Hi Josh, I’d like to report a broken product - the UE marketplace 
Can I remind Epic of their obligation… well perhaps they don’t have one
Don’t get me wrong, all of these comments come from a place of caring, beaten down after years of providing feedback and suggestions.
I have to say I was quite shocked at reading that news. I had some good dialogue with my customers in the questions and answers. It showed my quick support and that I really cared even if I am not the best digital content creator out there, my customers saw that I was honest with them and that I fixed issues and implemented extra content if there was a lack of such inside my asset packs.
Now I know there might be piracy related problems out there, and even my assets might have been stolen so I supported them for free. Even if that is hurtful to my income, I just cared about creating a good product that is for what it needs pretty perfect in value and quality.
I have to be honest, that I need to review and rate many of the products I bought. So this is also a huge sorry to these product owners. I don’t know how to break that circle of procrastination in that regard. Maybe we as a community have to find time to review content together? Forgive me if that sounds silly.
Regarding my products, I want to improve them this year in many ways, better demos, better lists and previews etc. Itch.io has a good system to give products more information, by giving creators the ability to create a devlog. So this would be something I would be glad to have when it comes to the Marketplace. I guess for the time being, I will create a forum post for a public support of my products.
I could create a discord support server, but I do not really want to do that. I joined so many discord channels and it became quite annoying over time.
I hope the new system will be released quite soon.
Have a good one!
We’ll have a major update to the storefront experience later this year that will include the new system for ratings and reviews, but it’s still several months from release.
Wait what? You mean we won’t have reviews for several months? I was expecting it to roll out like today. Why on Earth didn’t you leave the existing system in place until the new system was ready?
This “major update to the storefront experience” sounds like a negative update that makes the storefront experience worse. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the logic here. Suddenly nuke existing reviews and questions with no warning and remove the ability to leave new ones, just so you can add a different review system several months later…
It seems Epic has put zero thought into making this a comfortable transition for sellers.
Several months without basic functionality of the storefront…
This will have a serious effect on our work, and for long standing well reviewed products, our income.
Oh yeah this will have a huge negative impact, I’m very hesitant to buy things that don’t have reviews. I think somehow they underestimate just how significant reviews are.
That doesnt make ANY sense. I cannot understand at any moment for what rational reason you would make such a decision and just remove everything over night. Whats going on there in your department? What does the ENTIRE Marketplace have to suffer for?
How are you guys this bad at your jobs?
You can still get it in form of JSON, there are instructions on Unreal Slackers, so you should be able to back it all up if you hurry.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the new system.
Not to mention that it saved a lot of time for the sellers, who didn’t need to explain the same problem/question a thousand times for each customer…
Like many, the review and questions were a huge help in deciding if an asset would be the right purchase for me. Without it, people are now purchasing blind and have no idea if there are any problems, solutions, or suggestions on the use of the asset. With an update being months away, this is a dramatic huge step backwards given the implications it creates in the meantime. Personally, this does not come across as a well thought out update at all and it really becomes a hefty inconvenience for so many people. Very bad move on Epic’s part.
This is totally nonsense, the real problems are not “Fake reviews to get verification”, because many sellers just ask you to “ask a question” to see the “Verified purchase” on your name, and you often have to put your Discord username in the comment (So I have always deleted the question after I got verified)
Plugin makers have absolutely no way to protect their products from piracy, you can’t really afford to spend time assisting people that didn’t even pay for your product, that’s why so many discord channel ask for verification.
The main thing to fix is this, not the marketplace:
For those who don’t know what it is, it’s the seller panel, you have absolutely no clue about who bought your plugin, not even an order ID.
My free plugin has almost 45 thousands “purchases”, and the reviews and question were so helpful, because they saved me from answering to hundreds of emails or or pointless GitHub issues
Is it too hard to show an order ID and send an email to both the buyer and the seller when a PAID (I really don’t want 45000 emails) product is sold? Or at least a search field where you can input the code provided by the user and see if it matches?
If you don’t want to give order IDs (but I’m pretty sure you already have them), just let us check the purchase by entering the client email address (in this way we can have the proof that he’s the owner of the email and that he bought the product, and he’s not just using someone else’s email)
The solution is NOT to remove reviews and questions
Just parse them with some regex and try to look for Discord nicknames, and improve the seller portal!
I don’t get it. Why is the topic of “verification” even being brought up anyways ? There is zero need to “authenticate” buyers, and zero need for buyers to further prove that they purchased this or that product - the commnents in the Reviews section are (were…) there for precisely that.
If a buyer has a question or an issue to report, they can ask about it in the Review or Comment sections, or contact the seller directly by email ; and then the seller can chose to address the issue and roll out an update with new assets if so needed.
It doesn’t even matter if the buyer is legit or not - this wouldn’t make a bug report any less valuable.
So why is this even an issue ? If a seller decides to overcomplicate their business by setting up a Discord server that will get them flooded with questions that people expect answers to in near-realtime, it’s their own decision to deal with. There is no reason to change the way the marketplace operates just because of that.
Remember that customer and seller has control over the market. Once people start pulling off assets from the marketplace and complaining Epic will be forced to change their ways. Either that or this is death of the official marketplace.
So it’s like Taking away the right to ask questions about the product that we’re about buy? sure you could email the seller but why the extra steps? the Questions and written review can also act as an FAQ to the Product, so you’re saying that you plan to remove the ease to access of information about the product? like why? why can’t it be left alone? so far I’ve never heard anyone complaining about this system, I get it’s for simplification but who asks for this? The Marketplace Is already simple to navigate, you could change the UI But Why Change the system? I Don’t Understand your Thought process here so please help me understand
It would, because “non legit” plugins are usually not up to date and i’ve seen people on Discord/GitHub complaining about stuff already fixed.
It’s not my case but I understand these sellers, I don’t really know why they should assist someone that downloaded their products illegally. You don’t care just because it’s not your time being wasted (or your money being “stolen”).
Many sellers require buyers to leave a review and their discord id in order to get access to doc/discord sub groups. This leads to tons of 5 star verifications
thank you for your plugin, i was one who asked a question at a certain point
honestly with due all respect, this one was one the most “dumb” decisions made by epic, by removing the Ask Question and review section now you make us go full “blind” in the product before buy, how i gonna buy something without know if it will work for me, not being able to “ask questions” before buy is one of the most selfish stuffs ever, it made things really bad for customers, because we are going blind and i can’t trust to buy something without being able to ask questions, and others told go for "email and others ways like discord to just "ask a question is sort of forced, obligatory step, you don’t go to a shop and the shop say to you if you want to “ask question” go to the "vendor house’ or get the vendor contact because the store don’'t want to “answer any question”, it’s so dumb, really disappointed with it.
If you have a plan for a more efficient power grid later in the year, surely you shut down everyone’s electricity until then right 
@Unreal_Josh, I’m sorry but this is absolutely pathetic. There is no need to disable or remove existing features and content prior to the release of these “improvements”, which haven’t even been outlined.
If you’re really looking to improve the marketplace, take some ideas from Unity and combine it with the feedback the community has been spamming you with and you’ve continued to ignore… Also, be transparent about what you’re planning and get feedback on it before wasting the time building it out.
Some Ideas:
Require semver versioning of every product update and a listing of what engines each version should be compatible with. Allow buyers to download any version, not just the latest.
Create a designated place for sellers to add change logs for each release and a way for buyers to be able to see a full history of the change logs.
Update the marketplace layout… compared to Unity’s Asset Store, the Unreal Engine Marketplace is a mess. Update the design and add helpful features like “Quick Look” to avoid having to load the full project page for a preview.
DON’T REMOVE REVIEWS OR QUESTIONS. They are an integral part of the buyer experience and any decision to do so will ultimately hurt your sales… which will drive away creators.
