From what I’ve read so far, looks like written reviews will not be migrated from the Unreal marketplace to Fab. This is the worst thing that can happen to a seller and I’ll explain why.
We have worked so hard to get those reviews through constant updates and bug fixes, supporting the customers, and making high-quality assets that can stand out. Let’s say someone was over-inspired by your product and published a product that is very similar to your product. With the written reviews not migrating and the published date being reset, how is your product different from the second one? How to differentiate who copied whose work?
On the other hand, potential buyers could ask questions about specific aspects of the product before purchasing. This can’t be replaced with a Q/A section in the descriptions. How on earth can we know what’s on everyone’s mind so we can answer their questions in a Q/ A? We also used the questions section as a reliable tool to verify our customers for Discord servers and things like that. How do we do that now?
From the customers’ point of view, many customers rely on written reviews to know about the pros and cons of each product to better decide about purchasing them. Because it’s no longer the seller’s marketing stuff. It’s the word out of the mouth of people like them. Who were in doubt but purchased the product anyway and now want to tell others it’s actually good (or bad). This is way more than a somewhat meaningless average rating. How should a product be judged now?
I hope this is addressed properly because the way it is now, it’ll disappoint a lot of people, both sellers and customers.
I absolutely agree!
When I see asset I like, but there is a rating like 3.5 out of 5, I go check reviews. And a lot of time I see unreasonable complains, bugs what developer says was fixed in the recent update, and really i**tic reviews from people who needed a bit more tutorials before attempting making a game. And a lot of them do NOT change the low “stars” even after perfectly good reply from a dev. This way I know it’s not an isssues with the asset, and I can safely buy it. Without those reviews and question… it’s just 3.5/5 asset what better left on the self.
I never sold any asset, this is a perspective of the indie solo developer, who is carefully picking asset due to his limited budget. Bad move. Bad.
And with just star rarings, the developer doesn’t know what the problem caused this issue in the first place.
Just to give an example: a few days back I’ve seen 1-star review claiming the paid asset disapppeared from the Vault/Marketplace, the dev replied he didn’t do nothing, and it’s a temporary glitch in Epic’s part, which I believe to be true. But the 1 star review is still up months later.
I am not too worried about this.
You can still take a photo of all your written reviews and place a link in FAB so clients can see if they want.
What I am sad about, is the non existant changes within the seller’s portal, Epic could have added some extra metrics for us to know a bit more about what the clients like or not…
Ok this was a shock to me… EVERYTIME… literally everytime I buy something I ALWAYS go to questions and reviews… and more so to see if the seller replied to a review which I think it seems unreasonable to the product…
100% agree! Removing reviews and answered questions from the assets product page is a terrible idea. I rely on user reviews when buying assets. Btw, the majority of UE users is unhappy with this - there is much bigger outcry on the other media in comments sections about this news (like on YouTube under videos about Fab update). I hope Epic read this and will change their mind. No reviews is simply bad shopping user experience! Removing reviews will likely negatively affect sales as well.
Hi everyone. We hear and understand your frustration.
When you move your products to Fab, any star ratings that your products have on Unreal Engine Marketplace will transfer to Fab and be visible on listing pages and in search results. We plan to release an improved ratings and reviews feature that will offer both buyers and sellers more detailed information about products’ value.
@Maicolteam1 To your point, we’re also working on reporting features.
So, at some point in the future there will be a text review option on the Fab, even if old review won’t be transferred? That’s better then nothing. Thanks for clarifying.
As I said, I’m new to Unreal, and I came from Unity. And the lack of changelog / last_time_updated was also kanda drustruating. Maybe I just couldn’t find it. I always checked the “healthiness” of asset by the amount of activity in recent updates. But that’s a little offtopic.
We still need our old reviews that we worked hard to acquire, transferred. Maybe it’s only fair that Epic archive them and add them to the product after this promised new system is in place.
And also let us preserve the publish dates. If someone is new to marketplace and have no idea which is which, should the Ultra Dynamic Sky that’s been there since 2015 look the same to them as some newly published product? It’s just neither fair nor logical.
I unfortunately have to agree with the above; I’m glad it’s being heard, but more than hearing is required here. Wiping out historical reviews will erase public-facing technical knowledge about product limitations.
Sometimes these are hugely important for evaluating a product’s fit for a project.
Text reviews and Q&A sections (or suitable alternatives) are MUST-HAVE features, a star-rating system is not enough.
We NEED our reviews and questions to be SAVED and DISPLAYED in Fab.
Otherwise, at least for me, there’s no point in developing and releasing new content on the marketplace, knowing that my efforts and the reputation I’ve built through a painstaking process can just evaporate at the snap of Epic Games fingers.
Same will happen with Sketchfab – not reviews, only star-ratings. I guess they don’t wanna bother merging all those different systems together, only starts which ain’t that hard, and review will start with clean slate.
Very strange. I can’t imagine extracting strings and putting them into a common format should be a monumental task. Data engineers do this kind of work all the time.
Thank you for this @skfabby but please make sure text reviews are migrated too, would be waste of years of work for most of us who have done here as reviews show how well the creator is and is the selling point too!
