Marketplace Info and Guidelines: READ FIRST

I dont understand the need for two license types. :\ It isn’t like a single developer(or even a team or company) can publish a couple of projects a year except for arch-vis, and arch-vis projects don’t require many complicated stuff the developer cant handle themselves.

What’s there to vote on?

If 300 bucks is what you want under unlimited use then that’s the price.

That was a simple example!

We are not "AAA " here, the majority of the users aren’t even in a studio period.

When you download something from the marketplace, it needs it ‘just work’ as Epic has been explaining. Having price tiers is just fine for other webpages, but not in the marketplace.

Also regarding your analogy:

Yes you pay them for their work, once you have the finished product, and because that deal is complete, I now own the rights to use model as I see fit. When I contracted out the work, I was contracting for the model to be created for me, I did not specify why or where the model would be used, I contracted it out to have it made for me, and once it is complete, the transaction is complete, and I now more or less ‘own’ the rights to that model.

There are different contracts that can sometimes be made up, but rarely is the recipient of the model legally bound to only use it in one project, the majority will never be used again, but not because of a legal obligation, more just that companies rarely re-use assets (the odd one here and there maybe).

They state in the FAQ that you are responsible for maintaining functionality in future engines, the only ones really affects is code based items, as they need to be recompiled for a new version, which is a simple task to perform.

All of depends on what exactly you are bringing to marketplace, but if you really need to have your users pay for more than once for your product, come up with an updated/improved version 2 the next year, version 3 after that etc. But forcing them to pay again for the same product, to me at least, just isn’t right.

It may seem like the business savvy thing to do, but which is more important to you? Getting the highest price for each unit, or selling a larger amount of items at a lower cost? Nevermind the possibility you could get ‘tagged’ as a greedy seller (by the community), now you sell even less units at the higher price. It might seem like price per product is more important looking at it now, but you also need to think about how your customers perceive you, and how likely they will be to support you in the future.

So, why not have both type of license then? Let the buyer choose what he wants and need! :wink: Why is that so hard to understand?

I am not defending expensives prices! I am defending having two types of licenses!

I have been working under diferent conditions then that. Most of my work were made per project, and it wasn’t my idea to include on the contract.
I guess there are diferent ways of working, and diferent needs, and diferent license! :wink:

I am curious, how are you going to keep track of the user who bought a single use license to make sure they dont use it again?

Because multi tiered licensing is not compatible with the terms and conditions of the marketplace guidelines.

Just a though but there is no rule that says you can’t fork elements to a different product. Assuming that the package comes with animations you could fork them over as an animation asset.

+1 on . There is no amount of artificial leveraging that will change the fact, that if you try to sell something for lots of $$$ with restrictive licensing and someone that releases something that is higher quality, better terms and for less $$$, that they will get the lion’s share of sales. That is as it should be. It’s good for competition and good for customers.

Has any thought been given to allowing the release of tools on the asset store? Although I expect there are never going to be that many standalone tools made to make it worth the effort.

I have a standalone asset migration tool (basically a small Slate based tool that can be pointed at the content folder for any game and then can be used to migrate any of or all of the assets. So does exactly what the Editor does, but I find it extremely useful to not have to load the full editor just to migrate a few assets.) that I made for my own use, and had thought about releasing it if there was any interest.

However as it uses some code from the developer folder (from the Asset tools module), I can’t just freely make it available. As I can only distribute it to subscribers. So at the moment, as far as I know, the only way I could do that is to put the source code on github.

I made something similar as well, but I also made it to make backups, to two different hard drives and to the cloud. But, migrating from UE4.3 to UE4.4 has some problems(using my tool or just copying and pasting or just using the editor migrate ) with Blueprints. UE4.4 is not getting all the node properties.

Have you tried using the clipboard to copy and paste your blueprints? So open the project in UE4.3 and select all the nodes in your blueprint and then CTRL-C, then open it in UE4.4 and CTRL-v to paste. No idea if it will make any difference, but it might give you some idea of why the nodes aren’t getting all the properties. Taking it one step further, if they still don’t get all their properties, then maybe recreate one of your blueprints in UE4.4 and the copy and paste that to a text file. Do the same with the UE4.3 version, and then compare the text, to see if you can see what has changed.

Yeap. I tried that. I tried every way possible of migratting from 4.3 to 4.4. Then I had to manually set several nodes properties. Some of the nodes were fine, but other weren’t. So, I had to look one by one, and I have a lot of nodes. kkkk

One of the ideas that we discussed early on was the possibility of charging a base price B for access to the asset, plus a per-title fee T for shipping it in a commercial product (so you’d ultimately pay B+n*T), with the option of B=0. Another idea was having each game ship with a “bill of materials” and the ability to charge a small royalty for certain Marketplace items, adding to the engine’s base royalty, or monthly fee. We put a lot of thought into various approaches to constructing a Marketplace economy, but from the perspective of buyers deciding whether to buy an item, the simplest unified terms were always the most compelling.

My suggestion is to try to estimate the average number of commercial products that will be shipped by a Marketplace buyer of a high-quality, reasonably-priced item. Given that many folks are enthusiasts and tinkerers, the number may be less than 1.0. If we only count users who ship at least one commercial game, let’s guess 1.5, since each developer is trying to satisfy his customer base by shipping new, original games, and that limits content reuse. A small number of developers might ship many games with the item, but on the average they’ll be offset by the 1’s.

So, if we offered that choice, it might more realistically be between $50 for a per-title license and $75 for a lifetime license. But if all Marketplace licensing is generously lifetime across-the-board, and Marketplace buyers can buy with confidence that they can use all items forever and without concern for relicensing, we think the overall opportunity for all sellers will be maximized compared to offering more complicated choices of terms.

That’s the theory anyway!

I’m working on a plugin for when the Marketplace accepts plugins and I have two questions about your comment:

  1. Are we able to list multiple versions of the same product targeting different audiences (for example, one targeting enthusiasts and a second targeting professional developers), with different sets and different prices?

  2. Are any kind of stats for different types of users (hobbyist, solo developer, etc) going to be available to market sellers? These kind of numbers would be a big help in planning what to list in the market.

Might I make another suggestion that I have already given here: https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?30251-Marketplace-products-license-question&p=120675&viewfull=1#post120675 but it seems more Epic staff responds to thread.

Why not offer a similar system for assets as you provide for your own engine? Users can buy assets, plugins or whatever else for life and will get the current version as well as all previous versions. They can then decide to purchase updates for new versions at a decently lowered price. The Epic marketplace already has a good alert system in place that informs you about the compatibility of an asset with the installed engine versions and could be used for third party content as well.

In my opinion that would solve several problems. Supporting and updating content or code monthly over a long period of time costs money and if cost has to be calculated into the buying price it might become rather high. It also provides an incentive for developers to not just stop updating their work when the big first release sale is over. The buyers would not loose anything, since all sold assets are shipped with source files and they could do the updating themselves anyway. However with they can also go the easy way and purchase an update. It also means that content providers can include new features or new assets in their packs in the future and still get paid.

In the end is how most software is sold, you get the software ‘as is’ when you purchase it and have to pay when you want a new version.

Regards,
FTC

I agree with FTC on .

A good decision!

I’m curious, are the character guidelines of 5+ to an asset pack going to be changed in the future? I have a few character armors that I would like to put up, with customizable materials, but don’t have 5 nor will I be making any more as these are just character models I have no use for anymore. Also, do characters have to have rigs or can it just be the model with customizable materials/textures? I’d appreciate any info on .

If you there are enough assets to be of value to developers in building their project then feel free to submit. We want to avoid the case where a developer buys a single asset, finds it super useful, but is now out of luck for finding more assets to match style/functionality to finish their project. Humanoid characters need to be rigged to the Epic skeleton to ensure animation compatibility at the moment.

Thank you for . Let me just say, I will never buy an asset / plugin / content that is not lifetime, unlimited-project use. Per-seat is arguably ok with me, but not per-project.