How are sales for you publishers?

General Feedback & Requests
62

So there is basically no enforcement, since anyone can just buy the personal license, correct?
Serious businesses wouldn’t risk their success over a maximum price of $1,499 per professional license that they will own forever and that might be saving them much more in development time, and such professionals are the target audience of the Professional tier. To professionals, this is a business expense (that they know would cost them much, much more money/time if custom made, because they are aware of the actual market.).

I have contacted Fab support weeks ago because I only wanted to offer Personal licenses, they said this wasn’t possible despite me sending them multiple examples of sellers currently doing this.
I would take the UE Marketplace over the disaster that is Fab any day. It was not perfect, but it was expected, and at least we had wishlists, reviews, questions and etc!

You don’t sound rude or sarcastic.
I’m sorry if I’ve missed the point or any previous context. I simply was responding to the Starbucks comparison, which is still invalid, and to you explicitly saying that the professional license is not making sense - now I understand your point and what you meant.

I have been charging clients based on their company size/revenue for years. I’m not charging more here, I am simply charging smaller companies/individuals much less so they can grow their business faster, which would also help me grow my business. Companies that I’ve worked with did this, and many tools and marketplaces offer licenses based on revenue, like Unity (exceeding $200,000 in earnings requires a Professional license) or CodeCanyon/ThemeForest/AudioJungle (a much more limiting license where you must purchase an Extended License per project if you’re going to use the asset in a product that you sell, as in a video game for example.).

I completely agree that customers must get extra features or benefits when purchasing a professional license, but I absolutely don’t think this can be applied to Fab without redefining the terms of the current personal license, simply becuase the UE Marketplace/Fab’s personal license already offer everything a professional license can offer to customers and leave absolutely no room for any extra benefits.

When purchasing a product on Fab under a personal license you get extensive rights, lifetime updates and free support. What more can a seller offer through a professional license?

The UE Marketplace created this unsustainable environment where customers have such high expectations for minimal, one-time payments and where sellers are expected (required, really) to maintain and support products indefinitely, completely for free. So, the way I see it, the current license tiers are the only way to ensure a (somewhat) fairer contribution from higher-earning companies without affecting the personal license. Still, and just like every other aspect of Fab, it was unthoughtfully implemented without considering the different nature of products/frequency of updates if required at all…etc

Now regarding sales,
I wanted to wait for the Black Friday sale to see how things will be and it seems things are bad for everyone.

I have 3 products in the Game Systems category, which is the currently featured category on the homepage of Fab.
Out of these 3 products, one has no reviews, the other had three 5-star reviews and the last one had a single 5-star review back on the UE Marketplace.

I did not ask for these reviews, customers wrote them because they actually liked a certain aspect of my products and support. This makes these reviews invaluable to me, but Epic Games simply removed them, and all my products show “No rating yet” now. Having no ratings makes it impossible for the products to appear in the featured Game Systems category, which only shows products that has +4 star ratings.

At first I thought the products being showcased were picked randomly, but it seems the same products are being showcased. Out of these showcased products, 2 are from an AI Seller who sometimes share small systems, and 3 products are from an old, very well established seller who most likely wouldn’t even notice the exposure.

Fabulous!

63

May I suggest ‘Copyright safety’? Like buy Professional and have the warrant that in case of any problems with asset in this field it will be Epic and seller who will deal with that.

1 Like
64

According to Fab Distribution Agreement, Seller already agrees and Accept responsibility and Liability for their Content and Ensure all rights belongs to them.

However, According to Fab EULA, I case of any Damage caused by use of Asset, Nor Epic nor Seller is Responsible (Kind of Strange but for Epic Protection).

Although, my recommendation would be to Look out for Sellers who Brand their Product well with for example, you would find their Name anywhere (From marketing Materials, In Products, They may have their own Domain) those kind of Sellers are Safe Bet (although No Guarantee) since they are Promoting their name as well with Product, They won’t do anything wrong Intentionally since it will ruin their Name and Reputation. Although lot of Sellers doesn’t do that but it is my method to Filter Safest Bet Especially for Non Generic Content like Vehicles, Characters, etc.

1 Like
65

What I had in my mind. Now in case of any trouble you’ll quickly find yourself alone against some greedy corp lawyers. Remember Palworld. Professional license could provide some help here.

That’s why we have models from Dekogon in every second indie game. Oh, and they’re featured on Fab’s frontpage too. Pure coincidence, of course. \s

66

True, But I am not saying to go only with Dekogon or only known Creators, What I mean is to just check little more Information about Seller, and how much name or Branding they do with their Products, It is kind of Safety Check.
I have seen decent amount of Sellers Linking their name with Products (Not only Dekogon).
If Seller is linking their name with their Product, that does kind of indicate that they are Serious for their Business and doing something wrong will ruin Name and Reputation forever.

Although it doesn’t matter too much for Tree, Buildings, etc. But It is especially True for Characters and Vehicles.

Also I think Dekegon and some know Featured Sellers are receiving Overexposure, They are already known by everyone and is kind of Waste of Featured Slot for Featuring Sellers.

67

Yes, but again it’s honor system. The possibility of legal issues with no real established consequence is not exactly compulsion. And corporations assumedly are not the ones in the forum complaining about high professional prices.

68

We weren’t required to offer both tiers in the beginning (which I didn’t), but later the Agreement changed and they sent us an email informing that both tiers became mandatory and we wouldn’t be able to make updates to products that didn’t have the tiers. So I waited until I needed to make product updates (UE 5.5 came out) and then I included the tiers.

If you see products without the tiers I suppose it’s because they were never updated after the change in the Agreement. For instance, they can’t include compatibility with UE 5.5.

69

Very much this :slight_smile: I am glad my point was clarified so that it can be understood now.

Unfortunately I think they really wanted to have two-tiers of pricing (for some reason?), but I agree that it doesn’t really make sense here to have a personal tier.

The Marketplace is for professionals making products. There is no personal use scenario for a C++ Plugin that serializes saveGame info.

I think this is how we ended up with a “personal” license that is actually for business use despite its (bad) naming. They forced two-tiers, but this isn’t a shop where most products have any kind of personal use scenario. It probably had relevance for people printing miniatures from .STLs they got from SketchFab, but it just doesn’t work at all of Unreal Engine users.