And since free assets are also “purchased” from the Epic Store before use, I am sure these terms apply to them too. Here’s the link to the guidelines if anyone wants to visit Marketplace Guidelines - Unreal Engine
PS: You might be good at asset creation but not everyone can make a rifle in 3 hours. I made a custom rifle for my game from scratch and it took me a day and a half from the modelling to rigging to animation to texturing to debugging to finally importing to the engine. So free assets are still a viable option for us.
The licensing is specifically set up so you cannot use the assets outside of the engine. At least it was the last time legal looked at it.
It’s been a year or 2, so it could have changed - I honestly doubt it.
And mega scans has a different licensing alltogether - compared to the Marketplace. Where the licensing is specifically only free if utilized within unreal.
So, yes, you can extract and manipulate the files, but you probably cannot export the FBX and use it in Unity for instance…
I remembered there was a marketplace FAQ page before, but they replaced it with the support site, but I found it on the Wayback Machine: Unreal Engine | Marketplace FAQ.
I see absolutely no downfall to that and it satisfies the original question, which I would guess, since being on “Unreal Engine” forums, refers to good “Unreal Engine” games using free “Unreal Engine” assets.
It’s only normal that Epic would want their assets to not be used outside their engine, given how vastly different Epic’s monetization strategy is to other engine developers, say Unity. So yeah, if you want to use free assets from Epic’s Marketplace, maintained by Epic, kept safe by Epic, distributed by Epic, I think it’s only fair use towards Epic that we don’t use their provided assets someplace else.
You can use the .fbx files in any engine after extracting through Unreal Engine. You can use most base assets anywhere after extraction, such as textures, static meshes, skeletal meshes, sound files, etc. For them, it’s a matter of morals. I doubt, even though they said not to, the creator or Epic would pursue you if you used a sound file provided on their marketplace, in Unity.
It’s the complex assets like particle systems and blueprints that can’t be migrated since they’re built to the engine’s specification and at that point it’s more a matter of keeping them working properly with the engine than to prevent users from migrating them.
Unreal Engine is always free up to 1,000,000, unless you’re a big studio and plan on making a whole lot of money, or simply don’t want to be financially engaged with Epic over your earnings. Then, you’d call them and arrange something else.
It’s worth noting that the 5% royalty is off of your sales, not your profits. So, for example, if you work with a publisher to publish something on Google Play, and they take half of the profits, you’ll get 35% (30% goes to Google, half of the remaining 70% goes to the publisher). You’ll be paying epic’s 5% out of your 35%, which is essentially about 14% of what you’re making. It’s still a bargain though.
Consumers don’t give a ■■■■ about where you got the assets from, and lawyers would only care if you win hundreds of thousands of euros, so go ahead without fear.
What about the Sketchfab ones that give you a CCA license? Obviously you need to credit them but given that most people there provide the license with free stuff they give out, i think it’s fair game.
Actually, you pay Epic 5% of all gross revenue, not just your cut:
You agree to pay Epic a royalty equal to 5% of all worldwide gross revenue actually attributable to each Product, regardless of whether that revenue is received by you or any other person or legal entity, as follows:
With that math, you’d be giving Epic less than you owe them (ex. if the publisher took 100%, you’d get 0%, and 5% of 0% is 0%, so Epic would get nothing). Here’s an example from the EULA:
The royalty is based on gross revenue from end users, regardless of whether you sell your Product to end users directly, self-publish via the App Store or any similar store, or work with a publisher. The following simplified example illustrates the application of the royalty to gross sales: if your Product earns $10 on the App Store, Apple may pay you $7 (having deducted 30% as a distribution fee), but your royalty to Epic would still be 5% of $10 (or $0.50).
So in your example, you’d actually earn 30% (35% - 5%).
You didn’t read my comment carefully (or maybe I phrased it badly). You have to pay 5% of all revenue, which obviously comes out of your share. You have 35%. You pay 5% to Epic, leaving you with 30%. That’s ~15% of your share.
But how are you going to sign a contract with a publisher that takes 70% and says that you are in charge of paying the royalty to unreal and the royalty to the store?
Fire your negotiator right now!
The negotiator was probably the same person who read the licensing before and said… “yep we can use free assets however we like. It doesn’t matter, we’ll pay the fines, maybe.”
And finally there are taxes and other business related costs, such as insurance. Not to forget the unpaid time invested.
For an industry with an endless supply of complainers, it sure is an interesting choice given how insanely difficult it is to make tiny success or any success at all.
We must have an unusually high threshold for pain. Since society has become so easy and comfortable, our ancient brains get bored and then complain because this Leonardo DaVinci level free tech hasn’t reached Star Trek quality yet.
People aren’t even complaining about AAA level s*it that gets produced.
Take Assassins creed and it’s downfall of quality.
Take dark souls which has never been good.
Take any other major tilte that was once good and became total - including Thief, once upon a time the greatest game of all, reduced to cow dung by the relaunch where you can’t even jump.
So why do you feel people would complain to indy devs about using assets that are either bought or free / why do you even think anyone but another developer would know?
Yes, the complainers are in infinite supply.
But even that infinite supply was barely enough to have EA change mass effects ending ?
And we are talking about more complainers than those who got Disney to “admit” Aladdin was racist (Which it isn’t for the record. If you think it is, kindly refrain from posting in threads I read, thank you )
- including Thief, once upon a time the greatest game of all, reduced to cow dung by the relaunch where you can’t even jump.
)