Thanks but too late. It went 4 pages long and at the end happened what shouldn’t have happened. 
If Epic wants to comment on it now they have to prove me the person that’s refunded is not using any of the 12 landscapes now. Only 2 of them were used for creating false claims.
's the actual rule (you can find more info ):
Specifically this part:
Copying and pasting information contained within private correspondence is the . You can talk about an without using the original text (and images in this case) so long as there is no personal or identifying information.
I would much prefer the marketplace operate on an “All sales are final” policy, and I speak as someone who has spent orders of magnitude more than I have made on the mp. Of course, Epic would need to actually check art assets for quality to do that.
@ I see what you mean, though I still personally think this policy hinders the ability to have a full discussion. Why should he have to paraphrase the reasons given if they ultimately convey the same message? Not trying to make a big deal out of this, but that’s just my observation. But the policy is the policy so not much can be said.
The case is simply a matter of poor marketing choices which could easily be avoided.
These words… “infinite, advanced, pro, universal, complete, total, AAA, best” etc and etc… all those words, it’s a mistake to use them in your product’s name or description. Specially if the product is far from great.
You’ll get in trouble for using those “marketing words” always sooner than you might think.
It’s nothing related to the package name. I never mentioned in this thread a refund is happening right now because of the package name. The case is this:
The is there is no ground to put the landscape on it.
The is that I had a sharpen post process material in the package that I didn’t actually use to sharpen the renders and the buyer pointed to it as broken content.
And the is I have included distant mountains for user to design the horizon lines but they made something else out of it.
And ultimately the is Epic didn’t listen to me and despite me providing evidence in private and public the only reply I got back from Epic in this 48 hours regarding the evidences was the email saying “We’re processing the refund”.
While it’s true that some percentage of people who pirate content or games, were unlikely to buy them legitimately in a first place. But in this case, there is a big difference between pirating games and pirating content. When someone pirates game, he/she enjoys it or not, for free. When someone pirates content, they can use it to make profit. Some people use pirated content in commercial games, content which you can’t even buy - Activision suing devs of Orion. Which is a bit of extreme example but these things do happen.
About 20-30 games are released on Steam daily, how many are released on websites with free games and on mobile market I don’t even know. But trying to find who of the devs is using legal or illegal content is almost impossible with such volumes. Sellers have no idea who uses content legally and who is not, this is for MP team to check. Will they check games made with Unity too? As a lot of content is just transferable between engines.
Updates and support of code/bp don’t matter much for someone who ships game every 6 month or less, neither they are going for a kind of quality where they would care about fixing most of the bugs. On top of that no one stops you from making multiple accounts or having a “friend” developer who own those assets and can appear on development team as soon as legal question is asked.
In my past business endeavors we were building all kind of tech and out of the box solutions for the game engine (not UE4). Quite a few of our assets where pirated. Not just for educational purposes or hobby projects but for commercial use. This creates a competitive disadvantage for my own customers and is not just a pirating anymore but outright stealing. Pursuing each offender, takes away too much time and for a lot of indies being accused in using stolen assets publicly won’t make much difference in a long run.
We did found solution at the end, but it was a loss for our customers who could afford out of the box content but couldn’t afford custom commissioned work. Mind you, this was quite a few years ago, before the whole “Unity Asset Store” culture. So the levels of piracy and dev who didn’t care where so much less.
Should I be allowed to shoplift every now & then because I buy a lot of food for my family of 10? Not saying that that is what you are suggesting, but I have to wonder…
Add to this the fact that epic give us ZERO information on the purchasers of our content, so even if we could keep up with the volume there is know way at all of knowing who actually bought our content versus who stole it
I have updated the OP. In case anyone from Epic comes to write , please reply to the OP.
Regarding to
Im making blueprint code pack and i have some placeholder materials for FX and UI, so i should check all of them for this kind of stuff?
Hey everyone,
We’ve been emailing with Maximum about this and have been trying to resolve the issues presented. There is a lot more to this conversation than what is being presented and we keep correspondence private for that reason.
Maximum, can you please respond back to the email we have been contacting you through so we can continue?
I would also like to let you guys know that we are taking these concerns into consideration and we will be updating the refund policy to be more concrete and better protect the sellers.
Thanks,
Stephanie
rightfully so. if they change this policy, go for it, but they cannot start releasing people’s personal information to god knows who online for past purchases and it wouldn’t be smart to do so for future. Sure you may make cool assets (you do specifically) but you could also be a psychopath or a stalker… what information do you want? Email? Phone number? Address? Age? If you start with some information… it will lead to… “well I want their CC info too so I can work with VISA about this!”. If you kill me over a dispute its Epic that will be sued for giving my info out to you and allowing it to happen. The transaction was between me and Epic (for instance). Not too mention privacy laws differ from country to country, whose info are you “allowed” to give. Which bits? Which need to stay private or even resident?
If you seem reputable and trustworthy. Release your assets on your own site as well, or exclusively and still advertise it . Some sellers I buy from directly always because I prefer that if they seem legit enough.
Dont forget, as a seller YOU have a choice too. I’ve thought about releasing a few cool assets too and decided no due to support and these types of issues. You can choose to sell on this type of market place… exposure and transactions are handled on your behalf(for a fee), but you’re at the mercy of their guidelines and their guidelines will be less “fair” to the small guy as the market grows. You can choose to release independently, set up a biz and accept legit transactions, again there will fees involved, plus work to set it up. But you can manage your refunds, manage your quality control, fight with the angry customers on your own and spend your days taking calls and responding to emails etc.
I bought your “VR Ready hands” as a real example. They LOOK great. What I was “annoyed” by was that there are no animations really other than idle. Not even a simple fist closing animation for when the player presses the VR button to close their hands. I say annoyed because I wasn’t expecting a library of animations but simple GRAB for VR hands… I definitely was expecting that. I can(and did) easily fix this by making my own animations for grab and shoot etc… or using UE4Editors built in tools to make them from a modified idle anim that IS included. I thought about asking for a refund an looking elsewhere but the hassle of that was less than making the anims I wanted myself. did I read the desc to see if it had fist closing animation, shooting? I cant remember… but its a good example to show that some things people assume and other people assume differently. It also shows that Epic would need to micro manage requirements. I think VR HANDS should have a clench animation by default in order to claim they’re VR ready. Is that the majority? Who decides… etc. Can’t please 'em all. When you sell through a 3rd party for the benefits of exposure and easy “transactions”… you’re at the mercy of their policy which will always be generalized instead of specialized.
As with any buyer… you the seller also have choices.
The piracy argument has been discussed to death … always the same arguments.
Just simply the UE4 username should suffice. Maybe not even that- just being able to do a check like
“Has [username] purchased my pack?”
that is just a box for the username, a dropdown for packs/assets you’ve made, and a submit button with a simple yes/no result would suffice.
Sellers can ask for a username if they’re contacted by email, and if they were contacted by multiple emails claiming to be the same username, they can simply PM that user on the forums for clarification.
“Oh god, he has my username! I’m screwed!!”
Well that’s a real shame because by posting anything to a public forum, it becomes publically accessible anyway. By asking for support on the forum, I have your username. Why should I not be able to check “Does ‘user’ have my asset”?
You were going to ask for a refund because you did read the technical details and see there was no grab animation in there?
Because the pack lacked what you specifically wanted, which it never specified it had, you feel you are entitled to a refund? Did you stop for a second and think that if you would have simply made the suggestion to us via email we might have made the animation for you and updated the pack?
Thanks for grabbing the info. It didn’t lack what I specifically wanted. The look of the assets are great which is what I wanted initially. I said I don’t remember if I read it or not, I saw HANDS and VR ready and just assumed. Entitled to a refund? Not really… hence I didn’t apply for one. But now in reading that again, what I most likely assumed was… these are **FPS **hands, so the desc is FPS hands desc. Hence a “punching animation” doesn’t make much sense in VR world. In fact all of those animations are pretty useless in VR world since the punch would be unnatural since the player would make the motion not need the anim. I thought maybe you added VR to the desc when VR started becoming popular and didn’t update the old desc. Yep it was an assumption based on VR in the desc… I said it was an assumption.
To be totally honest though, VR in the desc and not a single animation in there I can use other than the default one… I think you shouldn’t really be able to put VR in the desc, because none of those animations help in VR. If the majority of the asset is meant for a different type of game, then it shouldn’t have desc for a type it doesnt REALLY apply to, even though it CAN and thats up to me as the buyer to make that choice. I say this because regardless of what you want to believe, assumptions ARE made based on your descriptors.
I see people talking about “infinite landscapes” and how they should be open world walkable… and all this time I’m thinking it means “we’re releasing new ones for buyers every other month! “infinite”.”
I was annoyed and I was honest about it. The refund came to mind, because it said VR and there are other assets that are built with VR in mind out there, but I liked your quality and chose yours. For the same(or lower) could I have gotten a few anims I could use out of the box? Save me some time and maybe better quality since I’m not natively an animator? Maybe… but if everyone starts throwing VR in the desc simply because it COULD work there. It’s going to muddy the descriptions overall.
As for your point about dropping you a line… I was going to and when I went to in the forum(or comments) I saw someone did already. Aside from that, I as a customer of yours said the work quality was great and I DID just give you feedback. please take it as such. I haven’t received ANY refunds from your products.
Relevant points. Again though… it starts with some small bit of info and then it will be well I need their name or contact info too and then it becomes a silppery slope. Plus people use same usernames other places. You dont like what a user complained about in your product and you start searching about who they are online from their username and harass them… etc. Yeah it’s extreme circumstances, but people are ridiculous. Why do they need to post a sign up saying “there are no pokemon on the subway tracks”. To protect themselves. I wonder if Steam tells that have released games, every username that has bought their game, or Sony etc. I’m not sure.
If the user contacts you directly or decides to post in a forum then that becomes THEIR decision and not epics to reveal your identity and actions(purchase history)
Just checked 3 entries at random on the Marketplace. There seems to be a required support email. Without even buying a pack , I can email three separate marketplace creators. They may respond with their name at the bottom. I can look up these emails, and if they use the same support email elsewhere, I can potentially get more nuggets of information with which to further track them down. If I ever am able to find their primary email I can then find their facebook page, and begin harassing their page there. I may even be able to track down every profile they have, without even purchasing anything. I could do so if I decided the pack wasn’t that great. ‘How useless. I’ll make their live miserable despite never having a meaningful interaction with them.’
Yet, prior to supporting a supposed customer, verifying that the person is actually a customer is out of the question and borderline creepy. Got it.
This is equally absurd, and unrealistic. This will never be solved for both parties, unless they communicate through Epic with key-pair encryption and nobody actually knows who is who. You don’t know who made the transaction. You don’t know who is supporting you.
To clarify, these would be autogenerated IDs/Hashes/etc.
If you’re going to argue slippery slope, 's a real one for you.
- Issues in marketplace are present.
- Potential sellers are driven away by issues not being addressed.
- Current sellers are driven away by the same thing.
- Marketplace goes under from lack of content, and thus nobody wants to make content for it.
- There is no longer any content because nobody is making content.
- There is no reason to fix the marketplace- nobody uses it
- GOTO 2
Or is that more of a viscous cycle? Hmm. The likelihood of this occurring is not actually relevant to the argument, because it is a hypothetical on the same line as yours.
Every store provides sellers a way to verify legitimate sales with an invoice number.
That’s basic stuff and we should have it since day 1…
I purchase many products from the Unreal Market Place (UMP) and can rationalize a NO REFUND policy with the absence of DMR or other protection. However, I’m not interested in refunds, I’m only interested in the product meeting my need, saving me time/money, and support. If the product fails my expectation, I would rather it be fixed/improved or credited by the Content Provider to receive something that solves another problem. If the Content Provider is not in the position to offer any of these options, a refund or partial refund is the only solution. Think: Repeat Business.
I’m not in favor of Content Providers removing their products from UMP after I’ve purchased them. Its a virtual slap-in-the-face, and price discounts add insult to injury (unless Provider is crediting such a discount for UMP purchasers). UMP Providers that remove products from UMP, lose my trust and future purchases. Its a feeling of abandonment. However, I would be interested in a off site store offering new add-ons and extensions to complement existing products in the UMP (as current UMP Policy doesn’t support selling Addons/Extentions in the Marketplace).
*** OPTIONAL READING ***
The potential distribution volume is what makes selling assets in the UMP attractive. The same type of volume would severely backlog an Asset provider, possibly losing profits /damaging reputation if not prepared to scale up. Epic gives away plenty of High Quality Assets to prototype with for FREE and competing in the ‘prototype’ space doesn’t offer the same exposure and sense of accomplishment as being featured in a commercial product.
I purchase items from UMP with 100% intent to use them in commercial products (I would suspect that 1000s of other Game Devs purchase with similar intent). This offers me the greatest return on investment. I’m not spending additional time and money, otherwise I would do that from the start. I’m aware these assets are sold to the masses and I also desire some form of exclusivity. The solution for me is Out-of-the-box Customization.
Savvy Content Providers realize Out-of-the-box Customization and extension of Assets is the expectation now, and will capture these profits. Content Providers who fail to see the paradigm shift in Asset demand will miss sales (I only purchase assets that are demonstrated to be readily customized/modular), but more importantly Marketplaces not designed to support the new paradigm will lose both Buyers and Sellers.