Epic Founder - App Store takes too much with 30% cut. UE4 Market to lower theirs?

[Maximum-Dev]

While I do chuckle at the irony of Sweeney’s comments with the current state of the Marketplace and it’s cut being identical to the appstore, I don’t think comparing the marketplace to Gumroad is fair, comparing it to Steam would be closer to the point. No one is reviewing or checking quality or even if things work on Gumroad, there might be an issue if you get a ton of chargebacks and complaints but there is no crew of staff reviewing things to ensure they work, follow standards and are of a minimum quality. It’s pretty much the same even with Steam, no one is really reviewing our game except players and then the market decides it’s fate, I don’t think that works here as it just leads to a flood of low quality garbage that scares away customers in the end. Sure the review process leaves a lot to be desired, it’s slow and some assets that are clearly just ****** Unity mobile packs brought over with minimal effort make it through, but it’s still there keeping the torrent of even worse piles of garbage off of the store and maintaining *some *confidence for the buyers.

On top of this, just like steam, being on the marketplace means gaining access to a huge population of developers that wouldn’t otherwise know about your product and boosts sales. We have our assets on the Unity store, 3d Export, Creative Market and we used to be on Turbosquid and our sales are 10x higher on the UE4 Marketplace than on the rest of those markets combined. Same packs, same marketing material, 10x more sales here than everywhere else combined. I think that’s because our packs are much more suited to FPS games, which UE4 is the king of, but I definitely don’t think that accounts for a 1000% difference in sales. I’ll agree with @BarisT that Unity’s popularity is partly because of it’s asset store but I also think it’s decline in certain areas is also very much because of it’s asset store. There’s so many dev’s making so many ****** games because the asset store became a race to the bottom and is now absolutely flooded with so many ****** $5.00 packs out there and, in certain circles, Unity is synonymous with low quality. While I certainly question, and have done so publicly, a few packs that make it through, overall I think the quality bar is being kept relatively high and we hopefully aren’t going to go down that same road as Unity did.

At the end of the day I certainly would love to pay less, I would love a quicker review process and I would love reviewers that know at least as much about the engine as we do so we don’t waste time going through iterations to fix something that doesn’t need to be fixed. There’s a lot of frustration that we’ve felt because of this, and a lot of WTF moments when I see some ultra low quality **** make it through the submission process, but with all that being said there is still a decent amount going right over here, the sales are outpacing anywhere else because of what makes this marketplace different from others, and I think that needs to be kept in ind so we have some perspective before going too far down a rabid rabbit hole of vitriol

I’m not convinced as to why we can’t compare MP with Gumroad.

1. I’d say we both agree that maybe 10% of the review process is the healthy process to keep garbage away from MP, but 90% of the process is pure waste of time, let alone the fact that garbage still make their way to the MP here and there. There are many packs on MP atm with content that are absolutely useless for game development whether because of their bad design, absence of optimization or anything else.

2. There are tons of refunds. They just hid it from us by adding the 24 hour delay on the sales data. Remember we used to wake up every morning to see on average 5 refunds on our products. I’ve seen 11 refunds on my products in one day, there are people who have had even more. But yeah they hide the data from us and that’s the point where we started to assume there are no refunds.

So basically saying they can’t be compared with Gumroad is not true (in my opinion) as they are not doing or providing anything special in return.

If it happened Epic asked for 30% and claimed it’s due to providing 10x more exposure then sure. But they’re claiming the 30% is purely for operational costs. The high exposure we have on MP is nothing Epic is giving us, they put no efforts in giving us high exposure. The high exposure is just because it’s -the official- store and people tend to buy more from the official places and in fact Epic even kept the exposure as low as possible by not giving us any channels to communicate with our userbase.