Thanks for posting. I have faith that you guys at Epic have got it under control. I understand that these things take time to evolve and its your first marketplace. Keep up the awesome work!
Ya right… I have tried with one asset to get a refund they said the would give it to me and then nothing… Had another problem nothing… I doubt they care if you are satisfied or not with the assets you buy. It works well for them the way it is… They get your money and they don’t care if it is what you want or not… Sorry that sounds mean but I have been burned for probably hundreds of dollars worth of poorly put together marketplace assets…
I believe it’s a good idea. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it - personally, I think that it’s very important to be able to see and explore content available in a package when you buy it.
However, my concern is more toward those who create graphic content. As of right now, it is possible to extract visual assets from packaged builds. This mean that in its current form, legitimate artists could suffer theft at a much bigger rate than what was before.
I want to reiterate that I’m 100% for a way to preview assets/blueprints before buying. I just want to be sure that we don’t end up losing to illegal businesses on the way.
I do agree that Demos would help Game Devs make ‘informed’ purchasing decisions. There are means to provide a web-based demos like in this post over here. If that method is not satisfactory, perhaps Content Providers can scheduled Twitch events to demonstrate their products live and answer questions.
I’ve noticed a *tone *of distrust between sellers and buyers emerging from these discussions: Sellers fear their product being stolen with refunds; Buyers fear being ripped off without the ability to be refunded. This tone is not productive to achieving our goals to develop awesome games.
As a Buyer, I’ve purchased many products from the UMP. A few products failed my expectation after asking questions prior to purchase. In these cases, I didn’t seek refund, instead sought the solution to get the product to meet my needs by working with the content provider.
As a Seller, I’m soon to submit products to the UMP in the very near future. I have absolutely no interest selling assets to Game Devs that do not add value. For me, it is more important for my products to be used in games, than to make an *empty *sell with my product going unused.
Twitch events are a great idea, but not something that can really be enforced across the board, given the limited internet infrastructure in a lot of places. I, for instance, don’t have internet that can handle twitch streaming at any level of quality that would render any demo useful haha.
The tone of distrust from sellers is definitely not all of us. There are some sellers that have been stung pretty hard by piracy and hyperactive refunds though (based on conversations in the sellers forum), so it makes sense that those ones are pretty upset about it. None of us want our stuff pirated obviously, but I for one have no expectations of people stealing my content or getting dodgy refunds - but it’s important to recognize that some sellers, even some with great high quality content, have had a lot of issues surrounding these things.
Likewise, a lot of buyers have been burnt by some pretty poor quality content, particularly in the earlier days of the marketplace.
I just think it’s important to realise that this is probably the vocal minority rather than the majority at this stage, from both sides of things. Not that these concerns necessarily shouldn’t be addressed, but I think the recent cavalcade of threads surrounding these topics might be getting a little blown out of proportion, and applying the view that a certain group of people have to a group is dangerous for the health of our community. I know I definitely don’t want even a single one of my customers thinking that I think they are out to screw me over - not because it hurts my business, but because I legitimately want to work with these people in that capacity and see the content I’ve made be used in new and interesting ways.
Finally - I think that you would find almost all sellers share your view and would much rather their content be used than just be an empty sell.
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.
Huge security risk. Just because the game is packaged, does not mean it’s safe. Everything can be reverse engineered, packaging just makes it harder, but not impossible. One example is the latest Mortal Combat that is done in Unreal 3 as it’s characters are taken off from the game itself and going around the internet.
Second example is Street Fighter 5 which is created by Unreal 4 engine. Not only people can get the models out of the packages but they can also add them back in after the editing they do on them. That’s quite the feat. 
So yeah, it’s not secured at all. Your best option is asking before buying. 
Dunno, this does not sounds right to me. If you just release a pack on Marketplace it’s easier to steal ready-to-use asset instead of data mining demo to get limited access to sounds, models and textures.
If you just release anything - it might be pirated and probably will if it worth something, but it does not mean that we should stop release everything just to stop piracy =/
I think most would agree that having a demo of the content we sell is a great thing. Nobody is against that, as far as I read here.
The issue is that this makes our content much more susceptible to piracy. While it’s incredibly easy to just buy a content pack and upload it on whatever hub, you still have to buy it first. This is a big deterrent for many hackers and data miners. Plus, you have to find enough seeds to download it, if you’re not the host. However, if our preview is available to everyone, we may see a rise of softwares that allow independants to directly rip the content out of preview builds. This will inevitably lead to a surge in piracy.
What we ask is that if there is an implementation of a preview system - which I’m perfectly fine with - that it’d be secure for us and our assets. A compiled build is not secure for that - or at least not in its state.
My point was not to stop privacy but tell you (and others) that just because you package a demo, does not mean the assets are secured. There is no way to stop privacy completely and we all know it. Just saying that free demo packaging is just a way of saying “here are the free assests, you just need to crack it to get it.”
People that wants to pirate are already doing it. But there is little reason to do this kind of easier for reverse engineers by giving it kind of officially.
I really wish for a good alternative, and I still think you can ask-before-buy to make sure everything is the way you want it.
But let me add something extra and become the odd monster here and ready myself for the torches of a wild crowd. People should NOT expect that a marketplace item should fix their entire problems. You just cant build a game completely made of marketplace assets, blueprints etc. I am against the false advertisement, but a little bit of work should be done by ourselves too in my humble opinion.
There has been one or two sellers in here saying that they think playable demos in EVERY INSTANCE hurt sales… but that’s honestly ******** A bad playable demo - sure that hurts - but that’s on the seller.
The majority of conversation in here is about implementing a playable preview of code and blueprint assets, which cannot be reverse engineered in the means you mention, because the code is compiled. You would just get a pile of compiled code that, I guess you could probably do something with, but it’s not going to be friendly and usable at all. So that standpoint doesn’t really hold up IMO.
Outside of the majority of this conversation - if we were to consider it for art assets, then yes that becomes a risk, but the risk is pretty low to be honest. As mentioned a million times already - a pirate is almost never a potential customer, and anyone wanting to use your content in a commercial product is asking for trouble if they pirate anyway.
Plus… I think that if so many sellers are going to assume that there are so many customers out to hurt them via piracy, then I think it’s only fair that customers treat sellers the same way and assume that there are a number of them out to screw them over with inadequate content and request playable builds haha.
For the record - I have a playable build of one of my assets available since it launched, and after all the talk in this thread, I will be making sure to upload playable builds of the other two when I am able (sometime in the next month I’d say). I’m pretty surprised by the overall attitude from both sides in this equation but I think it’s a good move for everyone so I’ll put my money where my mouth is haha.
I’ll reiterate that I’m definitely for a playable build. The thing is - and as you mentioned it - I work on visual assets. Now, there are good reasons to have extractors for games as it allows the players to mod a game. For that, it’s also perfectly fine.
The part where I’m fearful is the ability to rip assets directly from previews. As it is already possible to gather assets from UE4 games by simply running a decompiler, it’s very easy to download a batch of previews and then gather the assets without a second thought. It does not require the same investment as buying a copy, packaging it, uploading it to a pirate server and then needing seeds to share it.
I don’t know if you can do that for blueprints. I don’t think it would be possible because blueprints, when compiled, pretty much run as a code. To this end, I can only speak from my point of view as an artist.
I’m not ashamed of my work, so I really would have no issues making a playable build of what I do. In the end, both the creator and customer wins from previews. However, it’s important that both the creator and customer are protected in this and so it’s important to keep these assets secure.
Admittedly though, it’s way easier to preview visual assets through videos and pictures than it is for blueprints. So maybe I’m making a fuss out of something that shouldn’t even be a problem.
I thought important for me to voice my opinion first, as I released my first pack a few days ago and I plan to release much more in the coming months.
Oh definitely - my opinion is that I think blueprint and code assets should have playable builds. Visual assets I’m not fussed about. A sketchfab style preview would be great, and I honestly don’t think the likelihood of it hurting sellers is high at all, but Epic could also just enforce a standard that shows wireframe pics and such to negate that need. But
Blueprint assets are kind of useless when compiled. What you need is not what a blueprint did, but how actually it did and how you can edit it to suit your needs so you have to actually see the code first.
I can create a really realistic weapon and I can hide many bugs that might occur while editing its properties, because the code is not editable. Maybe I am a bad programmer so I sugarcoated many stuff in my compiled version of gun, how would you know?
As I said before, models can always be ripped rather easily. I am not sure why people thinks blueprints can’t. I will not fight on that part because I agree that it would be harder to rip the code and one can easily say “**** it” and pay for it. But a compiled demo would still not show all the potentials, good parts and bad parts of a blueprint asset.
Asset Demo sounds useful, and even great, but it is not solving the “things that you realise after buying the asset” problem completely. That’s just my 0.5 cents.
Well of course it doesn’t show everything - but at least buyers would get an idea how it works when compiled. And it’s not hard to set up a demo to show off how versatile your system is. Bugs and such things -will- allow you to get a refund, so that is covered. But if you set up a short demo showing off the sorts of results you can get using the blueprint system, then that’s definitely very useful to customers IMO. Coupling that, with screenshots/videos, customer should be able to get a reliable view of how a system works far beyond what is currently available - thus allowing them to make a more informed decision. Naturally, the only way to know for absolutely sure that an asset is perfect for you is to purchase it - but that doesn’t mean we can’t remove a lot of guesswork.