Let me see if tagging still works after forum upgrade.
@;
Edit: It doesn’t work for some reason. Sigh.
What determines how much a marketplace should charge? the amount of effort they put into it.
- Redistribution.
- Real time sale data.
- Analytics. Knowing where the audience are coming from and such.
- Tools to engage your audience -> Newsletters, updates and such.
- Automation -> no ~3 months wait times for a simple content review by staff.
- Transparency.
- Communication.
- Protection.
etc.
But when it comes to UE4 Marketplace:
- Redistribution of content are done with 3-9 months delay. Vast majority of submissions are rejected due to wrong submission guidelines from Marketplace itself as well.
- Epic refused to invest a fraction of the 30% cut back into providing us consistent real time sales data and instead they cut it out with putting a 24 hour delay in place.
- Analytics? Marketplace never heard of such features.
- Absolutely no way to engage with your audience. Epic refuses to allow sellers to talk to their buyers. We only get to talk with the few people who happen to write on our support threads.
- Transparency has always been something Epic talks about. But when it comes to marketplace that word doesn’t make any sense. We don’t know what’s going on with our sale data really, anything can happen to it during the 24 hour delay and we wouldn’t notice. We also don’t know how many refunds are taking place on our products and why because sales data aren’t real time or transparent. If we sell 4 units of a product and have 3 refunds it’ll only show us 1 and we’d never know we’ve had 3 refunds.
- We don’t hear back through PMs, we rarely get replies in emails (~10 days wait at best), Marketplace Forum and Creator’s Hub are completely abandoned by the staff and no one from Epic talk to us there about our questions and concerns.
- Seems like the trend is pirates buy our products, ask for a refund by claiming their credit card has been lost or whatever and they’re granted refunds by Epic. That’s how we’re seeing our products go up on torrent right after uploading it to marketplace, without actually seeing any sales on the sales report.
etc.
It’s only after 3 years of wait that we’re getting a beta seller portal. Where did all the money go to through these years since Marketplace’s existence? Furthermore, why does Gumroad charge 5% while providing tons of tools and options for us to work with? All other stores that are taking the same %30 cut are providing much more versatile and consistent services than Epic does with Marketplace. We aren’t even able to edit our own prices! Even AppStore has more rights to taking a 30% cut than Epic because it doesn’t take up to 9 months until they redistribute your thing. (Yes someone waited 9 months for his plugin and that’s crazy), and average release time being ~3 months. So in a nutshell Epic is charging 30% for redistributing content with 3-6 months delay.
We apprecaite the new seller portal, finally we’re able to edit our own product prices, images and so on, but the fact that it has taken 3 years makes it bitter to even think about it.
You should’ve charged 10% at most through these years and only raise your cut once are are providing services that are worth the money.