Apologies in advance if this post ends up quite lengthy - I have quite a lot of thoughts on the current state of FAB at launch and feel quite deeply dissatisfied with decisions made, lack of communication and so on and want to make an attempt to provide some feedback as I imagine that if there is a time that Epic are looking for it, its probably now.
Some background on me - I’ve been selling products on the UE marketplace since 2016, shortly after it fully opened up to the public, and have used it to supplement my income quite reliably in that time. I also use it as a customer, thought admittedly quite infrequently, and feel like I have a pretty good handle on how this current version of the storefront fails both sellers and customers quite badly.
So as for the feedback…
Reviews and Ratings
This has been covered by a lot of other people but its such an important issue I feel the need to outline exactly why the decisions made have been very detrimental. For starters, a single number metric is quite meaningless overall. While you can use it to roughly gauge a product, in general the written reviews are far more useful. Many 5 star ratings were left by friends of the developers, many 1 star ratings were left by angry customers who didn’t know what they were doing and misread, or didn’t read, product descriptions. Additionally, a lot of products were abusing the review system to verify customer purchases and some products had literally hundreds of 5 star reviews because the developer does not provide documentation or support until the customer reviews the product. Now that the review text has been removed, customers have absolutely no way to know if these ratings are legitimate or not, and those developers now have been given a massive boost over those of us who utilized the review system legitimately and worked hard to earn proper reviews from customers legitimately happy with their purchase.
With this change - as a customer there is no longer any way to know if a product is legitimately good or has been abusing the review system in any way, and as a seller there is no longer any way to know why a customer might leave a review whether that is positive or negative, and thus hard to know what you can do to improve your product and address customer-specific concerns.
I understand that you have plans for a new review system, but that is simply not good enough. If FAB was not ready to launch, it should not have been launched, or efforts should have been made to bring over the old content customers and sellers rely on to make informed decisions in the meantime.
Questions Gone
Similar to the reviews - the question section was an incredibly useful resource as a customer to know if a developer actually cared about their product. Many products had a huge amount of unanswered questions and this made it clear that you had to be cautious about purchasing that product if it seemed likely to be something you may need support with. Removing this is a massively negative decision that, again, hurts customers ability to make informed purchasing decisions.
Additionally, now the only way to get support is via email or discord reviews, and so many marketplace creators just do not check or reply to emails. I know this as I have reached out to many over the years without response. Some people do not use discord, or don’t want to join a million discords (one for each product) and some developers do not even offer real-time solutions like discord servers. The questions were a great solution for this and their loss in this regard is very unfortunate and overall reduces the value of the marketplace.
Product Publish Dates
All products have recent publish dates, regardless of when they were originally released. My product from 2016 is now listed as being published on October 13th 2024, as that was the date I migrated it over to FAB. This unfairly sets customer expectations that the product is a recent one, and not one that has been in maintenance mode for many years now, and is going to invariably end up in customers being upset (rightly so) and wasted time and resources on my end explaining that its an old product. I understand that this is likely a design issue that cannot be easily resolved now, but this is a huge oversight that hurts both customers and sellers.
Removal of Wishlists
Again, this issue has been covered by a lot but yet again - its such a huge oversight that I feel it bears repeating here. This should not have happened. Visibility on the marketplace was already bad (arguably its now worse on FAB), and wishlists were a great way to keep an eye on a bunch of products for sales. The fact that they were deleted overnight is already bad enough - but there was no warning that this was the case. Many of us reasonably assumed that, as it took many years for wishlists to be added - they would not simply disappear like this and FAB would launch with wishlists. Again - I know that you have plans to implement something similar in the future, but that is simply not good enough. As mentioned above - if FAB was not ready for launch, it should not have launched.
I am aware we can contact you guys via a form and request a PDF of our wishlists, but this shouldn’t have happened. If you were going to remove wishlists then an automated system should have been set up to do this instantly, and you should have let us know this was coming.
Removal of Filtering Options
In combining many marketplaces, it has made filtering a now larger well of content more important, and yet we have had vital filtering options removed. The biggest issue as an Unreal Engine user is the inability to filter by engine version. Right now if I search for a product, I have no way of knowing if the search results will be compatible with any version of the engine other than clicking on each individual result and scrolling down to check. This is made worse by the fact that all products are also “new” due to the publish date issue, so you can’t even take a guess by sorting by newest. Customers are absolutely going to make purchases and then find out that they cannot use a product with this setup. There are many other filtering options that have been removed, and the current setup makes it incredibly cumbersome to find what you want.
Copyright Issues
If you search for Dragonball Z, Star Wars, Mario, etc. right now you can find a huge amount of content that is not legal to be sold on a marketplace such as this. Some of it is fan made, but a lot of it is directly ripped from games and in most cases the creators aren’t even pretending that they made it - a lot have things like “All rights belong to ” or “I didn’t make this model and intend no copyright infringement”. This is absolutely appalling and I have no idea how this even happened - surely this is a massive legal risk to Epic directly… I know sketchfab in particular was full of issues like this prior, but I would have assumed they would be addressed BEFORE launching FAB.
Many of these assets have varied publish dates and multiple prices for their licences, suggesting that the “creator” did in fact choose to migrate the content over to FAB. When I did this with my UE Marketplace content, it took a little time and one product was flagged for an issue, so presumably there was some manual oversight to this process - how did all this content get by this?
Share Feature Broken
The current share button displayed on each product is broken. When you click share you are provided a short link that goes to an error page. When this was raised by people on the forums, people were told to try different browsers and asked what specific products exhibited this issue, but I haven’t seen a single product that shares correctly when tried so unless this was not tested, at all, I have no idea how this was launched in this state.
Substance 3D Promotion Abuse
Launching with an offer like 6 months of Substance Painter is great, and I don’t think anyone would be upset at the “spend $25 or more” requirement. But allowing people to upload a single listing to get this promotion for free is so incredibly shortsighted. People are uploading photoscans of objects on their desk with zero effort making them usable, I’m sure there are a bunch of creative commons assets, etc. and its just encouraging the marketplace to be flooded with garbage for free codes for the promotion. The fact that no one seems to have raised that this would happen is, frankly, unbelievable as it should have been immediately clear this would be an issue.
Some additional thoughts
Its incredibly frustrating to me, as a seller, that no real communication was made on this whole process ahead of time. We had no idea things were coming on any specific day, we had no real insight into how everything would work - if you check the forums there is still discussions where people don’t know if the old sales report is still working or not. That Epic could not have simply reached out, even with 24 hours notice to cover some of this, is really disappointing. So little effort was made to communicate with your business partners on this venture.
There are a few nice changes I can mention… The overall design of the FAB storefront is nicer to look at than the old UE marketplace, and finally being able to hide AI content from search results is a wonderful change. But all this is overshadowed by poor search results, worse visibility options than before, bad communication, a loss of consumer tools, and so much more.
FAB simply does not seem ready to launch, and it should not have been launched. At the very least you could have kept older marketplace up, even redirecting to FAB for new purchases, to allow people to have the tools needed to make informed purchases.
I really hope that big changes are coming for this storefront , but this has been a massively disappointing release and judging by the UE reddit, the forum posts on this page, discussions in discord servers I’m in, etc. - that is the overwhelming feeling about this whole thing. The above list is far from exhaustive, and its very easy, just scrolling these forums, to find a laundry list of other issues that people have. These are just the major ones I see as an issue and feel like chiming in on. Above all, I no longer feel like I can make purchases on this marketplace due to copyright concerns, a lack of consumer information, seller accountability and so on. And I feel as a seller that I should expect my sales to drop to zero because if I don’t feel like I can safely make purchases, why should I expect anyone else to.
… basically all of old marketplace is out there shared somewhere… some sites even charge subscriptions for access :|)