Hi, everyone! Allow me to introduce myself. I’ve just started at Epic Games as the Content Curator for the Marketplace.
What exactly does a Content Curator do? I’m glad you asked! I’ll be the face of the Marketplace to the Epic community, and my job is to make it as easy as possible for people to create awesome, relevant Marketplace content for game developers. With the help of the excellent Marketplace team, we’re developing cohesive artistic, technical, production and process standards to ensure that everything in the Marketplace looks great, is well-organized, and easy to use. With the help of the community, we’ll choose which assets will go up for sale and keep a consistently high quality bar across the board so that you know exactly what you’re getting when you buy from us.
Here’s some background on what I do. I’ve been a game developer for 14 years, and my particular specialty is art outsourcing. I’m the guy that seeks out external artists from all across the world, trains them to use my project’s tools and technology, then works closely with them to make the best art possible for my project. Most recently I was the Outsourcing Art Manager on Just Cause 3, and prior to that I ran my own art production agency where I was lucky enough to develop art for games spanning an extremely wide variety of visual styles, genres, and platforms. I’ve had my hands in a bit of everything, and I believe that’ll come in handy in my role as Content Curator.
I’ve also been deeply involved in the video game art community for many years. I’ve been writing, blogging, speaking, and podcasting for artists for over ten years. I’m extremely passionate about self-improvement, career development, and freelancing in particular. Some of you may know me from the CrunchCast, and others from my blog posts like Your Portfolio Repels Jobs or Marketing for Artists. I’m fascinated by the rise of empowered, self-sufficient freelancers and game developers making their own way doing what they love, and I believe the Marketplace has remarkable potential for giving people the opportunity to do exactly that.
My goal is to take everything I know about helping creative people around the world produce great content that game developers can easily use to maximum effect, and to make the Marketplace the world’s best place to make that happen. I’m honored and excited to come aboard and be a part of !
To voice my only compliant with the current marketplace I’m not “comfortable” with it being squished into the launcher. I use big screen resolutions and it looks so tiny.
Can you tell me if there is plans to improve the overall browsing experience and if not I’ll have to go out and buy a smaller screen?
Quick question: I’ve been toying with a new project and I"m trying to check back to the Unreal Marketplace on the dates you write that certain “in progress” items will be available. For example, I think the Modular Sci Fi hallways would be cool to mess with, and that was marked down for a 12/5 release, along with about 5 other things. Now, we’ve blown past that date, the things still aren’t available, and there’s no new date or info on the Trello. I was getting into the habit of seeing something on the Trello, hunting down the developers, and just buying the stuff from them directly because it saved me the 2-3 week waiting period, but I absolutely love UE4 and if Epic gets a cut of marketplace sales (as they should), I’d like them to get that support.
Very interesting! Good job Unreal! I’m so happy that you’re prioritizing the marketplace. It’s so important… and for me, is the future of the indie game development. =)
Thanks everybody! I’m really excited to be here and to get you know you all.
I’m still getting ramped up here and learning what the future plans of the Marketplace and the launcher are, so I can’t speak to that just yet. However, that is exactly the kind of feedback that I’d like to hear so that I can do what I can.
above answered correctly, but I’ll reiterate. The dates on the Trello board for everything to the left of “Promoted to Marketplace” are for the voting period to determine what does or doesn’t make it into the Marketplace. That being said, we have been discussing how to clean it up and clarify the overall process better for the community so that the status of submissions is clearer.
However, one part of the submission \ promotion process that’s difficult to estimate is the time between community voting ends and the content pack goes live in the Marketplace. What happens then is that we contact the submitter to let them know their asset has made the cut, and then we sign all the legal and financial documents. Only at point do we receive the actual source assets, and that’s where the real detail work begins. is where the Marketplace Content Team works closely with the submitter to polish the submission and make sure everything works exactly as intended before going into the Marketplace. Sometimes takes a few days and a few rounds of feedback before we can make the assets perfect for mass consumption, so that’s why it may sometimes seem like it takes a while to get posted.
To improve upon that, one of my first priorities here is carefully documenting the best possible process and troubleshooting steps for submitting assets and making sure they’re as close to being ready as possible on the first try. It’s essentially a list of best practices that’ll help speed up getting your assets on the Marketplace, and I’m going to be broadcasting that to the community as they come together.
To some extent, yes, but it’s because of how hands-on we are with the content creators to help them along. We actually get quite a few submissions that don’t make it to the public board for various reasons. Part of the time gap between submission and going to the public board for voting is working with the content creator to bring it up to quality and give advice on presentation so their submission has a for the community to see it, like it, and vote for it to move it forward. It is a fair amount of additional effort, but we think it’s worth it, and we hope that the community does as well.
That being said, can (and does) slow down the overall process, but it raises the quality bar of the Marketplace’s content. I’m going to find every way to reliably and responsibly speed up the turnaround time from initial submission to voting to posting, but not at the expense of quality. It’s a tradeoff, but I’d rather err on the side of higher-quality, consistent, easy-to-use content than to raise the risk level of the developer. I’m typically in the position of being a developer seeking content, and I assess the risk of buying an asset versus commissioning a unique asset or doing it myself. My two primary concerns determining whether I buy or not are a) construction quality and b) usability. It can be hard to know what you’re getting, and there’s a reasonable risk of spending more time fixing something you bought than it would be to make it yourself. Ultimately, I want the Marketplace to become the place developers can go to know that whatever they buy, it will absolutely work to fit their needs.
We’ve discussed at length internally, and at time we feel that would significantly lower the quality bar of what the Marketplace offers. We’re not ruling it out in the future, but that requires a lot of moving parts. We’d need to reach a point where we can ensure a minimum level of quality, as well as having a more scalable means of presenting it for public review, voting, transferring and updating the files, and managing the community’s feedback on it. For right now, I’d rather keep things the way they are and work on improving our process and speed than to cut corners on the developer’s buying experience.
Thank you! Those are excellent suggestions. I know some of these things have been discussed before, and I’m still ramping up and learning what the community requests are and what our internal plans are. Consequently, I’m a little reluctant to comment on specifics until I learn more.
Thank you for the comments on my material pack on the Trello Board - I have been trying to improve the overall presentation of my packs each time i submit one to make them as aesthetically pleasing and as clearly demonstrative as possible.
I’m happy to hear that, rather pleased actually, that someone knows that it’s more than just pushing other peoples junk for the quick buck and so far I’ve yet to see anything that I would consider sub-par, including body bags(J/K).
I for one would rather wait a month for pro stuff and pay top dollar than buying on the cheap and have to spend time fixing stuff that should have been right in the first place.
Hello,
I am a filmmaker and would like to hire someone to use gaming creation software like Unreal Engine to
make the film . the film is a period piece from the 1700’s any ideas? kennethmelie
cheers
KennethOMF
