FAB is a disaster, and we all know it.

spacegojira · March 28, 2025, 12:23pm

We all had high hopes for FAB and we all have been waiting here for months for things to get better, while watching our sales evaporate compared to the old marketplace and seing customers lose trust in FAB and thus in us sellers.
And yes, there are some improvements, but they are too little too late, especially when every update also breaks something else and the sales are so bad that I see many, previously successful, sellers consider leaving FAB for good.

..

So to speak plainly what most of us are thinking:

FAB is an afterthought for Epic, most likely created to save costs by bundling together the multiple sites / marketplaces they aquired - e.g. sketchfab and artstation … as well as to further Tims dream of turning Fortnite into a metaverse.

A company with billions of dollars in revenue should have the means to hire a large enough team of proficient web developers..
Yet the painfully slow development procress of FAB, the bugs, the accidents like uploading a patch to live instead of the test branch, the complete lack of a coherent design philosophy, the amateurish approach to development of basic features like a search function, …
Or how uploading assets / updates can completely break them, how FAB is flooded with AI generated garbage or stolen / copyright breaking assets, how changing the color of a sentence in the description triggers an asset update, confusing the customers, …
Or questionable decisions like hiding the reviews until we get 5, confusing the customers again and inviting review manipulation, while also favoring old, large sellers compared to small ones - going completely against the promise of Epic to create FAB equally for everyone.

All this screams that FAB is build as a neglected side-project for Epic, with a team too small and not skilled enough to handle it. Stuff like the search feature should take an expert webdev a few days tops to complete, yet it took months and it’s still broken..

And no personal offence Abby and whoever is working on FAB, but this stuff is not okay.
There are people relying on their income from FAB to pay their bills and feed their family, yet the responses we get here sound just like hollow PR statements, with completely wrong priorities.
And our biggest concerns, like AI flooding FAB, not even being addressed, make us feel like us sellers aren’t being taken seriously.

Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s painfully obvious to everyone. Just go to Reddit and browse the Unreal Engine or gamedev sub, every discussion about FAB is a negative one. And if this continues, I don’t see how FAB is going to survive..

Or to paint it more vividly, the ship is sinking and Epic is bailing it out with a spoon.

Immersive-Games · March 28, 2025, 2:14pm

You are right about so many things. I have pointed out basic functions that are missing, like Stats, after several weeks, I get a ‘It’s on the Roadmap’… which it is clearly hidden on the roadmap as well… I mean, it is not like Google doesn’t supply Stats for Free…

I want to know, as a seller, how many people actually take the time to look at my products. What seller wouldn’t.

Then the are the Duplicators, one product, change the wording, becomes another product and so on, until the selling page is swamped with them.

I actually typed in the exact name of one of my products, it appeared on page 15… totally unrelated, different product section, completely different name, products from the same seller, appears pages and pages before mine. Smells of a scam. FAB is a Pay To Win site.

Income dropped by 80-85% within a month of being transferred to FAB and has never recovered.

The Submission ‘Guidelines’ are now draconian… one product that was migrated and more than 2 years old, was ‘downgraded’ to mature, with blocked images etc, because it contained a glassware called a Whisky Glass in the Kitchen Pack. Not because it contained Knives, but a single glass.

One pack was refused because I had nested a folder called Scene within the pack, which showed the assets in a grid, just like I always do, no matter the platform, editor or engine. I had to rename it Showcase… Just this one asset pack out of the 100 or so I host.

Then there is the Copyright, EULA issue.
In the UE Project Settings Editor is a box where the note states, to put your Copyright/EULA information. Do that and the pack will be rejected. Include a nested folder called Docs with PDF that include your EULA and Copyright licenses, and the pack will be rejected. Reason: Any ‘third party’ copyright/EULA may clash with OUR (Fab/Epic) own Copyright and EULA notices… a Copyright/EULA that Epic will not pursue, if the goods are stolen and hosted elsewhere. So where is the real protection of MY goods?

What about the ‘FBX’ exporter? Assets were sort of protected by the bespoke uasset format, but someone can buy a single copy and then extract all of the meshes in FBX format, and sell /use elsewhere. What is the point with so many formats supported in one place. I sell MY assets on other platforms… that I spend numerus hours scouring, to see if someone is selling my Assets hosted as Unreal Assets, now posing as a FBX universal pack somewhere much cheaper.

I may only loose/pay a 20% mark-up to sell on FAB, but with sales dropped to only 20% of what they were, sours the deal.

I cannot use any assets that are given away freely without any usage restrictions, as I am a reseller. It doesn’t matter if you provide the creators own agreement of use, it is still rejected. I can use Free Textures and other Maps, but not the supplied shaders? Materiaze supplies Free to Use Shaders that support its Maps, made directly for both Unity and Unreal, yet unless you are a Game Maker, you cannot use them. I am not selling the shaders, but I am using this asset to showcase the Mesh Models I have created, with all the Maps, that can benefit game producers. Isn’t that the very core of what Asset Producers do?
I can expose my Meshes and the UV mapping for textures, to anyone that purchases my Assets, along with Freely available/generated Maps, but not shaders…

I am considering removing all my Unity related assets here, as I do not believe any Unity Users shops here, under the Unity EULA we are not permitted to sell on other outlets cheaper than the Asset Store… If they did, I would never know, and I will probably never anyway with this sellers site setup. Pricing limitations here on Fab, means I have to sell assets for Unity here, more expensive, or alter the values on the Asset Store to match. I really dislike the ‘99’ con with prices, it fools no one.

You may not know, that ALL of the Assets hosted here, are allowed to be used by Epic/Fab, for marketing purposes and can be used in any Movies they chose to make without your permission?

One last thing… where are the ‘prefabs’ Promised by Epic years ago? I want to be able to sell Prefabricated Versions of my Assets, not the Exposed Meshes. FBX is an Encapsulated Format that is so under used by Unreal. You can import an FBX where the textures etc are encapsulated within the file format, without the need to expose Materials or Textures, or even your meshes.

Satintribe · March 28, 2025, 4:44pm

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I have to admit Fab has been disappointing.
I, like you, had very high hopes. I watched the fanfare before Fab opened (the Fab video) and believed the hype that Fab was going to be the place to be…It hasn’t lived up to the hype.
I thought with Epics reputation it really was going to be Epic, but it certainly hasn’t.

I have written before that Fab is slowly “earning” a reputation which will be hard to lose once gained & that I’m puzzled they are allowing it to happen…and I still am.
And what I really find disappointing is that I thought with Epics reputation the products they sold would be top class and that I’d be proud, that my products I work so hard on, were being sold in such a place…but I’m not feeling proud!

…I could go on!..just to mention my latest gripes.
That being Fab, unbelievably, does not have a category for bags! Of any description!
Or that in my category the same products are always at the top pushing some of my products down the page and appearing next to Ladders and sandbags, which should be nowhere near my category…but I put it down to how the search function on here “works”…but let’s not go there.
And as for sales. I don’t expect to sell bucket loads of my products, but sales aren’t just slow, they’ve almost stopped.

That reminds me! Fab being found in search engines. I did a search (google) for 3D models. Do you know! I looked thorough 4 pages (I gave up after that) and didn’t see Fab once, only the other sites you’d expect to see.
Do Fab not promote this site?

I only sell my products on Fab, but when I’ve finished putting my catalogue together I have a sneaky feeling that will no longer be the case…sadly…as I didn’t think I’d have to sell anywhere else.

sdkwarrior · March 28, 2025, 5:32pm

I don’t know about other formats, but the Unity format doesn’t sound bad and it shouldn’t be removed. Many people wait for discounts, but it’s impossible to get them on Unity. That’s why when Fab adds individual sales, there’s a chance that people will come here for Unity.

Immersive-Games · March 30, 2025, 3:07pm

The problem selling Unity assets on Fab, is the pricing system. I hate the .99 suffix pricing range, which apart from being limiting, is not aligned with the same assets I sell on the Unity Asset Store.

Unity doesn’t allow the selling of the same assets, on other outlets for less than the Asset Store. So a Asset pack selling on the Unity Asset Store for say $5.25, can only be sold on FAB for $5.99. Who in their right mind will pay the extra? After all, FAB is not a reseller as when you chose the Unity Format, you are downloading from the Unity Asset Store Servers anyway. The only choice is to uprate all of my Unity Store prices in line with the nasty .99 price stepping. There is Zero need for anyone wanting to buy assets for Unity, to come to FAB.

Beware, if you checkout the Project Settings of your Unreal Editor, there is an entry box where you are encouraged to post your EULA/Terms of Use… If you add anything there, your product will be rejected, unless it is a Game, that is not sold by Epic and doesn’t need their approval…

The Epic EULA/Terms of Sale, do not cover you should anyone purchase your Asset Pack, then install the FBX Exporter to make copies of your assets, which are then able to be used in ANY Editor. FBX is an encapsulated Format, which includes Animations, Textures, Vertex Painting etc etc…

The uasset format gives you no security for your assets. You cannot protect them in any legal way, or include documentation in their respective folders for submission, or as part of the Project Settings.

Have a read of what you are signing away when you submit to FAB… You give them full permissions to use your assets in any Marketing, including tutorials, Movies and Scenes, without even seeking your permission. They do not even need to accredit your work.

Add to that the total lack of Sales Tools for resellers, including Ranking and Review, User traffic stats etc, makes this feel underwhelming. I was told it is on the roadmap, but it must be invisible.

The Introduction of both Quixel Bridge, followed by Megascans (supported now by nanites) that are free to scene/game makers, was a bombshell for all those Asset Creators, overnight.

FAB is a poor quality add-on to Epics plans for Unreal.

Satintribe · April 3, 2025, 11:57am

After mentioning the Fab promo video (Fab | State of Unreal | GDC 2023)
I thought I’d go back and take a look at it. I was surprised to see that it only has 24k views from over a year ago and 85 comments.
These were some of the comments the host made in the video, starting at 3.08

…”Our primary focus is on bringing you the best stuff out there from millions of independent artists who will benefit from the lowest fees in the industry, pocketing 88% of revenue from their sales so they can build real businesses and invest in more great assets for you to use”…
…”with millions of assets we have to make it super simple for you to find what you’re looking for and get inspired along the way”….
…”We believe an open and fair market place were artists and developers can come together to buy and sell assets is essential to the creation of the emerging metaverse”…
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In answer to the above quotes…
I’m trying to build a real business. I work hard to create a quality product, and I would like to sell them on a site known for the quality products it sells.

I’d like to think buyers find it super simple to find my products.

And as for artists and developers coming together to buy and sell assets…I said in the above post my sales have almost stopped…correction! They have stopped!
.

So…I decided to find some other Fab vids, like this one -
Monetizing Your Work on Epic Marketplaces and Selling on Fab | Unreal Fest 2024 -.
It was posted 2 weeks ago and only has 4K views and 24 comments, which, let’s say aren’t all positive!
I tried to watch it, but as the host bumbled along in a boring way I lost interest and clicked off!

And lastly, if you want to see a video about Fab with 158 comments (posted 2 months back) look to this video. Which is easily found, just 10 vids down on YouTubes first page of search results.

ILLEGAL Asset Rips and AI Junk, welcome to the FAB Marketplace.

I went through some of the comments…I’ll let you guess how many I saw that were positive!
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You might have guessed I’m getting a bit despondent about the business I’m trying to start on fab.

Hoping sales get better…MUCH better! Because they can’t get any worse.

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Edit…I just had to add this screen shot I just took…
Two of my bags next to a machine gun, military base , two designer bags! and an art gallery and a store…on the plus side the art gallery and store do have bags in them!!

VertexMachine · April 3, 2025, 2:49pm

IIRC that was removed from provider agreement some time ago. But they still reserve rights to remove any seller that they think is using UAS only to funnel people out to other stores. Which is broader definition than just undercutting pricing. One could even argue that selling more stuff for the same price (like having both UE and Unity versions on Fab) is funneling people out of UAS…

But overall I 100% agree that having a combo box for a price is weird choice. One I haven’t seen on any other store/platform.

Immersive-Games · April 3, 2025, 4:11pm

Then there is the total lack of policing what is hosted on FAB… the times I have seen duplications of the same product spamming each section… I search for Kitchen, I get Guns, Avatars (totally unrelated to a kitchen), Animations, again unrelated, and so many by the same seller… A single change of wording or a screenshot, then post the same submission and get another product slot. Sometime, the exact content, with a slight change to the name.

I actually searched for one of my own products by name, it began with Everything Ivy - Primitives, I discovered my product on page 4, buried beneath tons of unrelated stuff…

Stinks of Pay to Sell cr@p. It has improved since I complained again and again… but it should never have happened in the first place.

I read the blub about its release… the PR department do not work for the same company and is based upon fantasy.

Sales on my products were measuring in the high 3 figures per month, now on Fab, dropped to lower end 2 figures across the board. I have no clue why, because I don’t even have very basic stats.

VertexMachine · April 3, 2025, 4:15pm

I think that’s no longer the case. They fixed searching. Is still not ideal, but it works more-or-less nowadays, e.g:

Immersive-Games · April 3, 2025, 4:36pm

I had stated “It has improved since I complained again and again… but it should never have happened in the first place.”.. it was an edit when I tried the same search, so you have gotten a delayed cached version of the post.

a-sennov · April 4, 2025, 5:49am

All products on your image do have bags in them. Some of them are sandbags but that’s English for you

Epic’s error (or Epic error ) here is them having tag system that clearly differentiate ‘bag’ (UID: “a9c57d11-656d-4b02-af61-7b14c7f199d3”) from ‘sandbag’ (UID: “5d1bab9f-a7ba-4a5f-b9a1-96d0b1b30a5e”) still do not properly use it in search, falling back to simple text matching. Thus the results.

Mr.Osman0 · April 4, 2025, 6:46am

Yes, I completely agree with you.

I believe Fab will improve over time, but it really upsets me that the products I create don’t sell, and it’s causing me to lose motivation.

Additionally, since AI has advanced a lot in topology, people are now publishing AI-generated 3D models without even tagging them as AI-made. A single seller can upload 100 products a day. You can clearly tell those products are made by AI, it’s almost as if they scream ‘I was made with AI!’

Maybe we can’t fully stop this, but at least setting a daily product upload limit (like 3–5 items per day) or letting a few human staff review the submissions instead of relying entirely on AI moderation would be a more reasonable approach."

"Let’s move on to another topic — not being able to see the statistics of our products is incredibly frustrating. We can’t see how many views or clicks our items get.

We might spend hours, maybe even months working on a product, then upload it to Fab.com… and all we see is the product just sitting there. Nothing happens.

Honestly, it makes me feel like creators are not being valued on this platform."

Satintribe · April 4, 2025, 2:40pm

Yep they do all have bags in them.
Although it would be nice to not have a fashion item next to a machine gun, even if it does have sandbags in the background
Oh, adding an S to the end of a search term changes the search result.

Anyhow… it doesn’t get much better for my product! I just took a screen shot. This screenshot has the same bag in it, but it’s a different day.
Today my bag is next to a Boxbuschka dolls, Inventory sounds, wow! A bag and interface sounds…on the plus side, it’s not next to a machine gun!

Satintribe · April 4, 2025, 3:15pm

It may have advanced in producing models, but not the topology, at least from what I’ve seen.

A model should be created with attention to detail.
The model should have a quad topology, created with individual pieces, no overlapping uv’s and you should be able to rig it. Then it can then be used in a variety of ways. You should also be able to unwrap the model as you see fit and bake a new material for it.

You can’t do that with A.I generated models.
From what I’ve seen, they are created like you’ve squashed chicken wire together, which looks a mess, and moulded it into the shape, like you would clay, of what the model should be, and then a skin is wrapped around it.
No quad topology
No individual pieces.
No way to unwrap it and bake a new material.
No way to rig it.

An A.I model, again…from what I’ve seen, is good for a background prop, that’s it.
But that said!
When an A.I model is created, the skin it’s wrapped in always has that A.I generated look about it. I’m puzzled who would use it.

Of course there are other problems when using A.I generated products, which we all know, and so putting an A.I model into a game, for example, means you could be on shaky ground!

Whoops …I went off on a bit of a rant there…sorry about that …I’ll end here.

Probezeit · April 4, 2025, 5:56pm

View as a Seller:
Fab is a roller coaster .

Revenue:

I had the best month and the worst month ever revenue-wise since Fab. Each month it’s either extremely good or extremely bad. Overall revenue is up by nearly 2x on average so that is good. But I am the exception here & I poured a bunch of work into modernizing every product, documentation and shop page as well as optimizing SEO to rank highest (This doesn’t work as good anymore as now most popular is at the top) & tweak things like the pricing to adjust to the new marketplace. I don’t like the uncertainty of whether I make any money a month though. On the UEM it was steady and I was sure I make X money a month.

Fab Updates & improvements

I do not understand how it can take them so long to update the most basic things and manage to still implement bugs and issues everywhere. Also why aren’t you working on written reviews when it is the most requested thing. At least give us the functionality from the UEM.

Support

The support got really bad. It feels like they replaced it with automated Ai responses. The only way to communicate with the Fab team effectively is to message them privately… The support website on Firefox doesn’t work at all.
Fab btw has so many glitches and bugs on Firefox, it’s unusable.

Review & Update Team

The review team is also extremely bad. They uploaded completely wrong files TWICE already. So someone purchased product y but got the files for product x for some engine versions. One product of mine got rejected because „someone could misuse it in a way to do bad things“ with it. Its something in the sense of: Someone could delete an important file from someone’s computer if they used the „delete file“ node. I mean, WTH? You can misuse most plugins for bad things. What even is this sh*t?

I fear of updating products too. It was so often the case now that the fab team made some sort of mistake which broke my product. I also can’t really update my product pages as then the file also gets updated and my customers get confused.

View as a customer:
I used to check the UEM every single day because I built up a habit to do so in the Epic Games launcher. Now I don’t bother to even get the free for the month stuff as that is also only trash. I used to do a bunch of impulse purchases and check the latest assets but discovery is extremely bad now and I buy nothing anymore and I think 10 times about it before buying stuff. Please also give me basic features like seeing the stuff in my revenue and not USD. Give me written reviews and questions (not stupid comment threads that no sellers uses and is very inconvenient to use anyways.). Fix the glitches for Firefox and give me more sales.

KomodoBitGames · April 4, 2025, 6:42pm

They said written reviews have not been made yet because the higher ups at epic want them to make it into an api or something that can work with other epic owned platforms like EGS or Fortnite so they are reliant on working with other teams at epic while building it. The stuff they have released so far like wishlists is something that’s only for fab so they could make it fairly quickly.

Maciek_Leto · April 4, 2025, 10:22pm

What was this product about?

True

spacegojira · April 5, 2025, 9:38am

Yeah this is nonsense. How long have they been working on FAB, two years? Maybe more? You are telling me, in all this time they couldn’t get the teams together to figure out how to build the most important feature of the marketplace?

spacegojira · April 5, 2025, 10:01am

Yeah the problem is, from what I hear from other sellers, that effort doesn’t equal success anymore.
On the old marketplace, if you made an effort to create a good asset, do good presentation on the store page, have a good documentation and engage with the customers in comments & support, you would see good sales as a return.

On FAB you can do all that and it doesn’t matter, it’s completely unrealiable how much income you are going to make.
This unreliability is disastrous for sellers, who rely on the income to pay their bills. Multiple sellers, who were quite successful on the old marketplace, have told me personally they are not selling on FAB anymore or want to give up, because it’s just too unreliable and not worth the work anymore they have to put into it.

The only thing that seems to help a little bit is to have a lot of assets, but that isn’t easily achievable for most sellers. You can’t just suddenly create a bunch of plugins, models or blueprint systems in a short time, without sacrificing quality a lot.

And even then, if you are in the “wrong” category, say 2D or Music, you can create a lot of great assets and still be drowned by all the AI generated stuff that is flooding FAB now.

..

I think the entire review process got automated with FAB, as there is clearly no quality control existant anymore.
Which would explain why so many pirated or copyright breaking assets get accepted, or how a single user can upload 600 AI gen assets in a single day.

But yeah, horror stories about your uploads breaking is something I heard from multiple sellers now.
I just can’t understand how something this broken can be acceptable for Epic.. it can kill a sellers reputation singlehandely and it drives away customers from FAB, who already have a very low opinion of FAB.

..

Oh I agree, on the old marketplace I have spend a boatload of money. Every week I was browsing the new assets, to check out if there is something interesting or great to get. Often I even bought new assets just to support my favorite marketplace devs.

Now I too don’t even bother with that anymore, and this is something I hear from sooo many people in Discord, Reddit, etc.
The whole buyer experience in FAB is terrible, the search function is terrible, the endless scrolling is terrible, the viewing of the images is terrible, … and you have no written reviews & comments to actually show you how good an asset is, since the star rating is completely unreliable and so easily manipulated..

And even if people try to buy something, it’s up to luck if there won’t be bugs preventing you from actually buying stuff. How many times will someone try to buy something on FAB before they give up and won’t come back?

At least we got bookmarks now, although the design of them isn’t great to be honest.

Lazy_Golem · April 5, 2025, 7:10pm

Exactly. I’ve been working on my latest asset for several weeks, but now I’m looking into other marketplaces, because on FAB it has better chances of being stolen than sold. And I’m even looking other ways of earning money.