of junk on the marketplace makes harder to vouch for the beforehand quality assets that made UEM special.

ScamBot45 · December 18, 2024, 12:32am

While I’m not entirely sure about the sports cars, but has anyone made any noticeable progress on reporting stuff? Because one of the listings that I’d reported is still up, despite them saying that they’ve sanctioned that account

Krabworks · December 18, 2024, 6:48am

@Unreal_Josh I will add to this: I am curious why no check has been done for major game titles yet? It has been months. This is the absolute bare minimum.

This is less than 2 minutes of work: I use the keywords of major game titles like “Skyrim” and “Witcher” and easily find tons of asset copies and rips. It is totally unacceptable, the lack of bare minimum effort being taken here really shows a bad look and sends message that Epic is consciously choosing to ignore this problem.

It is a really bad look.

Here are some simple keyword searches that your team should have already done weeks ago if they had been doing the bare minimum:

Skyrim:

https://www.fab.com/listings/3b6dc42d-2a63-4463-9476-f0f700a77bc6
https://www.fab.com/listings/9ead1919-626d-4b8c-b45d-196596685f21
https://www.fab.com/listings/bc9f4248-14e0-48b6-8f5b-899a2f6b4116

Witcher:
https://www.fab.com/listings/8d18efcb-5ebb-4c06-85e6-fe1989dc0254
https://www.fab.com/listings/a49e82ed-25af-4545-9f9c-ff376ac9d3cb

Genshin Impact:
https://www.fab.com/listings/aa90fdfd-92ac-46ba-ad84-16b084c91c3f
https://www.fab.com/listings/d88e1a35-20e1-4ea0-b4c0-4958a9086cb8

Plus some random ones I found while checking the above keywords -

Muppets:
https://www.fab.com/listings/930e3d26-d3ad-4aa3-908d-8646060a5c93

Motorhead Album cover???
https://www.fab.com/listings/5811bd75-5109-472f-a88a-f24873342b6b

The Matrix:
https://www.fab.com/listings/5caf16ec-c0c7-4f3a-a13e-516580166ab4

To say you need to step up your efforts on this is the understatement of the century.

This is a very simple step that would show a lot of good will to the community, and that you are actually taking this problem seriously.

ScamBot45 · December 21, 2024, 1:17am

I’ve reported the first one an while ago and they told me that it was delisted…Except that it’s still up.

Krabworks · December 24, 2024, 3:35am

It is unfortunate. My post was a week ago and no response. Words mean nothing if there is no action behind them.

Krabworks · December 27, 2024, 9:10am

All of these still listed shocking

ScamBot45 · December 27, 2024, 6:53pm

Personally, I’d give it around an week or two after New Years’ before expecting to take any form of action

Krabworks · December 28, 2024, 9:44am

that’s fair although we were expecting in October. The November. Then December.

Should we wait for Valentine’s day next

Loden-Heathen · December 28, 2024, 11:23am

I do not think we should wait

Something Epic is going to have to learn if it wants to do B2B is that the holiday season isn’t a time for you to cut staff and take a break … that is the busiest time of year. B2B is very much so inverse to B2C pattern of doing things and Epic is now doing both … so Epic needs to learn to be “always on” e.g. no you can’t take a break from Nov 1 to Jan 5th like a purely B2C company might … you need to support your biz partners, you need to maintain your B2B shops (Fab in this case) you need to react to predatory biz using your platform which is going to increasing in frequency during those times when consumer level stuff is slowest e.g. 1 Nov - 5 Jan is the busy time for scams, exploitation, etc., not the slow time

@Epic you need to get off your ■■■■ and triple down

ScamBot45 · December 28, 2024, 9:52pm

Realistically speaking, what else can we do? I don’t plan on losing my account by filing tickets and half of the stuff that I’ve reported in Krabs’ post is coming back as “this doesn’t break our rules.”

Loden-Heathen · December 28, 2024, 11:41pm

Pushing on Epic to react is in many cases the only thing that can be done and is a fine first step, I do not think we should stop pushing on them until they correct the issue. If they would like us to stop complaining about crap perhaps they should stop shoveling crap

And then with Heathen anyway (my group)
We are preparing to pull our assets off the store Jan 1
Epic did respond on this post via @Unreal_Josh however those are just words and in a months time (just about) we haven’t seen any action. The fact that its a holiday period is not a sufficient excuse. Either FAB is a professional store in which case this is a critical item to be handled as such or they are a problematic outlet in which case we wont be working with them.

And finally (to each there own) but we do not recommend FAB and advise against its use actively. This isn’t meant as an attempted punishment or anything its simply that FAB is unfit for purpose and at the moment outright risky for a legitimate team to be using, be they a team looking to license assets for a project or a a team looking to publish assets for sale.

So to summarize

Continue to report every issue you see, and expect a response, no they won’t give a response each time but they should and that should be your expectations
If its within your capacity I really wouldn’t recommend shipping product on FAB at the moment. Its like shipping products on Wish dot com even if you’re legit your rubbing elbows with obvious crap.
If you have a community inform them about your intent and your reasoning so they can make an informed decision of their own

We have a community of a few thousand indie devs that have shipped a couple hundred games and we have made it clear that while we like Epic and the idea of FAB the current store is a problem and is not fit for purpose. We have warned that we will exit the store on Jan 1 if critical issues which we have outlined are not addressed and we have put in solutions for anyone that has licensed on the store already advising anyone who hasn’t licensed via FAB to not use FAB but use one of the other available channels.

Come Jan 1
We will review the state of things, if reasonable action has been taken (not just words that is not good enough) then we will delist and that will be that.

ScamBot45 · December 29, 2024, 1:50am

Trying, but it takes weeks for results to actually happen via reporting on Fab

While I’ve never really posted anything on there or actually paid for anything, an exodus of sellers would be the right call. But I doubt if it’ll have any meaningful impact on Epic’s behavior

Loden-Heathen · December 29, 2024, 11:08am

We moved 1 of our assets Toolkit for Steamworks and we had intended to move all our assets over.

But

As we have been talking about here the FAB store is an out right problem actor in the industry so no we wont be moving more over and unless they do a big ban wave in the next 3 days we will be delisting Jan 1

@Unreal_Josh
As your the only one to respond I will ping you, here is what we would have to see to stay

Obviously, we need to see actual action not words to resolve the egregious levels of blatant theft and copyright all over the store
We would need to see an actual statement from Epic not just a staff member saying the right words making the effort to clean up FAB a clearly stated objective that the wider community can expect to hold you to not simply the squeaky wheels here in this and similar threads

SO that is just for us to keep what we have here, note FAB beyond this MAJOR issue is still not fit for purpose.

There is no way for us to offer updates, new versions, bundled packages, maintenance and support options or really anything that is required to run an actual business. FAB is a little more “Adobe Stock” for stolen video game-related content at the moment. It needs actual support and tools for technology more like a partner program where we can offer services (support, maintenance) where we can offer paid updates, bundle deals, etc.

Your competitors … all of them … big and small … have these features the fact that you have not only none of these built in but also no facility to handle this ad-hoc tells us this is nothing more than a half-arsed prototype that is the target of a lot of bad actors and frankly we do not want to be associated with that sort of poor quality and behaviour.

We do love the idea of FAB and have been calling for a global game industry-centric site where small tools devs can offer there services and wares, where content creators can show there work, offer there packages and be connected with for deeper engagement. You see these sorts of things for other tech and creative industries game has nothing at least nothign that is accessible at the indie small studio level. Sure some of the groups and publishers have this but there is no reason FAB couldn’t be at least a big part of this.

At the moment though FAB fails as even a basic store and we honestly do not recommend any publisher or developer make use of it in its current state. It is a liability to use things on this store as there is no assurance what you buy is legitimately licensed, there is no facility through the intermediary of the store to get support, resolve disagreements or issues, avail of services, maintenance, etc.

To put it much more simply there is no reason given FABs functionality and structure for it to exist beyond as an advertisement and frankly, since its flooded with garbage now it fails at that to.

You have a real opportunity as a platform to really be something great that could both make Epic a ton of money and draw more indie and small studio teams to Epic’s ecosystem but at the moment its so not useful its an active risk to use it. We will remain active in the community, we will continue to offer suggestions, and ideas we are even happy to help with more than 2 decades of experience as partners with major entities like Microsoft and well over a decade as small-scale tools developers supporting thousands of indie and small studio teams publishing hundreds of games we are a small fish … the exact kind of fish you really need to learn how to serve if you want FAB to be of value.

Wish the FAB team all the best
Wish the product hadn’t been released as it is

ScamBot45 · December 29, 2024, 5:49pm

I’ve filed an ticket last night(?) in order to report one of products that Krab found and got redirected to this thread, again