Fab will fully replace Unreal Engine Marketplace. By joining Fab and migrating your products, you can upgrade your listings to include additional file formats, new licensing options, and a real-time 3D preview in each product’s media gallery. While all product star ratings will migrate over from Unreal Engine Marketplace, Fab will not support open-text reviews or questions sections
Text-reviews and Questions were one of the most important features of the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Before I bought a product on the marketplace, I always checked how actively the seller is replying to Questions to get a feeling for how likely it is to get good support from a seller. If this information completely disappears on Fab, I’ll certainly be willing to buy way less things on there than on the UE Marketplace.
Why is this important feature not made available on Fab as well?
I agree, this feature being removed is large enough of an issue for me to consider pulling my assets from sale and finding another marketplace for them.
This seems crazy - while not every asset needs it (perhaps a basic 3d object can be judged by a preview) the majority do. It’s especially important for more complex things like plugins or blueprints where you can generally get a pretty good feel for whether they are going to work in your setup from the reviews and questions.
I can appreciate the logic behind consolidation of the multiple stores but this will be a big step backwards for UE users and a little surprising from Epic.
I wonder how Sketchfab users who are not commercial (for eg the many museum scan collections) will respond to this move - it looks like Fab is very much shop first, everything else second.
Epic already lost that valuable text-infos in the past. If they now do not migrate it intentionally, and have no options to ask/comment from non-buyers as well as people who have bought the product, then potential buyers would have to rely on the creator’s advertising only.
This is a no-go, and even more people will choose to get their assets from other -even illegal- alternatives.
Also developing this Fab thing for many years now and not having such basic functionality is just a shame. I have no good feeling about it.
When creators move their products to Fab, any star ratings that those products have on Unreal Engine Marketplace will transfer to Fab and be visible on listing pages and in search results. We plan to release an improved ratings and reviews feature that will offer both buyers and sellers more detailed information about products’ value.
Imagine thousands of authors, developers, and artists working hard for each positive review, only for Epic Games to suddenly say, “Let’s just throw it all away” .
They provided a vague excuse, saying, “We plan to release an improved ratings system…” and blah blah blah, which only highlights their incompetence and indifference toward both sellers and buyers. Who cares about future improvements when these issues NEED TO BE ADDRESSED HERE AND NOW?
Moreover, this so-called “improvement” obviously won’t restore the UE Marketplace text reviews and Q&A section. All of it will be lost.
Update:
I just read a topic over a year old about the announcement of Fab. Sellers expressed concerns about review system, and what did Epic Games say?
We are planning to update the system since we have products coming from multiple ecosystems. We want to greatly improve the way people can leave feedback in the future to allow for improved discovery and less possible toxicity.
And what did Epic Games do? They couldn’t care less and implemented the simplest review feature .
Ironically, they called it “an Evolution of the Unreal Engine Marketplace.”
Yeah, it’s evolving - just backwards
A simple star rating isn’t that useful - which is why the majority of platforms that offer customers the chance to review also include text (From Amazon to Google maps to UE Marketplace). Many people leave one or five star reviews that are essentially meaningless and represent uninformed or angry knee jerk reactions to the thing being reviewed. Text gives context to the star rating and allows the shopper to decide whether to trust it or not.
This has been a basic aspect of the internet for so long that surely everyone on the Epic staff is fully aware of it. It must have been planned for Fab and at some point the dev costs or potential moderation costs got in the way - or perhaps things were just running very far behind and there was a desire to launch asap?
Whatever the reason it’s a big step backwards and the developer Qs will also be hugely missed, with this section very often ending up far more useful than the reviews or stars.
I agree with all of this. Q&A and reviews were a fantastic way to learn more about a pack in the Epic Marketplace, and in many cases encouraged me to purchase something I was on the fence about. I encourage Epic to prioritize adding reviews and Q&A sections to listings on Fab.
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