Publishing a demo would kill sales for poor assets, and increase sales for great assets. Simple enough.
Maybe you download the demo and don’t like the way the lighting looks against the maze, and assume that my meshes are messed up (No sale). Maybe the demo doesn’t work (No sale). Maybe a one-time bug occurs while looking at the demo (No sale). If anything goes wrong for a second with the demo, that’s quite possibly no-sale, as it ruins the first impression. Obviously an experienced user wouldn’t be turned away by a silly things like this, but most of us are not targeting experienced users. Having received good feedback on all of my assets, I am not at all worried that a demo would turn someone away because it is low quality, but because of something silly.
In general, at all the analytics data that I have seen for my assets piracy does not really hurt sales. Even if it did, there is not much you can do about it when you’re content isn’t DRMed (and even then if it becomes popular someone will crack it). As far as I’ve seen in our field even the large corporations can’t effectively stop the torrents/websites and it is a never ending game of whack-a-mole. Epic and Unity certainly do get take-downs for the popular pirate sites even if they aren’t hosted in countries that a small company could realistically do on their own, but it is usually just a hiccup and everything (meaning the whole library of pretty much everything on either store) is re-uploaded somewhere else within a few weeks. These are seeded from only one legitimate purchase. Having a WebGL demo won’t make it more likely that your stuff is pirated, if it’s even remotely popular you can almost guarantee it’s on a pirate site somewhere.
In my particular case even from the larger groups like cgpersia it really only accounts for about .005% of traffic. Adding all of the known pirate sites together still doesn’t reach half a percent. On top of that, if you just follow the normal logic that most pirates were never going to buy your stuff anyways so it really doesn’t effect anything. There are even Unity publishers that use it as an alternative marketing means seeding their own content themselves (usually the developers that add stuff all the time so that the torrent is usually a few versions behind so even other seeders can’t keep up). Granted, this isn’t really a challenge currently for Unreal since the market isn’t that large so using it as a means of advertising isn’t really necessary yet.
If one is really paranoid about that stuff though, your best bet is that approach of the ever evolving product (if its art add to your art packs, if its code keep adding features). Not only do you build a really loyal customer base, but you make it hard for those that would pirate who will always be behind what you’ve added.
I don’t think that webgl demos should be required but if Epic’s marketplace ever takes off then when saturation comes into play most publishers are going to want to add them anyways to stand out and increase sales.
I get that glitches can happen but I the prevalence of something like that happening is probably really low. Think of it from a buyer’s perspective though. When have you ever tried a product in a store, like a pair of shoes for example, and decided not to buy them because they looked good and felt great? Never! You only won’t buy them because they feel uncomfortable. Would you buy a pair of shoes if they told you you’re not allowed to try them on and you can’t return them? Not likely.
And what makes you come back to a specific store over another? Good customer service. What qualifies as good customer service to most people? Being able to get what you want quickly and without issue and knowing that if there IS an issue, it will be resolved quickly and without conflict. If you can provide that to your customers, then they’ll keep coming back. I believe that a demo of your content would definitely do more good than harm.
Good to hear that you can only vote on a content pack that you own, but how this one product (I’m not naming names) got such a high rating when it doesn’t even do what it claimed to is beyond me.
Also nice to hear that you CAN include a demo link but it would be nicer if it was something that was more fully implemented into the store. For example, you probably have to host the demo on your own website/server. It’d be nice if it was fully featured with a proper Demo button and the ability to upload the demo to the marketplace along with your product.
As to the whole pirating argument, I still stand by the statement that pirates are not customers so you’re not losing sales anyway regardless of what the analytics say. Its a waste of energy trying to stop bad things from happening.
Finally, going with the assumption that most people purchasing your content don’t know what they’re doing is a very poor viewpoint to have. I think (its the case for me personally) that a lot of devs simply buy content to save time and money. If I were to hire an artist to make a character model (and I’ve done so many times in the past) its going to cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand and take at the very least several days to get said asset so I can use it in my game. If I purchase a character model from the marketplace I get it in a matter of minutes for a fraction of the cost saving me time and money and thus making me a lot more productive.
These are all very unlikely to hurt your sales as most people making purchases are aware that any demo, including the one included with the purchase (overview level) is not the only use of a product.
On the flip side, there are a LOT of people who don’t buy content because they aren’t sure if the video/screens are accurate representations of how they work in-enging, so you would gain sales there.
I really don’t think your argument has any stock to it, and recent reception to my demo has definitely backed that up for my case at least.
That is correct. AFAIK epic wont host it for you. I host mine on my own site.
This +1. Sure you get a decent number of customers that do seem to be very new to game dev, but you also get a lot that aren’t. Treating customers like idiots is not a smart move at all.
No one here has pointed out that it’s also possible for sellers to rate their own product. From what I’ve gathered this seems to be pretty much accepted practice among sellers based on the old “Well everyone else is 5-star rating their own product, so I have to, too”. Just have a scan through and compare the number of 5-star single rated products to the number of products unrated.
This has been pointed out multiple times to Epic over the last year, but still persists. Apparently they either think it’s fine to abuse their rating system and dupe customers, or implementing a fix that should take a matter of minutes is beyond them.
As to the original question, I agree having something for this properly integrated into the product page would be nice. I think it varies very much by the type of Blueprint/code product though as to how useful it would be.
IMHO it’s an exaggeration. Whenever you see just one 5-star rating it’s pretty safe to assume it was rated by creator. It just one star and it’s nothing like you can dupe multiple customers and boast your rating. However, I think that requirement of comment for rating might improve rating situation overall and also fix these “dupes” because I doubt author will publically write boasting comment on their own asset. But really, one rating is not that serious of a problem =/
As for theme topic - demos are nice, they help to understand what you get as a client and also helps to stand out as a creator. I would love if Epic will host it and maybe add a button “Download a demo” and appropriate tag like “Has a demo!”. Don’t like the idea of making it mandatory though.
The thing is ratings are so scarce it’s impossible to know if it was the seller or a legitimate rating. Just because there’s one 5 star rating on a package doesn’t mean it came from the seller. I am quickly approaching 1000 sales and I only have 38 ratings across all my packages. There were times where 1 rating was all I had for a while. The same can be seen with many other packages. People just aren’t inclined to rate/review unless there is a negative experience in which case they will immediately use those platforms to express their discontent.
I also noticed that there seems to be a pretty low opinion of sellers in this thread, with people suggesting we’re trying to rip off consumers or mislead them. As a seller I find it sad to see we are viewed in this regard.
I’m certainly not calling out anyone in particular, or saying that everyone does this, and no single-rated products are legitimate. But I’m just going off what I’ve seen said, and also off basic statistics - the low frequency of customers giving ratings would naturally lead to many products with a single rating, but also many (more in fact) with no rating. There are exceedingly few of the latter.
It’s true this isn’t a big problem, people really shouldn’t put much stock in a single rating of course. But it just bothers me more than other, perhaps bigger issues, because (1) it’s intentionally misleading as people assume ratings are from customers; and (2) it’s so incredibly easy for Epic to fix.
I honeslty don’t think any sellers really want to rate their own product these days, but it just comes down to the issue already cited - almost no one rates. So you are left with the choice of rating your own product, or having it be free of ratings at all, and sadly that also probably hurts sales lol. Epic have stated, though, that they are trying to come up with ways to fix these sorts of issues, so hopefully that’ll help out.
Actually that IS a serious problem. If the seller rates their own product 5 stars and then 3 other people rate it 1, the average rating is still going to be 2/5 stars which is 1 star more than it deserves. I cannot believe this has been pointed out already and hasn’t been fixed! That’s terrible. It would be very nice to require a comment with the rating AND maybe have a separate page for comments on the product itself.
To clarify, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the sellers themselves. I think most people are honest and sellers are trying to make great products and a little money just like devs. Without sellers, the entire marketplace would be useless. That said, I think that Epic needs to step up their game and make a bit of an overhaul to the marketplace. They are a business who has created a marketplace for others to use but have unintentionally created barriers to providing great customer service. If they want to make the UE4 Marketplace better than their competition, they need to be able to roll out marketplace updates more quickly. Its absolutely shocking to hear that sellers can rate their own products. It would be very nice if we could have demos for the product officially hosted by the marketplace and it would be nice if the ratings that people give also came with a written description of the product along with a stamp of the name of the user who rated said product (The unity store does this). Move the “support” comments onto its own tab as they don’t belong on the front page. I doubt Epic even intended the comments section to be used for support, but that’s what the community is now using it for.
Marketplace really needs a lot of work. I’ve been waiting for Epic to update my plugin to 4.12 for over a month now, and it is set to go on sale tommorow, as I figured that would be more than enough time for them to update it, sadly that’s not the case. Us sellers have quite a large thread in our sub-forum for features we would like to see, almost all of which have seen no progress 
Yeah… that’s another issue. We as sellers have absolutely no way to get contact information for customers, so if they leave support comments there, we pretty much have to deal with it there, or ask the customer to email us (which often doesn’t go down well with the customers). There’s a lot of stuff that really needs to be fixed up to aid us as sellers to provide a better service to customers
Well, I guess the best we can do is provide a clear and precise list of feature requests for the marketplace and hope to get the attention of one of the Epic team members so they can bring it up in a future meeting. So far from this forum thread, I think the main points we can agree on are as follows:
1 - It would benefit both sellers and customers alike if there was a way to include an easy to use demo of your content. The integration of a proper “DEMO” button (regardless of requirement or not) and preferably full marketplace integration (IE upload/download through the marketplace).
2 - Disallow sellers to rate their own products and require a brief comment to go along with any posted rating as well as a “user stamp” for who posted the rating and comment.
3 - Create a separate “Support” tab for support related comments and give sellers a way to directly contact buyers either through DM built into the marketplace or undisclosed email (IE an email button that masks the email address to avoid spam)
Anything I missed? I think I’ll create a separate thread to help give Epic a clear place to find all of the suggestions.
For reference, this is what we have put together so far:
I’ll see if they can add these requests to the list. Just know that this is in the seller’s forum, so Epic is well aware of it 
So you guys have already presented the list in point form on the seller’s forum and had no direct response from Epic? That’s a little disheartening. lol, maybe we should post it in the Bug Reports section of the answer hub, that always gets a fast response 
Epic is surely aware of these features requests, and that thread. We weren’t even able to see our live sales numbers for like a year 
We have also been in regular contact with the staff in other threads, as well as on the Unreal Slackers chat. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the marketplace is not being given the resources to implement these features.
Well that sucks. Its strange because the Marketplace is essentially the backbone of the engine. I’d assume Epic knows that. Ahh well, its new territory for them. I’m sure they’re working on something and a good update will roll out in the next 6 months or so.
As Jayden mentioned we had a thread full of these feature requests and more for quite some time. I don’t know if they’re aware of it or not, but there hasn’t been a single staff post in that thread. Whats more is that most of the bare essential features have been requested for over a year, and we’ve been told for just as long that it is coming soon.
I don’t believe Epic sees it that way at all, and the treatment sellers have had over the past years doesn’t reinforce that assumption. We’ve been told improvements are coming since 2014. I don’t think many of us are holding our breath for the next 6 months sadly.
Hey TorQueMoD 
As others have mentioned, we’ve got these requests on our list of things to explore! We appreciate the feedback and will be able to provide an update on things in the future. There are a number of threads with multiple feature requests listed in them, so I understand how it can be a little difficult to understand what is on our radar and what is not. We’re working to improve here as well.
Thanks again!