2 month gone, still waiting for review process of my art assets to get review
I got an invitation for a beta test of some kind of new developer portal.
Apparently Epic is recreating the Marketplace developer portal, hopefully with features we need, so this is probably why everything was so late to get the 4.17 update.
I have no new products to submit at this time so I am not participating the beta for this new portal. I hope it’s better than what we currently have tho.
I’m in the same position as you, got the invite but I have nothing new to submit to the beta. Stopped working on new assets as its been taking too long just to get the ones I already have up.
Hey Epic please update the market place items you have received.
I have a project that depends on several items that I have bought through the marketplace. 
There is people that paid for a product and is waiting the update (that the author already uploaded more than 2 weeks ago where update the whole structure) of the product (they already paid) for more than 2 weeks and still not updated. And this have some teams waiting for the update…
Communication is something that Epic lacks big time atm, maybe it time for the sellers to find other legal options, having to relay on Epic is just a joke nowadays, it really looks like they don’t give a **** about users/buyers.
I used to be a big supporter of Epic but not now.
been waiting 2 weeks for a product that i use to be updated !!!
the other side is that Epic expects you/us to test the “preview” version to find bugs for them, that system needs to work both ways not one way
I heard trust mentioned in this thread, and I have to say that I think this reason here is one of the most important points for Epic Games to consider. Not trusting Marketplace Sellers to update their own products and maintain their own page, etc - especially when coming from a Seller with a good track record - is just poor form. Look to marketplaces such as Steam, eBay, or the likes. These places give the Seller complete control of their product with minimal complications. Steam (after an initial review process) for example, allows the Seller to set the price, title, description, etc, etc. And with a good rating system, this will sift the wheat from the chaff for the buyer, and will destroy / empower the Seller depending on the Seller’s own level of interaction with their community… not depending on someone at Epic who was too lazy to do their job on that day / week / month / quarter.
I’m a big believer in Epic Games, and I do have the patience for them to get their **** together - since they are, by definition, Epic. But the silence they have displayed here is woeful, unprofessional, and downright disappointing. Streamline Marketplace Assets already, Epic. Unity is laughing at you and your inability to capitalise here. Whereas it should be the other way around.
Reading such threads year after year one would assume epic is a small group of people operating from a rented apartment depending on donations to pull it together. No matter how hard people are working to improve the platform, a simple post wouldn’t slow down the progress on seller portal or whatever other secrets going on behind the scenes. Just spend 4 minutes per day to create 2 posts to clam people down.
Reminds me of world machine 2 developer abandoning and development for 2 years and then saying hi, I was busy so I couldn’t make a single post in the whole time. This is a serious disrespect and wasn’t something people expected from epic. Sigh. I hope one day updating files would be in our own hands so we wouldn’t rely on epic’s response anymore.
I think Epic is adopting <Valve Time>
We’re pretty close to rolling out a more automated pipeline for Marketplace sellers to reduce the bottlenecks caused by the completely manual review process.
The current process arose because we chose to launch Marketplace before we could build an automated web front-end and sever back-end for seller management. At the time, we thought the automated pipeline would come online sooner, but we greatly understimated the challenge of rolling out all of our planned engine back-end systems simultaneously with building and launching our current games. Now the development bottlenecks are starting to clear up.
This system was never motivated by a lack of trust in Marketplace sellers. Everyone’s lives will be better when the system is more automated, yours and ours too.
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@Tim Thank you for the reply; we’re all eager waiting for this new Marketplace portal.
(btw I also don’t get why you go against app store’s 30% cut in recent interview while Marketplace charges the same)
I appreciate the fact that you post here. We all do.
Currently the new seller portal is going to address many of our issues so there’s less to complain about. But there are a few debatable issues.
[HR][/HR]
A) Title of this thread says “Dear Epic, Please Update Marketplace Products”. Updating existing files is a critical act for sellers. Marketplace had set to achieve a 1 week response time by the end of August, that didn’t happen. But even then 1 week wait is too long for updating existing files. So my question is this, (according to the staff) why updating files is still going to be kept manual even after the new seller portal is released?
B) The review process, if is going to remain manual (which is the intention according to the staff), is so far the greatest motivation killer UE4 Marketplace has ever seen as it’s plagued by macro and micro inconsistencies. Here are some examples the seller community experiences very frequently:
**1. **Submissions get lost. After months wait people ask about it and then they’re asked to submit again. We really don’t know how a submission is lost though given there’s a confirmation email right after submission.
**2. **Apart from Automation, are you aware that some other aspects of the Marketplace are also pretty disastrous?
For example the Submission-Guidelines are designed by preference, not professionalism.
For instance our projects are required to have a file/folder structure that kills the organization and fast access. The required structure is even COMPLETELY against the file/folder structure that’s being used internally by Epic Games itself. Here’sa project rejected while having the same standard structure as Epic’s internal projects. There are lots of submissions rejected for false submission-guidelines.
**3. **There is no order in the submission reviews. It’s clearly not First In First Out process.
**4. **Review length take up to an infinite amount of time longer than the time spent to create the product itself.
5. Lack of communication - Please take a look at Creator’s Hub, the place is abandoned. We really need better communication between sellers and staff. A few posts per day isn’t really going to hurt anyone. But if you look, I think thisis the last time we had a conversation with staff. Thread belongs to July 31st.
Point being, while you’re at it, please try to free us from such problems as well. Most of the issues here need no large $$$ investments or tons of man hours.
[HR][/HR]
Also most of the issues just need a simple understanding. For instance, Epic’s PBR documentation says that non-metallic materials should have nothing connected to Metallic pin so that’s what people naturally follow. But since Marketplace’s existence until a couple weeks ago staff continuously rejectedprojects that had any materials that had no 0 connected to Metallic pin (which is wrong and against the documentation). It took us +2 years of arguing until staff finally dropped this. Like I said, guidelines are designed based on preference, not professionalism and thisneeds to change.
[HR][/HR]
Well you might not be kept in the loop but the lack of trust has caused a great deal of disappointment among the sellers community so far. Actually we’ve had some features available since long time ago, but locked on us for what it seems precisely “lack of trust”.
For instance I can refer to the “Price” field that’s been there since many months ago but intentionally locked on us to prevent us from raising or lowering our prices at will.
If I want to bring another example, prior to the recent upgrade we were disallowed to update our own thread titles, staff specifically mentioned that this was to prevent abuse. We seriously hope they’re not gonna block that feature again.
If I want to bring a third example it’s the refund policy where we’re disallowed to be in charge of processing refunds on our own. Not to mention that we’re currently getting zero email notification every time there’s a refund on our products.
If I want to bring a fourth example it’s that staff refuse to talk to us about the “Fraudulent Purchase Detection” process. They refund such purchases and claim to disable those accounts before our files are downloaded but there’s been several cases proving there’s nothing preventing them from downloading the content along with getting a refund. But still nobody let us know what’s actually happening behind the scenes with such cases.
I don’t think sellers here are stalking for an opportunity to break a rule or rip people off. That line of thinking is something that needs to change.
[HR][/HR]
These are just issues from the back of my mind. There are far too many issues to deal with. From the bottom of my heart, we as a community appreciate every second of the time staff are putting towards making this a better platform, but in all honesty, most of the issues originate from their lack of actual development experience within UE4 and general online store management experience. Everything continuously collapsed after Jon Jones’ contract came to an end.
[HR][/HR]
Anyways, all super excited to see you actually reading and posting.
We all hope for a better future, looking forward to see that getting started with the new seller portal.
Cheers.
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Maximum-Dev, thanks for the detailed summary of all of the pressing issues. We’ll get together internally and dig into these topics in detail. We’ll provide a response, but it’ll take till late next week. Lots of areas to cover.
The fraudulent purchases implementation is something I’m fully familiar with. The payment processors (Visa, etc) require several different levels of fraud detection to occur. Some of the fraud detection occurs immediately when the user attempts to purchase an item, and rejects the purchase if potential fraud is detected. Other parts run asynchronously and can reject the transaction after the purchase was initially approved. It’s sometimes possible for a user to sign up, buy an item, and download it before the bank rejects the transaction and the purchase is reverted.
Thus we (and other stores that sell downloadable stuff) face a choice: either accept that some abuse will occur, or block all first-time purchasers from downloading their items until a fraud-detection waiting period has elapsed. We want purchasing to be as convenient as possible for legitimate new users, so there was no question in our minds that a waiting period would be unacceptable. This applies to sales of Epic’s own games as well as Marketplace items, and in the case of our games we felt that crooks who would commit fraud probably wouldn’t have been legitimate buyers if the system had rejected their purchase sooner.
Thank you very much.
I think everybody here greatly appreciates this information. There has been many of us keeping our content exclusive to the UE4 Marketplace mainly for the sake of protection. But recently more and more of our products started to appear on the torrent sites without us actually seeing any sales on the seller report, giving us clues that purchases are refunded and content downloaded. Thanks for the confirmation.
In the case of Marketplace assets it’s not limited to that one person who commits the fraudulent purchase, their goal is to upload the content and as that happens we literally see thousands of downloads taking place on our assets, a good amount of those downloaders would’ve been buyers if the content wasn’t available for free. I think I should quote a very respectable seller here which sums up my thoughts about legitimate buyers.
Cheers.
Thanks Tim for the great replies, It’s great to see some high level attention for the marketplace improvement. I personally have many assets in queue and i’m looking forward to many more in the coming months. The current communication relationship between Epic and Seller is very one direction at the moment as it is frustrating to run a business based on the marketplace. There are some great people who are busting their butts on staff to battle the overwhelming workload but receiving no response for emails can’t happen for an indefinite amount of time. It seems like there is no ownership of any submission. It is literally tossed around like a football from one person to the next and if someone isn’t holding the football, it gets lost into the Zendesk void.
I’m optimistic for the future of the marketplace and I hope this begins the effort to make the whole experience better for every seller who works everyday for the common success of the marketplace.
Thanks again for giving the much needed info! =)
I wish it was like itch.io. I update and it shows up immediately. Would also be nice if we could run beta’s for updates and have other cool features for customers. For example, we are running a beta for our big 1.1 update on itch.io as a way to our oldest customers to have more say in active development.
Regardless on update time Epic is taking 30% of our sales so at the very least the Marketplace should not be more of a hassle than the 10 or 5% itch.io takes.
@Tim Sweeney;
I have been trying to get in contact through many different avenues but none have yielded any results. I had two packs approved in the middle of August, my ice shader which was released shortly after, and my starter bundle which comprises of products that were already released on the marketplace in individual form. Why can I not get any information on when that will be released? Why was it not released with my ice shader since they were both approved at the same time? The bundle was even submitted weeks before the ice shader! The marketplace has shown they have no problem releasing multiple packs from a single author in one day, ask anyone about the multitude of icon packs or material packs from one seller that takes up an entire release cycle at times.
I work on this marketplace full time, but stuff like this severely limits my ability to be successful. I lost possible bundle sales in August since this was not released with the Ice shader (which is incredibly perplexing given each of the products in the bundle were already approved/released individually, and the ice shader and this bundle were approved the same day). Now my prospective earnings have been pushed back into November. There are only two more potential months for me to see earnings from that product this year. Do you see how this is hurting my ability to sustain full time development on the marketplace? The more products I put out, the more work is required of me. That doesn’t even account for the tremendous amount of work that goes into each of these packs especially at this quality, or the customer service I provide. This platform has a lot of potential, but examples like this are hindering the ability of sellers to provide content while earning a living. I’ve seen many sellers who have just outright given up on submitting new content because of this, and it’s something I’ve been forced to consider myself as this sort of a situation is not sustainable with all of these delays.
What makes matters even more confusing is the new seller portal was released today, and my bundle product is nowhere to be found in there under Approved, or any of the other submission related sections which leads me to wonder - has it been removed from the queue? I was told 2 weeks ago that I’d be receiving an email about the release date within a few days, and it’s been 2 weeks since that email and I still haven’t heard anything. Sent in another email earlier yesterday, and still nothing as of today.
I even submitted an update to my ice shader a day after it was released around the 15th, and still haven’t heard back anything. No business can function like this.