I’m really glad you started the conversation with Epic about this. As a buyer (and I future potential seller) let me share some thoughts about the situation:
**Submitting to the Marketplace **- The Marketplace team takes too long to review and accept / deny submissions - We are all familiar with this, so no need to explain further. In addition to making the process very painful and long for the sellers, this is causing an interesting dilemma for us buyers. See, the recent trend is for Sellers to simply put their products on Itch / Gumroad / whatever because the Marketplace takes too long. So as a buyer, do I buy it on Itch to get the product now or do I wait for a few months (literally) to get it on my launcher? Updates are also an issue…you get them instantly on another platform, yet have to wait days / weeks to get it in the Marketplace.
At the end, we should encourage buyers to put it in the Marketplace - its better for Sellers (more exposure), better for buyers (more convenient) and better for Epic (they get their cut).
Potential Solution - Once a Seller is vetted, they are now free to control their content themselves. Maybe have the initial long process for first-time Sellers and then give them tools to submit new content or update their files instantly.
**Moderation **- My only comment here is that we should NOT give the Sellers the ability to moderate their own comments. We don’t want a situation similar to Steam where some devs just delete negative comments. A flagging system for inappropriate comments or deceiving content should be added for someone at Epic to review.
Seller Rating System - I think this is a great idea! When buying a new asset I typically look at the Seller to see what else he/she has for sale and look at the other asset’s ratings. Perhaps we can allow Buyers to rate the Sellers on a variety of categories: Quality of his/her asset packs, Responsiveness, Quality of learning materials, etc
Outdated Content - Maybe Epic can add a little warning on the product page if the product isn’t compatible with the latest version of Unreal?
I don’t have any ideas that haven’t been discussed before. I think that if we can speed up submission and give Sellers control of their content a lot of these issues will go away.