I don’t think the marketplace represents Epic as a developer or as a whole. It’s certainly no reason to think less of the cool stuff they make. But personally, to me the ue4 marketplace isn’t functional or even well-thought out. I still have the feeling it was forged as a quick response to the assetstore with a pinch of “but we need to make it better”, and with time that pinch just pinched the whole thing.
I mean the marketplace has been up for like, what, 3 years now. If folder structure is so important, how come in these three years no one spared the dev resources to develop an automatic folder re-structurer based on the reference tree of given packs and an xml file specified by the customer/ dev studio. Why force any specific folder structure? This could be annoying for a large studio purchasing many packs. Or why isn’t there a tool to automatically build the overview map and all its contents. Heck, we could use a tool to tell us of possible flaws with our submissions before we submit and wait for a few months to hear back, you know. Or a tool to gather all the technical data, even that would be cool. And while on it, it could be useful to have some kind of a way to actually preview a pack before purchasing. Or larger studios/ devs who have made more than a 1000 bucks worth of purchases could be given the privilege to trial a pack. I’m just saying the marketplace doesn’t have to be a copy pasta of the assetstore with “more strict rules”, it could be a lot more. Unity is partially what it is today because of the assetstore.
Furthermore, for some reason I personally do not think of packs as “sold”. This is sometimes a very successful strategy on the assetstore: people release a pack for a relatively low price and keep building and adding stuff, increasing the price. We’ve purchased many such assets and it’s nice to come back and see extra models in there or a bunch of improvements. But really, one would have to crazy to do this on the marketplace. Releasing an update for a pack on the marketplace is the equivalent of NASA trying to upgrade a shuttle while it’s already in space…