if people are asking for refund then there generally not happy with the product, there are always going to be people the “rip off the system”, but I can tell you all one thing if people are not happy with a product that they buy and they don’t get the refund that they want. they will simple not buy anything at all, simple as that. they will not come back, happens all the time, in every business. don’t cut your off the nose to spite the face.
I see a bit of a poor attitude towards the costumers hear, and a lack of wanting to keep the customer happy, buy the look of things this post and the whole negativity around it could of been stoped if this guys got a refund, give it to him, I don’t understand? the dude is not happy, to the point he is venting, and giving the whole marketplace a bad name, what possible reason will someone like this have to come back and buy anything from that seller let alone the marketplace? people shouldn’t need a far out and in-depth reason and full videos.
Gotta also look at the flipside. The item being sold is a landscape- which is fine on it’s own. The complaints stem either from the purchaser not understanding the parameters of the material, or from bonus content/content outside of Maximum-Dev’s control. If the ‘background meshes’ were not present, a significant portion of the likely reason that the refund was issued would evaporate.
Had Maximum-Dev simply not included anything but the bare minimum, I’d expect that this customer in particular would not be getting a refund- because it can be demonstrated that the is only a misunderstanding. At this point, removing features/content won’t be considered a fix, so who knows what Maximum-Dev would have to do in order to not have the refund issued.
Or, that’s how I’d expect the outcome to be, coming from somebody who isn’t involved with the MP at all. Things like this are why I’m not involved with MP at all.
but I guess that my point, even if he didn’t understand it that’s not a reason not to give someone a refund (in my opinion). if I buy something I EBay I would probably get a refund, I have had refund on steam because I was not happy with, it was not what I excepted . it is just excepted now days. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to sell things on the Marketplace (you don’t have to be a expert on UE4 to see that), your then end seller, your product can be altered at any time with our your consult or input, then you have to spend your time fixing the problem, but unfortunately this type of thing happing in most industry’s in some forum or anther,
but, how would I fix this, most people are happy with a “Store Credit” I would say they would fix some happiness, maybe even a Seller credit of sum sort.
I have ask for a refund on the marketplace once, because I was disappointed with the product and I didn’t get it, why because it’s impossible for me to prove that I was unhappy with the product. the product Worked but it really wasn’t what I excepted I told them the reasons why but to them it’s wasn’t good enough , So what? what was I supposed to do? there no out. I was surprised by epic and the way I was it was handled, I found it poor, and from what little research I did most of the marketplace terms and conditions conflicted with consumer laws anyway, the whole thing of having to “prove yourself worthy of a refund” its utter garbage. but for $30 it’s just not worth it. I was going to go through PayPal to get my money back but I wasn’t shore if that was going to work, and again it just wasn’t worth it
1: The Pack is called “Infinite affordable Landscapes” (there is nothing infinite, because the Landscapes are a square - this is just how it works, but the Pack-Name is “wrong” - at least from my point of view. Even if you add one Landscape a Month, there is nothing “inifnite” - you will end up with 24 landscapes for the 2 years you wrote in the description.)
2: The “Dust” he shows in his video really looks “weird” i think, but that should not be a problem if he can deactivate it.
None of them, especially if there is PDF-Documentation about that stuff.
And… that “Asset Guidelines” they require… this might sound stupid for us, but not for People who do not know that a not connected “metallic” node means “0”.
You know… People download UE4, buy stuff, dont know how to use it, and then they are coming around with questions like: “why can’t i add metallic to material XY?” or “i want a refund!!!111 material not working!!!11”
The difference is this,
When you return a game to Steam or EA with reason being “Unhappy”, they take it out from your library. You have literally no access to it once you get a refund. Same with physical goods. If you do get a refund and don’t return the physical goods then that’s fraud and doesn’t mean the marketplace should follow the same scheme.It’s wrong to assume same should be expected from a market that’s like one lane road. You’d state you’re “unhappy”, you get your money back but also get to keep the content and do virtually anything you want with it. That’s why you have to prove something is wrong with the content and simply being unhappy isn’t enough reason.
However, the current situation indicates if you are “unhappy” but nothing with the content is wrong or broken, you can still make a video or attach some images and imply something is wrong. I believe nobody is taking the time to verify the reasons. We are just given a 1 or 2 day deadline to fix the non-existent problems and any argument whether in private or public still ends against us which is unfortunate. Maybe this time they’d look at the much closer and decide to not proceed with the refund but like I said, next time everything starts from square 1. Maybe not me anymore, but many others happen to have the exact same problems. That’s why I suggest updating the rules and guidelines and whatever necessary to prevent this from going on.
SE_JonF alone I can admit has put much more effort in MP than all others, it was his primary job as opposed to us that do it when we have time, but why he should get to a point where he should leave his primary job and look for other stores than MP to work with. It’s not his fault, it’s not Epic’s fault, it’s not MP team’s fault. It’s a series of small problems that were there since the beginning and can be literally solved over one week if there was enough cooperation.
No, there is not. I don’t want to sound too harsh on Epic (luv ya guyz), but if Epic can’t even manage to let us view sales stats in real-time, or individual sale details at all, or allowing us to give out free access to our items, they definitely aren’t going to be able to help us when we think we’ve caught someone pirating our work (although to be fair there’s not much to be done anyway).
Epic, basically, shouldn’t be issuing refunds on behalf of sellers if they’re not prepared to invest serious time and effort in finding out if the reasons are legitimate. I know that’s a non-trivial task, but you know… hire people.
Umm, you can view sale stats in realtime . Or you’re talking about more advanced stats like clicks and etc?
Also, you can give free access to items, but this is a manual process(as everything else at Marketplace sigh) and should go through marketplace support.
without having bought the pack, I have to say I didn’t know the background of the lava scene was meshes. the name “infinite affordable landscapes” does have a subtle implication to big playable areas IMO
this is precisely why I think landscape packs in a game dev ecosystem are a waste, and I can’t stress this enough. but hey it works for some
getting a refund from a Marketplace asset and then continuing to use it is no different than downloading it illegally from some shady website. in the end the person using the asset has no license to do so, so the license abuse is just as much.
preventing refunds with this argument will only drive your unlawful ‘customers’ into other illegal ways to acquire your assets. on the other hand it will drive your lawful customers into double-thinking a purchase, or could even make some consider an illegal download of the assets to evaluate and try before an actual legal purchase.
the way I see it, it does more harm than good.
no amount of images, videos and technical descriptions can convey enough whether or not an item is technically satisfactory and/or suitable for a specific project. as there being no way to actually inspect and try marketplace assets before purchasing, I actually think “because I didn’t like it” is a valid reason for a refund.
Huh, i never knew that had gone up! Thanks.
But yeah, I know you can manually email Epic, have them do it manually, wait for a response, etc. That’s not really good enough.
Re: refunds: as with any good, you should need a good reason. in Australia, the rule is you can get a refund on anything if it wasn’t fit for the purpose for which it was sold. , if that’s the case, it shouldn’t have been allowed on the marketplace in the first place.
I think the “selective refunds do more harm than good” argument is pretty glib. As a creator, when somebody buys a thing and then refunds it because they decide they don’t like it, it’s like they’ve reached into your pocket and taken your money back out. Since they literally still have your work on their hard drive, it’s hard to see it any other way.
Realistically, if somebody steals your marketplace work and uses it in a shipped game, you’re never going to be able to do anything about it. It would be good if we could at least make stealing it slightly less convenient than not.
why is it glib? every other digital refund system works almost that way.
even steam is like this. you can just make a folder backup of the game before you refund (same as making a backup or a marketplace item, or arguably technically not so different from adding a marketplace item to a project). the only difference is you need a crack for the steam game (hardly a setback for any person wanting to surpass the license terms). the violation of the license is the very same
but it’s the same with illegal downloads. by disallowing “free for all” refunds you’re making it slightly less convenient for unlawful users (but they’ll get their way in any case), but you’re also making your lawful customers (your true source of income and trust) more weary about buying your product. once again, because it’s hard to know exactly what you’re getting despite the multiple pictures, videos and technical informations included.
my point is that in no case will a selective vs. a free refund system stop any unlawful users out there. might as well make it more convenient for the good users
This pretty much sums it up. This proposed practice will only hurt sellers, and I can tell you right now with all of the problems going on behind the scenes in the marketplace if there is a return to this easily abused policy it will be the final nail in the coffin for many developers. I guess it isn’t clear to people who aren’t sellers, but when you put hard work and time into your products you do not enjoy it when people try to steal it - whether it’s through piracy, or abusing the refund system. People keep demanding higher and higher quality work from the marketplace, and then want to implement hurtful policies that will chase away sellers like a swarm of bees.
People keep bringing up Steam as a justification for this, yet they always leave out the fact that steam DRM prevents their users from playing a title once it has been refunded. The same can not be said of the UE4 marketplace. All someone has to do is copy the contents of the product to another folder, get a refund and they just stole those assets from you. This happened a lot back when the marketplace policy was “refund for any reason” a year ago. Using piracy as an excuse is equally mad. Just because piracy exists doesn’t mean we should have to make it easier for people to steal our products.
You also assume the people who are trying to get refunds are always “good users”. If there was something broken in my package and it didn’t work as advertised, I as a seller would have no problems with issuing a refund. It’s the policy, and aside from that I as a seller would endorse it. However when someone makes up extremely ridiculous reasons in order to justify one (such as rotating assets randomly and claiming they don’t work together, even though the example map demonstrates how they work together and subsequently proves that the way the user approached it was wrong) then you are not deserving of a refund. I only had 2 refund attempts, and both were varying degrees of my example above. The first kept changing his story every time he realized it wasn’t enough to justify a refund. The second refused to look at the example map and then photographed some randomly put together assets that obviously didn’t belong together and in that way. These aren’t legitimate reasons for a refund. But according to your proposed system, they would have been allowed to take their money back and undoubtedly keep the assets (because I highly doubt they would have deleted the content from their projects). The policy you are referring to is an honor system, it was done before and failed miserably. That is why we have the current policy which offers protection to both buyers and sellers. If a product doesn’t work as advertised, you can get a refund. It’s as simple as that. However you have to demonstrate how it doesn’t work as advertised, and the seller gets a to either fix it or explain how it does. Is it perfect? Maybe not. But it is a fairer system than the one we had before.
I honestly can’t believe some of the things I’ve seen people write in . Especially the vilification of sellers who don’t want their hard earned work stolen from them for $0. It’s enough that we have to deal with pirates, but if we have to add refund abusers to that I can assure you that many of the people who are helping to keep the marketplace alive with quality content will no longer do so. (And yes, as someone mentioned above the marketplace is officially barely breaking even). I can personally say that if we were ever to go back to that policy I will take all of my content off. And to those who say that we are somehow anti customer - I have provided high quality assets and customer service for over a year. Furthermore I have released free content expansions with enough content that I could have sold it in a separate pack. I resent the notion that we are somehow anti customer because we want to protect the integrity of our products and earnings. I aim to deliver the best customer experience I can, it’s my number one goal in providing my service. If you have a legitimate problem with one of my packs, then I will have zero problems issuing a refund. But if you are obviously making up things in order to justify one, then I won’t be inclined to do so. I’ve had over 500 sales and only 2 refund requests who tried to do just that. It may be a small percentage, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth as a seller.
There is still a difference between downloading the content and getting a refund AND downloading the content from torrent websites. The content on those websites are usually many months old but the MP version is constantly updated.
Them having no license doesn’t make ANY difference in the end because you’d never know who has bought the package, who has got a refund, who has acquired it illegally. As far as it goes on the Epic’s side, everything is secret, and as far as it goes for other websites, they have god given rights to the content they steal and you’d still not know who owns it legitimately and who not. So the term “License” just doesn’t make any sense . All this is to prevent abuse, and I don’t see why a legit customer should double think his decision after he finds out he can’t simply fool people to get a refund, if that was his intention then he was never a customer in the first place.
Your statement is like saying no posters and trailers of a movie really show it all (obviously) So you should go to a movie theater and watch the movie completely, then decide to pay for it or not. Seriously?
Now this argument isn’t about whether a refund should happen or not. Refunds were issued since day 1 and they will be in the future. But the reasons one points out to the MP team for getting a refund are usually confusing or technical and the MP aren’t a group of artists that have experience producing the kind of content they publish on the MP so they simply proceed with the refund believing it’s legit. There is nothing below the landscape, refund accepted.
well the steam DRM can be bypassed by the use of a crack. like I said before a crack is just an extra step that doesn’t represent any setbacks for anyone trying to surpass the license of use.
you say this:
“Just because piracy exists doesn’t mean we should have to make it easier for people to steal our products.”
and I can say this:
“Just because there are pirates out there doesn’t mean we have to treat everyone like one.”
it’s two sides of the argument and I don’t think one is greatly more valid than the other one.
I don’t assume all refundees are always good users. with the current system eventually the unlawful users will go away from the refund system and just do the regular pirate route. you might never even know a pirate stole and used your assets in a game because you won’t be playing every game out there. but they will still be pirates and they will still be there, you just won’t be aware of it.
do realize I’m only playing the devil’s advocate . I’m not saying that an open refund system is just better, it’s just that the drawbacks are different.
but once again, I can’t stress enough that the problem with the marketplace is that no amount of pictures, videos and technical descriptions will accurately tell you if the asset it suited for your project. in the case of art, not until you see and evaluate for yourself. assets might be good and dandy it’s important to see if the polygons and texel density is suited for this or that camera angle, if the materials are not relying on overly complex calculations, etc. in the case of blueprints and code, if the algorithms are efficient or if there’s major architectural differences that would make the integration troublesome.
not being able to try anything before buying it, but also not being able to get a refund, is the real problem for me.
anyway I didn’t realize the marketplace had a more open refund system before, and I can understand if they went for the current more closed system. but even then it’s clear that the marketplace has issues.
and about the marketplace barely breaking even, I can understand it based on the amount of work that goes into making a marketplace item. moreso with all the changes the engine has gone through and still goes through (every major release means making sure the stuff still works. expecting something to work from 5-6 releases ago is usually a stretch).
even more with how unclear it is about the time you’re meant to support your items. as a creator if you want to keep selling you become a slave of sorts, you can never really close and just move on.
this are the reasons I always stayed away from making marketplace stuff. if it works for you and you’re actually making some money, honestly man you deserve a cookie
it’s not. you don’t pay 100+ bucks for the movie. the movie trailer is technically closer to the movie, the underlying product is the same (a video is very different from actual art pieces or code). the movie will not cause performance issues with the rest of your life. and “trying before buying” is miles away from “watching the movie completely”
you can however, go to a car dealer and try the car before you buy it (but a car is expensive). you can use 3ds max for 30 days (license is 242€ monthly, still some money). or use photoshop’s trial (license is just 20€ per month). and back in the day there were demos of games you could try before buying them.
the analogies are very different, but they show not everything in life has to be paid upfront without the rights to take it back. it’s usually more expected to allow refunds based on the amount of attachment as well as the price.
I’m not saying we treat every customer like a pirate. I’m saying I am not in favor of giving out refunds for obviously false claims. If for example someone has a legitimate claim, and I go ahead with giving them a refund there is still a that they will keep that content. But if the customers complaint was valid, I wouldn’t care so much about that because I would have failed to deliver on my end of the bargain.
On the flip side if someone makes up false claims that are easily disproved, I wouldn’t be in favor of giving them a refund. Keep in mind that the marketplace refund policy says the package has to be broken in order to get a refund, but if a claim doesn’t fall within the guidelines of the policy sellers can still a refund of their own volition. I want nothing more than to make my customers happy, but if someone is making obviously false accusations of a product of mine and I give them a refund outside of the policy - that validates their false claim.
Maximum-Dev makes a good point with his Movie example. Digital goods aren’t the same as physical goods, and are considered to be consumed once purchased/“opened”/viewed. Many digital distributors have a similar policy to the marketplace for this very reason. Steam is an outlier, but again there are DRM reasons for that.
To your point about not enough information, the marketplace requires we provide detailed descriptions, technical details and sometimes videos. If some find that to still be lacking, there is a support email which can be used to acquire more information about the product. I’ve had a few buyers contact me before purchasing over the past year, usually to inquire about VR support. The point is, if you don’t see enough information to help you make an informed purchase then contact the seller. I am more than happy to discuss my products with potential customers. Hell I’ve even recommended SciFi packs from other sellers in the past when seeing a potential customers desires wouldn’t have been satisfied with my product (mobile game support).
You were probably wise to stay away from the marketplace. It really is a lot of work, not just making the products but maintaining it and giving customer support. There is no sun setting of content, if you stop supporting a product it gets removed. I can’t imagine how it is for people with 10+ products, especially solo developers as myself. Many of us have begun to question whether it’s really worth it lately given a lot of the issues going on behind the scenes that most are unaware of.
I completely agree about illegitimate claims, it smells fishy from any angle.
the difference with the movie example, is the marketplace assets do not get “consumed” once purchased/opened/viewed. far from it. you only “consume” it once you start analyzing it for learning purposes (mostly relevant on BPs, code and materials), but most likely when you put it in an actual project.
asking the seller might prove useful in some cases but I usually avoid that. maybe it’s just me but I’d imagine that as a creator, spending 1 hour doing further technical explanations and preparing additional material is just making you as marketplace seller even less profitable. I know it sounds mean to potential customers, but time is in theory better spent creating more content to sell to more people.
actually I expect content creators to not always be responsive (it’s the case in some forum threads or marketplace comments). also many things won’t be clear until you see it (materials).
if you manage to do such customer care and still manage to be profitable, again kudos to you
for me a somewhat better solution to the inherent problem of no-try-before-buy + no-open-refunds would be an Html5 export of the project that can be viewed and tested in lit/unlit/wireframe. it would mostly just be useful for art and of course it would need some packaging and encryption of the assets and some other creative ways of limiting the use (to avoid hackers to just download and unpack the assets)
Mmmm… wait, are you saying that you are buying MP assets as a final content for your specific projects? How do you even imagine a landscape/character/vehicle/materials or code logic not made for your project to fit perfectly your project?
Like let’s say I buy Simple Towns package but they have only single lane roads and I need at least two lane roads and a limo for my game, I guess I have to refund it now? To me, MP assets are suppose to be place-holders, a basis for a prototype or a foundation from which I can extend content by contracting creator. You can use them to establish your pipeline/workflow or learn how something should be done. Sure there will be odd cases when something is so generic that it will work just good enough for you, but refunding landscape because it doesn’t fit specific idea of your game level is just… I don’t think this is a correct way to approach assets on marketplace, it doesn’t work like this even when you contract people, nothing will be exactly as you want.
Nothing personal , I’m biased towards more custom art and code instead of using assets from MP directly as they are. Maybe I’m wrong and too old for this … but I know that it’s impossible to create or find assets that satisfy all criteria.
It’s not sellers fault that there is no way to preview all possible details of the asset. Providing something like a template for building packaged demo for pure art content could be nice (assuming it becomes a standard practice to use it). But I foresee the same rhetoric repeating with code/plugin assets.
Personally I would take a different route - use MP to publish assets that demonstrate your skill, use them as marketing tool and target custom contracting work. I believe it would be more productive environment facilitating easy outsourcing of workload to experts instead of building something that is suppose to please everyone from wannabe devs to veterans.
I wouldn’t expect MP assets to exist as final content per se. if I buy an environment asset I’d expect to be able to use the props as they are and make use of modular pieces to make my own buildings and of course to assemble my own scene (with multiple roads etc). probably tweak the material or redo it entirely (but only cause I’m a tech artist and I’ll want this and that for my own material anyway). maybe make slight texture variations of the props and arch modules.
but I wouldn’t expect to have to rebake the textures into a different UV layout because whatever reasons, or reduce/increase the polycount, or change the model topology to make it more suited for a topdown view, or completely re-modularize an asset that wasn’t modular (i.e. the bumping pub’s architectural meshes, which is an otherwise awesome piece), etc.
as a customer, for me the purpose of the marketplace is to save time by spending money. if in the end I have to also spend a large amount of time then it’s not good. and of course if I spend the money and can’t use the asset it’s even worse.
for me a character is way too much project-specific in terms of all the connotations a character brings, which is why it’s understood that marketplace characters usually need to be generic and would hardly ever be used as a game’s main character.
to me a landscape is also not good. a landscape needs to be modified to suit the gameplay. and the more you do it the more out of place the additional textures will be (talking about flowmaps and such). even the regular painted layers will differ in quality (hand-painted areas vs. untouched areas with the nice distribution of layers as they come from WorldMachine)
not taking it personally. in my personal project I’m still making my own assets by hand but at the workplace I’ve worked with outsourcers so I know what to expect. personally browsing through marketplace assets and integrating to fit is a skill I’ll have to acquire for a future personal project though.
so… you assume everyone still keeps your stuff? (regardless of the fact that they could bes sued if they use it in a game?)
come on…
If i refund something because it is not as expected (since the screenshots at the marketplace dont tell the whole story about the stuff that is sold there…) i have no reason to keep and/or use the stuff that does not fit my needs (for whatever reason).
That is a valid reason - in my opinion.
After all… you buy assets in the MP on the base of a few Screenshots that were created to show the Assets from the “best side”.
Someone pays 100 Bucks for something that he will never use? (and he needs to buy it, to see what is really in the package)
It is a customers right to refund or send back whatever good it is.
Steam has a 2 hour playtime-limit for a refund, origin 24 hours? (i think it was like that, not sure)
I also got a refund on Overwatch, after i played it for ~3 hours. (just dont liked it, and asked them for a refund, and they did. (to be honest, i did not expect it))
There are 2 ways to handle the current problems:
1: give us a detailed insight for WHAT we are paying at the MP, not just 2 Screenshots and a crappy yt-video that looks like a 10 year old made it with his potato-camera.
2: Live with the refunds.
For Example:
This Tree-Pack does it right:
https://.unrealengine.com/marketplace/realistic-trees
Very very good price, good content, and a video that explains some stuff about the Trees.
This Pack… is a joke:
https://.unrealengine.com/marketplace/bane-cinematic-s
It has 475+ Assets (Sounds?) in it, and there is a single ~1 minute long track on soundcloud without an explanation if it is “mixed” with the sounds in the pack, or if it is a single asset.
How the hell can i know, from that, if i can use some of the 475+ assets?
And if i would buy it (yes i still need sounds) and it would not fit in any way, i would refund it. (and i would delete it… just to be clear)
I would refund it because i had to buy “the cat in a box” without knowing what really is in the box.
We need proper Previews and Descriptions at the Marketplace.
Also, the Price-Tag is important.
I wouldn’t care about something that costs 20 bucks or so, but i definitely would care about something that costed me 100+ EUR/USD/Apples.
Price and Quality should match at some point… we have Assets at the MP where i just ask myself “why? why so expensive?”
