The market place is missing additional filters for product categories. The 2023 extension of ai generated 2D texture content has made browsing for 3D content more time consuming.
If people need more time to browse the market for content they have less time to work on their projects. The impression is that 50 percent or more of the new content are ai generated textures. And judging from the product votes this content is not frequently thought after.
The problem with most of the ai generated textures is that it does not reflect the actual game world, usage is limited to specific genres like trade card games for instance.
To reduce the time required to browse the market for new and content on sale, and eventually spending money for the benefit of a project and the content creators there are two main solutions.
Solutions
Introduce a filter for products tagged āai generatedā (add this tag to ai generated content)
Introduce a filter for each market place category, i.e. ā2D Texturesā
Add a filter to hide content by selected content creators, i.e. I do not like gross and splatter views when browsing the market with kids around.
Add a new category and introduce category filters.
Migrate all the ai generated textures to Artstation.com and sell them there.
Iād vote on this if the topic was on a voting category.
Thing is, EPIC is never going to write in their terms and conditions that what they serve is what the seller claims it to be. Safe / quality / AI or not etc. Itās a system where we are constantly fooled with copied, stolen, low quality and unsafe content which may or not be AI. The trust level is steadily decreasing the way the system works right now. You can have just anyone pick any program from Github to generate content to sell (which happens all the time) and you would not be able to detect it. They claim anything, even designers I hired previously. If they put a search filter on the marketplace you can only guess itās probably not what it says itās going to be.
For the latter, hiding imagery that is not for kids, or just not your preference (adult / body parts / blood / religious etc) that would be totally doable by the marketplace itself. An AI can automatically classify what it sees on an image and decide regardless of what the seller claims to be on the image. That is a true filter. EPIC could send marketplace requests through a server hosting such AI and serve the marketplace entries you need to match your local filter preferences.
To push this even further, I would suggest EPIC to take a look at what can be done with AI to push back piracy (even just a little) by doing similarity scans on marketplace assets. Look at Google Lens, where you can upload a design and check if anything similar is on the web. Remove the weeds, claim damages. Let your program write a report for potential sellers which reports a seller trust level and about similar assets it found on the web and where. Just look alife EPIC ffs, the world is spinning and half your software lags 10 years behind the experimental toys.
Hope EPIC wakes up and puts experienced developers on the job for the marketplace, the launcher (where we see our products), who actually look at the forums and listen.
Thereās little point in buying anything if the marketplace gets such filters but the Vault does not, so we end up managing hundreds of little plugins by hand on a butchered package manager.
They havenāt listened so far but I wish you good luck.
Something needs to be done about the endless spam of AI content, the people selling it add multiple packs of them a week and itās getting hard to avoid it all.
Some donāt even disclose they are AI generated. With marketplaces like Steam cracking down on AI content in games it could lead to issues for developers who donāt know better, not to mention the ethical issues with using content that is not 100% yours.
A portion of people can use alternate websites like the one you linked, but the majority of users wonāt! And thatās what matters. Most sales are probably from new hobbyists. Stats from similar marketplaces show that hobbyists are what matters. Hobbyists are going to open the Marketplace., see it cluttered with AI stolen content then leave never to come back. And perhaps with how slow and bloated Unreal engine is they will probably leave game development.
The experience at the Unreal marketplace has become more than appalling. I get it that they are probably trying to push things for āFABā but I honestly doubt their ability to pull a good service on FAB from what Iāve seen so far.
Things are so bad at this Martketplace that I find it hard to justify even publishing already existing assets I created. The process of publishing here is lengthy and not worth it. To add insult to injury I had assets rejected because I saved some files on desktop!! A ācuratorā wanted me to reply with confirmation that these are my assets simply because I saved some textures on my desktop. Apparently ādesktopā is an infringement to copyrights but AI stolen art isnāt.
Epic has its focus on Fortnite and Fortnite only. As you can see from the website you linked. You only need one good web developer to make a decent interface for an online marketplace experience. How much money was spent on curators rejecting assets over trivialities while passing AI assets? Couldnāt they put that money on improving the UI and search?
Subsidized services that do not follow market dynamics are failures. This Marketplace for Epic is a money sink, they just throw some money at it without really caring. The money they spend ācuratingā AI assets are much more than the money made from it.