It kind of depends, for me. Normally, I don’t unless it’s something that’s meant to last. But specifically with video games, it’s like 60/40 for me
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Actually, you made me remember one place I shop for games without written reviews and that’s PSN. The thing is I almost always do an online review search first before purchasing anything. And the more time goes on I’ve been buying most of my games from GOG and sometimes from Steam. I haven’t bought a single game from the Epic Games store. I have downloaded free games though, but haven’t played any of them yet.
At some point I think I won’t be buying any games from PSN anymore since I canceled my PS Plus account many years ago.
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Contact your colleagues to join FAB’s Livestream to make Epic aware of this issue, in the Twitch & YouTube commets, or in conversations with Epic staff.
Ask Epic to return text reviews & questions.
Epic must be informed that open-text reviews & questions are very important for creators, customers, and FAB’s success!
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Agreeing and liking your post, don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said already, just intent on Epic taking notice
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Ohh they know about all those complains already, rest assured. They just don’t have any urgency in it, as things like prettier lightning seems to be more important than their own client and their own sellers facing financial issues due to this buggy, messy intervention that is FAB right now.
In the way I see it, they pretty much fired everyone from QA of the previous marketplace (we wouldn’t have so much low-quality stuff otherwise), are pushing to some sort of AI auto-review system (explaining why non-labeled AI, copyrighted/stolen stuff and plain garbage are passing through “QA”) and will update things ONLY when someone finally open a 3rd party marketplace that poses a threat to it.
Regardless of the 3rd party marketplace, expect no change at all until they have a cut in it. Remember: They won’t benefit anything in fixing their buggy mess since we have 100% of the revenue share until the end of the year. We will only see a proper response when their pockets bleed due to the massive decrease in sales. There is no such thing as free candy.
Let’s be honest, CGtrader, Turbosquid and the other websites are just as bad, if not worse. Artstation is far better than FAB, but they will nuke it too next year. There won’t be anywhere else to run to after that. I’m honestly surprised that no one appeared so far to put FAB in check.
In the way things are right now, if you’re not a top creator you’re pretty much doomed.
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The roadmap is up: Epic Developer Community | Fab Roadmap
Looks like text reviews, and a comments section (opt-in 
but better than nothing) are in the current plan.
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Epic staff said during the FAB livestream that they don’t plan to transfer old reviews 
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That’s bad.
I remember written reviews being introduced in the past to make it not anonymous and to combat exploitation of the review system. With time sellers learned that they could exploit this even more by offering Discord access via the review section. After a lot of unrestricted exploitation, Epic took measures to combat this for a short time, then let unrestricted exploitation run free again.
The result is many products with zillions of 5-star reviews that are just Discord access requests, but at least customers could look at the texts and see that they were just Discord access requests.
Now Epic removed the texts but maintained all the stars gained via the exploitation, putting at a disadvantage sellers that didn’t exploit the system and earned their reviews the hard way…
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The new star-only rating system on Fab.com significantly diminishes the value of user feedback. Without written reviews, there’s no context to gauge the technical competence or intentions of the person leaving the rating, which is essential for making informed purchasing decisions.
From my experience, user reviews on the previous Unreal Marketplace typically fell into four categories:
- Fan Enthusiasts – These users often left 5-star ratings, not necessarily based on practical use of the product but out of admiration for the creator or the concept. While well-intentioned, these reviews were easy to identify and weigh accordingly.
- New Users – Often unfamiliar with Unreal Engine or the product’s intended use, these users might leave 1-star ratings out of frustration with their own lack of experience. These were also easy to spot and discount.
- Genuine Reviews – These were rare but invaluable. They provided balanced, thoughtful insights into the product’s quality and functionality, helping buyers decide whether a $100+ plugin was worth the investment.
- Helpful Technical Reviews – Occasionally, users shared fixes for bugs or offered workarounds, particularly when the creator was unavailable. These reviews often saved time and frustration for other users and exemplified the collaborative spirit of the community.
By eliminating written reviews, the star system loses its utility, as it fails to differentiate between these user groups or provide meaningful context. The only scenario where a star-only system could be somewhat effective would be if accompanied by a 24-hour refund policy, giving users the opportunity to try and evaluate a product for themselves.
I urge Epic to reconsider the importance of context in reviews. Written feedback not only fosters trust and transparency but also empowers creators and users to make better decisions.
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The problem with a 24 hour evaluation period for testing, is that in order to be fair with both sellers and clients, Epic would also need to implement a feature to automatically delete the files from any projects after a refund. Otherwise, this would only create a loophole for ill intended people. There are ill intended people on both sides, a healthy marketplace should not have loopholes on either side.
A star-only review system is not useful in any scenario. The best course of action is restoring written reviews, so people can make an informed decision before making a purchase.
It is concerning that, even though written reviews were added to the roadmap, there is still uncertainty regarding migrating the review texts from the UE Marketplace. A lot of useful information will be lost if that is not handled correctly. Unfurtunately, honest sellers and clients are always the most affected by issues like this.
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Horrible. Almost makes me wish we could access the old Marketplace as an option.
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Of all the bad moves with Fab, this is probably the worst. Yeah it sucks having no wishlists, no publisher in the title, tiny images, no easy way to contact the authors unless they link a discord or something…
But when you combine the lack of reviews, and the lack of questions and answers, Epic has created an environment where publishers are in no way accountable for anything. How do you know of the quality level of what you are buying if the seller doesn’t have a discord, doesn’t have 5 reviews, and you can’t even ask a question or see what other people think?
You can’t. Which apparently is how epic wants it. It’s the same thing their techs have with bugs and the removal of the AnswerHub, and butchering of documentation… The publisher is always right apparently.
I’m certain they are paying for this now with a lack of sales. It’s their first big sale quite some time. I bought one product. Not because I didn’t want to pick some things up. But because the interface is so terrible, that I had trouble finding anything. What do I have to click every tiny icon that I can barely see, and then figure it out? I want to filter my search and I have to scroll through hundreds of items? That’s how bad fab is. I’m willing to bet the farm they are earning less income from fab than they did from the marketplace, despite having unity offerings.
I’m a fan of Unreal Engine. I’ve been a fan of Epic since Unreal 1 (ran the old Unreal Dojo way back when). But I am not at all a fan of the changes they have made to support and the marketplace, over the past couple years. They need to hear this feedback.
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You’ve also forgot to mention about how there’s an ongoing legal issue with people creating models from well-established franchises and trying to sell them for an quick buck. Some of us where maintaining an thread about it. At least we were until it got deleted an little bit after they’ve unveiled the roadmap for Fab.
Speaking of which, the bookmarks are supposed to be coming back. It’s just that it’s an comparatively low priority against everything else
As you may have seen on the roadmap or the livestream we are going to be adding text reviews. We are first addressing various other things related to search, overall UI and navigation, wishlists and so on, but once we are through these, we plan on getting to Text Reviews.
I personally totally understand the value they have in assessing the quality or value of a product, and while open text reviews might at times be abused, we should not let that be a reason to remove them altogether. We will need to figure out ways of keeping the reviews genuine, and that will probably take some iterations and may spawn further discussions on what the right approach is, but one way or another we should make sure that as a buyer you have as many tools as your disposal to assess the quality of what you are looking at purchasing.
@estrange - We were thinking of having the comments opt in because not every seller might want an associated forum thread. Happy to reconsider though if you all think it should just be there for every single product on Fab.
@maciek_leto @peacesells @wsmatis1 re migration of previous text reviews: I also really don’t like losing years worth of info and content. That happens all too often online in general I think and it is never great. However on the other hand as you will have noticed we do have quite some issues and improvements to resolve with Fab. First things first is to address various workflow and search or discovery challenges, and adding in things like the new text reviews. Once we are through those we will need to take another look at where we are at, what the biggest gaps or needs are, and whether at that point there is a way of migrating the previous reviews, and what that then would mean technically/legaly/workload wise and so forth. It is not a ‘no’, but we just don’t want to overpromise things right now given just how much we have to do in many different areas. When the time comes we will explore it though.
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Yes, but an forum thread per creator would be more reasonable, now that I’ve thought about it. Especially with the occasional instance of AI portraits flooding the marketplace.
To be fair, I haven’t seen much of the bootleg apks being passed around in the last few weeks.
First of all, thank you very much for replying our concerns
As a seller, I like the idea of having a Questions section on the product page, flagging which clients have acquired the asset, so it is easier to identify pre-purchase questions from support requests, exactly like it used to be on the Unreal Marketplace.
I don’t like the idea of a mandatory forum thread, I believe this could be an optional feature. Some sellers already have dedicated forum threads on discord, reddit or their own websites, having another thread would decentralize information. Having it as a optional feature would allow sellers that don’t have a thread yet to create one, without decentralizing information for sellers that already have one.
Regarding the reviews, the former Unreal Marketplace review system was good enough as it did follow the industry standard. A good review system only needs the user name, a single score and mandatory text justification for the score.
Having a report feature to let the Epic Support team mediate any conflicts is also interesting, this feature was also present on the former UE Marketplace review system.
I believe most sellers and clients just want the old review system back, it was good enought to let people make an informed decision. The only improvement necessary, would be a way do deal with Discord validation reviews, as it was indeed a loophole.
Creating a new system with multiple scores will overcomplicate the review process, making it harder to create a system that makes sense for multiple types of assets.
It will also make clients less inclined to leave a review, as it will be more time consuming. Multiple scores will also consume more database resources than the conventional single score system.
Following the industry standard is the safest and fastest solution to implement, so I believe restoring the old UE marketplace review system as it were is the way to go.
Regarding restoring the text reviews, I did worked with migration of large data volumes in the past, as long as the table structure for the review system is ready on the FAB database, the data can be migrated gradually using scripts, usualy during server maintainance time.
I also believe the minimum five reviews threshold should be dropped.
Regardless if an asset as only 1 review, it should show its current average score. Clients are smart enought to know that a single review is not enough to make a informed decision, but 3 ou 4 reviews are.
The way it works now, if an asset as 4 negative reviews, a client would still buy it, unware of the quality issues. On the other hand, an asset that has 4 positive reviews is less likely to be sold. Treating both assets as the same is not fair for either clients or sellers.
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Comments should stay opt-in. A mandatory forum thread will lead to Spam and price Harassment for our products 
. If they want to harrass, force them to do it in the text-review section where they are required to BUY before comment. It’s common sense, buyers shouldn’t be allowed to trash a product without trying it first.
Indeed one the reasons we put the comment forum threads on the list is because it is a pretty low lift due to it being able to rely on the existing forum infrastructure, while it can provide decent value and handle anything from reviews to feedback to support to showcasing work people made with what they bought.
We are hoping to get to it in January. That is what I will try to push for at least.
The reason we are looking at having both the comments threads and text reviews is that the text review feature would provide a cleaner list of actual reviews as opposed to what might be hundreds of replies of technical discussions or questions to wade through, and more control. With a forum we would not be able to limit text reviews solely to those who actually purchased the asset which might increase abuse, and we would not be able to manage it in other ways that could help improve the quality of the reviews. For ex a forum would not allow us to randomize the reviews shown, or whatever other mechanism we want to try.
The combo of forum comment threads + wishlists should hopefully be an improvement already. The reason we got wishlists ahead of text reviews is based on the fact that the wishlist is easier to implement. Text reviews are harder because there is also a moderation component to it. I understand text reviews have a big value, but we felt that the sum of a range of easier to implement changes together may still have a good impact, and allow us to bring improvements faster than doing a single larger feature that will take time to get through. That is what drove our prioritization basically.
We can look into this, but what is the dev platform?
Yes, several of us in the team would really like to see this happen too. It will probably come at some point.
You can hide AI content via a switch. And as per the roadmap we will make that switch persistent so once you enabled it, it will stick.
Yeah that might be better. Though for sellers with a lot of stuff this is going to lead to confusing situations probably. Ideally you can pick how you want to do it, but as that would add complexity I think for now we probably need to settle on one per product.
Long term we have this idea that we’d love to be able to offer an entire mini forum/community per creator, but that is not that easy to set up on a Discourse based forum, and at a scale of potentially hundreds of thousands of mini forums. That is probably more like a 2026 thing at the earliest.
Indeed, that was our original thinking too. Maybe optional is best.
All of that makes a lot of sense. When we get closer to starting work on the text reviews and ratings we will take all of this into account. The intend with the multiple ratings is to try and summarize things into a clear metric but maybe it is overthinking it.
And I will discuss the 5 review minimum with the team. I see that come up a lot.
Got it, optional it probably is then.
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Prohibit tags on sellers’ support threads that will show them on the various general forums’ pages, especially on Unreal forum.
A lot of off-topic, self-promo and “How to install UE???” newbie questions are already now burying serious topics and questions.
If you now push for thousands of asset-creator-support-comment-threads to invade the forums where each thread will pop up on the top with every new comment, you will make it a nightmare to use the Forums.
Even if this is now just a quick workaround before you implement a proper QA section on asset pages. You should still appropriately implement it to not worsen the already not-the-best UE forum experience.
Thank you.
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