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.
I’m glad to hear that a better ratings and reviews system is going to be offered, but please reconsider the intermediate step.
Migrating the reviews as-is is misleading. There are so many reviews that are just meant for Discord verification. It’s extremely unfair to migrate them as-is, unless you are planning to at least filter those.
A second issue is that many users will leave a one-star review due to user error and other buyers are able to evaluate those situations by reading them. Having assets just migrating over with one-star reviews from situations like that is also very unfair.
This partial solution is harmful for both content creators and potential buyers. I really hope you either reconsider it, commit to filtering the current reviews instead of migrating as-is or just release with a better system in place.
It is a bit hard to understand what you are asking here. You are saying we should have text-reviews in one sentence, and saying that including all text-reviews is bad in another.
Most people here want to see text reviews migrated…asking for a manual clean-up of those is definitely a stretch, mostly people would be happy to see the existing ones not discarded.
Migrating star reviews with no context is definitely a problem though. You are right that one-star reviews are sometimes obviously due to user error, and that context will be lost if they do not include the text.
I think we should ALL bring every one of these concerns up directly to the people behind Fab! Hopefully, they just might listen to us, & accept our wishes. I say that it’s worth a shot, at the very least!
I get your confusion, I apologize, but I never said that including all text-reviews is bad. Probably a better phrasing would have been “migrating the score as is, without textual explanation, is misleading”.
Again, there are many 5-star reviews that are just Discord verifications, and 1-star reviews that are user errors (or other types of unrelated issues). Not showing the context is misleading, and ultimately harmful to both sellers and buyers.
And I agree that it is unrealistic to sanitize this data which I never really asked for. I just pointed out that, if this is the direction FAB is going for, then data sanitization should probably be done, otherwise a bunch of those scores will be wrong.
Think to the countless request of discord access with 5 stars.
How would you be able to understand if the review was for the product and not for the discord access?
Not much to contribute except to say like others it’s hard to watch all my hard fought positive reviews and useful Q&A be tossed out with the garbage. As if discovery wont be hard enough now that we’re going the Walmart route of everything and the kitchen sink in one location.
Generally I’m a positive, “benefit of the doubt” person but looking at FAB storefront and the migration process I have to say I’m about as underwhelmed as I thought I would be when this project was first announced.
The migration process does not migrate buyer reviews and questions
We recommend for questions that you want to keep, you do the following:
Save them to a separate document. Make sure that you delete the username of the person who originally posted the question.
Link to this document in your Fab product description.
It would be great to transfer the written reviews & questions to Fab - but for now, it seems like that’s our only workaround.
Is there any way to save the questions to a separate document? I have ~50-60 Questions + answers for each product, so copying them manually is not really an option… Update: For now I’ve done it by setting the max questions per page to 50, selecting the whole section, then Ctrl+C → Ctrl+V into a doc. It’s messy (and it doesn’t copy the nested answers when you don’t “Show More” them manually), but it works.
Thanks for the reply Abby. I like to bring up the big elephant issue that everyone here seems to have magically forgotten… that is the BULLY / HARASSMENT comments left on the question section of our products.
I believe questions should be sent to the Seller’s Email and not be public in our product’s page. Why? because they will abuse that window to trash our products without even testing them. Now about text-reviews, I support them but as long as they are well monitored and have purchased our products.
Many marketplace sellers are manipulating the review system by placing asset documentation exclusively in their Discord server.
This forces buyers to write unfounded 5 stars reviews with their Discord IDs. Some sellers have 100+ of such fake 5 star reviews. Those reviews should NOT be transferred to FAB!
This will result in:
Having large amount of assets with non-objective & fake 5-star ratings.
Misleading customers in their buying decision & complicating getting the necessary info about an asset.
Anti-competitive practices against other marketplace vendors, who are honest and transparent towards their customers.
No text reviews means customers can’t even see if reviews are constructive or were just Discord verifications.
The entire sense and purpose of Reviews gets lost.
We must guard the review system for what it is designed for, and allow open text reviews and questions.
FAB should NOT start its lifecycle with ruining the review and question system!
Agree. Epic don’t seem to be assigning any of their PhDs to these kind of problems or challenges (not even able to moderate SPAM on here). So that’s a red flag. Are Epic rushing what is a huge marketplace change too quickly? As most corps seem to be able to solve these kinds of problems easily with AI.
To be fair, they’ve actually deleted an spam thread. But I think that was done through someone manually taking care of it.
As for the rest, I genuinely don’t know. Like, some people can get away with spamming the forum with their nonsense for an little bit before they silently get banned
But stuff like this should be an Day One feature, in my opinion
^This^… That’s why everything feels rushed… If Epic needs more time to make text-reviews work (like copying over existing text-based reviews and not just Discord validation spam) then why not take it. Nov / Dec / Jan is just as good as Oct. So long as everything works…
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