Firstly I want to mention again that I truly believe that a loss of sales due to piracy is a complete fallacy based on the notion of “Shrinkage” suffered by physical goods retail stores. There’s literally no difference in distribution costs to the seller if they sell one copy or one million. There’s no warehouse where the goods are stored, there’s no delivery costs, nothing. The only incremental cost difference is the bandwidth used to transfer the goods (which falls to Epic in legitimate sales) and if the item is being pirated, then they’ll be distributed over a P2P network or some other website so even that cost is not put on the shoulders of Epic. Now you might think that people pirating your product(s) would translate to a loss of sales, but I would again like to point out that pirates would never buy your product even if you could prevent them from stealing it (thieves are not potential customers) AND the most important consideration; people purchasing content on the UMP are doing so so that they can include it in their own retail projects. If they released a game with pirated content, it would be akin to sending themselves to jail. It would be very easy to prove (Limbo of the Lost anyone) and very easy to sue them in recompense. I really doubt company is stupid enough to do that.
Drixil - Possibly the problem is that you’ve requested too many refunds or a refund for a reason that Epic doesn’t deem valid? I had no problem refunding the one product I had issue with as the seller would not reply to my support requests and the product was shown to be broken.
Techlord - Twitch events aren’t really any different than a video which really don’t work for a blueprint unless you go into depth but also as I said earlier, with certain blueprints, you really can’t tell what you’re getting until you try it for yourself. I really think being able to include a cooked demo would solve this problem. For most Art Assets, a video is fine but Epic should change the requirements to include screen shots of the wires as well as the materials/textures and they should add the ability to embed a video directly into the store page. Screen shots alone in this day and age don’t cut it.
Ironbelly - No offense, but hopefully not. That demo stole all of my bandwidth, took forever to load (and I have a 3meg per second connection), looks terrible (compared to how it would look running as an executable) and when I tried to “buy” another weapon, pressing the B key did nothing. Not to mention the fact that I had to edit my browser settings just to get it to run at all. That’s far too complicated. Also, having a demo that doesn’t work properly or look as amazing as possible can often times do more harm than good. I’m impressed you were able to get anything to run in the browser though. What I was asking for was the ability to simply have a “Demo” button on your page that links to downloading a cooked package hosted directly through the marketplace servers and can be run stand alone as you would any game.