Honestly, how hard is it for someone to open that “Rules” document and simply erase those lines such as “0 to Metallic”, “No overlapping”, “Structure like this or reject” etc. They know it’s wrong, but nothing changes, for years. People have delays in responses because there’s a massive amount of absolutely unnecessary issues they’re dealing with. It’s quite disappointing to see months going by and we don’t actually get any reply from anyone in these kind of threads, especially in the creator’s hub. Almost feels like as if these aren’t Epic’s forums.
Yep. And honestly I hope buyers see the way sellers are treated by Epic. (and keep in mind this thread only highlights a fraction of the issues overall). We work hard to deliver quality services and products and we can’t even do so to the fullest extent due to the problems on the marketplace. So we try alternate avenues such as Gumroad which allows the seller to provide better, faster service but no one wants to buy outside of UE4. Being placed between a rock and a hard place like that gives the seller very few options to continue their work.
Very well put.
Yeah, that’s true. People, including me, like a single point of organisation and updates for their assets which would be the Epic Games Launcher / Epic Games Marketplace for now.
As someone who buys a lot of assets and depends on them it’s really sad to see that promising products don’t make it in time to the marketplace as I think I’m not the only person who’d buy them.
Maybe an alternative marketplace, where authors could grant access to assets after buyers send in their Epic Games Invoice, could help out.
I can understand the desire to have launcher access, but that isn’t something sellers can offer outside UE4. (There may be a way to manually add vault content for products bought outside of UE4, but most people aren’t going to want to do the work themselves.)
The problem isn’t that the products don’t make it to UE4, it’s that it can take months to. The development process already takes time, then it takes a few months for Epic to review and release. Once it’s released sellers have to wait 45 days to see their first paycheck. So we’re looking at almost half a year in some cases between developing something and seeing a return on that investment.
I’ve tried putting content up on Gumroad earlier since it was complete, and offering UE4 marketplace access once it’s released there but very few took that option as well. Just understand, that without support and with such a long and frustrating process it’s forcing sellers to either put out less content or just give up altogether. The amount of time and work required isn’t worth it when we have to wait so long to see out earnings.
Well, the launcher is just one factor that plays in here. Another important thing is the marketplace page itself in which people can easily browse for assets and see new ones.
So, a cool alternative would be a page where all developer packages are listed like in the marketplace, but the “Buy” button would redirect to GumRoad etc.
Actually once the content is released it’s 75 days to get your first paycheck since it’s a “45 days after the end of each month” cycle. 
Good point. Lovely, isn’t it?
People are still less inclined to purchase there though. In my experience at least, it’s never been an issue of exposure to my Gumroad store, most people just prefer not to buy from there. Even if content is offered there exclusively. Which as I said puts the seller in a very difficult position. Gumroad in all honesty would provide sellers a platform to give consumers the best service possible. But for most the launcher ability supersedes that.
To be fair, I just recently had a bad experience with Gumroad, so much so that I wouldn’t recommend it. It has to do with their Fraudulent Transactions policy in their Terms of Service. Never have I seen anywhere where fraud transactions are faulted towards the seller enough to make the provider suspend the seller’s account, possibly indefinitely. They were literally going to permanently suspend my account and refund all sales until I talked them out of it. That is an extremely bad policy.
I’m glad there is movement here to updating the Marketplace with their review and submission process. I’m glad they are starting to communicate with us and hope that by the September like they have said, this becomes a better place for developers to put up their work for others. I’d rather deal with a lengthy review process than terrible policies.
Wait what? They were blaming you the seller for fraudulent purchases of your products? o.0
I share the frustration with every seller trying to get their products released on the Marketplace. I currently have 6 characters in the pipe… and a 7th one will be submitted tomorrow… All I can say is: explore other horizons as well! Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket if you’re really determined to be a full time asset developer you need to port your content to as many platforms as possible and publish it on as many marketplaces as possible.
Just betting on UE4 Marketplace is :
1/ limiting yourself or your company to half of the income you could have if you would even consider unity, reallusion etc…
2/ letting yourself in the dark! get some exposure! publishing your content everywhere would do yourself some advertising. You need to be everywhere! Do it!
3/ silly! Did you ever sign an exclusivity agreement with them? I bet none of you guys did… so why even bother to just publish content for them…
3/ frustrating! you all know why…
So please while I understand your guys frustration you need to make the right moves… Be smart about it, and still get money from your hard work while you wait for the Epic team to put their stuff together.
Go publish everywhere!
My company has been doing that since 2011. We keep on producing new content, updating stuff and our business keeps growing yet we still have the UE4 release hurdle…
Perhaps what you suggest is true… Why not have someone reply on this thread with an official response? Isn’t the lack of communication one of the things that folks rightly complain about? When there is no communication people naturally think…“Hey, what the heck is going on!”.
teak
Yeah, look at this link here as it relates to their ToS: Account suspension FAQ - Gumroad Help Center
I was livid, I cannot believe they have something like this in place. I’ve heard such good things about Gumroad too and they make it super easy to sell what you want and get paid.
And I agree with you @PROTOFACTOR about putting your assets out there. But other than Gumroad and Sellfy, I don’t know where else to put my product to sell while waiting for UE4 marketplace. I have put myself out there on social media and YouTube and created my own website, and I have driven a bit of traffic to Gumroad and Sellfy, but it does seem that a majority of people want the ease of use of the UE4 marketplace. I’m the same way as a consumer, having the products right there in the Epic Launcher is helpful. Plus, my current product is really UE4 only so I’m kind of limiting myself there.
Sorry, totally forgot about publishers creating template projects, Blueprints, plugins… They are the one who have to wait the longest and they’re mostly affected by those problems. They are the ones who did the biggest gamble though, which is even more frustrating.
I was mostly talking about art asset publishers…
If I recommend anything to sell arts? not really but there are turbosquid (not using it… to much royalties to deliver), Cubebrush, 3dSquirrel, Creative Market, 3dOcean, CGTrader, Reallusion, And unity. On our end we’re mostly using Unity and UE4 Marketplace, then Reallusion, CGTrader, Creative Market.
For people creating plugins not sure what to tell them besides that usually it brings more money than art does. People need more tools than art that’s a constant. SO hopefully for you guys the money will be worth that frustrating wait ( for release or for any follow up and communication …)
Both your posts, are totally bypassing what the thread is about, that being the lack of communication between Epic Games and the sellers on the MP platform. As you are a seller on the MP that has a large number of assets for sell from the MP, it would seem prudent from your point of view, to encourage more communication from Epic Games instead of simply stating that it is the sellers fault for not pursuing more lines of revenue.
While I do agree, that all sellers should pursue as many revenue streams as is possible, with the product that they offer. That should totally be in another thread, concerning how to run a business for example.
Sorry if you think I went out of the way. Was trying to help people deal with the cards we’re all given. Of course, everybody want more communication from the MP team. as I said I have 7 assets waiting and piling on each other, collecting dust…
Saying it’s the publisher’s fault was not my intention. Yes it might be more appropriate to have those comments on another thread, however, at that point in time, I wanted to help fellow developers to pursue what they’re here for.
So yeah broken communication, review with notes that are kind of inconsistent across the whole review team: I’m pretty sure not so long ago the sunlight intensity had to be set to 5… now the reviewer is telling me to set it to 1… My last submission that passed and got released (July 4th Dark Elf) with this newly trained team wouldn’t pass the review as of today… Waiting times that are way too long.
To my opinion they’re still training the people recently hired. It almost look like they re edit the guidelines each time one of them get confused, then ask the superior, who’s gonna end up telling him something and then this is not communicated to the rest of the team… Boom, inconsistency.
I totally agree with the fact that some of the criteria are ridiculous (UV overlapping not accepted etc…) Which is NOT. Because we have a bunch of assets released and they use overlapping UVs…
This is indeed frustrated. But we need to deal with that…
We can rant and complain. Make it louder here on that public section of the forum…
End of the day they’ll still have to finish training all these people…Properly… and fix those guidelines once and for all… When is that going to happen? What is the current state of the queue? This is got to be overwhelming on their end as well.
Wouldn’t like to be in their situation.
Hi everybody,
First, we do apologize for any delayed responses and for the amount of time it is taking for submissions to get onto the Marketplace. We’re making great progress on working through the current queue of submissions and developing ways to speed up the process so you guys can get your stuff live and selling a lot quicker in the future.
@-Dev
I’ll try to address each of your points as best I can. I hope that it’s understood that this was not an outright rejection in any way. We really like your submission and want it live on the Marketplace. We just need you to make these changes for consistency.
I took a look through your pack and here’s what I found:
Metallic and PBR
We do require that all materials be PBR and have Base Color, Roughness, and Metallic inputs. While it may look as though Metallic defaults to “0”, it actually defaults to “NULL”. There may be no noticeable visual difference, but the engine handles the material differently. With no metal input, it is not entirely a physically based material because lighting would not take into account whether the material is a conductor or insulator (dielectric or metal).
Overview Map
You are correct. This is not an “Overview” map. However, we do require one for packs that contain models, materials, or other visually-based assets. I believe the reviewer was going to let the setup slide by as long as it was renamed, but we do require an Overview map. While you do not need to rename this one, you will need to provide an Overview map.
Naming Conventions
Having a consistent naming convention is a requirement in our checklist. Once the asset has been renamed, the item will continue to move through review.
Folder Structure
We have folder structure requirements for Marketplace assets that were defined based on buyer input, our means of distribution, and to keep a consistent structure for all Marketplace asset packs. We determined a standard that met the needs of the majority without limiting the needs of the few.
We decided on “ProjectName > AssetType” or “ProjectName > AssetType > SpecificAsset” because “ProjectName > SpecificAsset > AssetType” isn’t reasonable for submissions with either a large amount of assets or for submissions that don’t refer to specific assets. For instance, an environment sound pack would have a bunch of folders (one for each animal, bird, tree, water type, etc) with one or two assets in each folder. With our structure, all asset types are in one place and can be subdivided there. Using the example above, the environment sound pack can have subfolders for animals, birds, trees, and water if they want, but it’s not required.
I hope this clears some things up. If you have any more questions or want to give feedback on content practices, guidelines, or review, always feel free to hit me up in the ticket or shoot me an email. 
Thanks,
Mike V
UE Marketplace Content Coordinator
Hi Mike.
I don’t make art packs, but this is still relevant for me when submitting plugins with blueprints and example content.
First off, “ProjectName > SpecificAsset > AssetType” will end up with exactly the same number of folders, and the same number of assets in each leaf folder, as “ProjectName > AssetType > SpecificAsset”. Now I can see your point that in some packs the distinction between specific assets is not so relevant, but I really don’t see what’s wrong with allowing either “ProjectName > AssetType”, or “ProjectName > SpecificAsset > AssetType”. It’s hardly going to leave people scratching their heads unable to find assets.
More to the point though, the engine already provides filtering by asset type. Why then enforce folder structuring by asset type too? In many (possibly most) cases, people will need to work on a bunch of logically associated assets together, rather than “all textures” or “all blueprints”. Your suggested folder structure makes that a massive pain, since obviously the engine can’t provide filtering by logical grouping due to it being dependent on the pack/project as to what that means. The reversed structure on the other hand makes it simple, and the asset type filtering allows all assets of a given type to be viewed together too, when that is desired. So it would seem to me that the reversed structure is in fact the one that meets the needs of the many.