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.
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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.
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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.