I’ve noticed this too; Surely part of the certification process for the Marketplace should be a quick Google search to find how the exact same Asset is priced on the Internet.
I understand it’s a different engine and more work has to go into it to port over; But surely that’s not the consumer’s problem; If you want to expand your audience; You port your asset. It’s like if I wrote a book and because I had to convert it to EPUB, charging $40 dollars extra because it took a few hours.
It seems to be that asset creators like to use the excuse “Time is Money” but with the prices as they are I think it’s encouraging more people to just re-make the assets their way instead of purchasing assets on the Store; I mean why pay $40 more just because it’s not Unity? Thanks to the Blueprints system and the fact there’s millions of tutorials online about 3D modelling and with the rise of Substance Painter, Designer and Bipmap2Mat (Or whatever it’s called, I can’t think at the moment!), it’s easier than ever for people to say “I’m not paying $90 when I can do it myself!” Especially when that exact same asset is available for $40 less in another engine.
I even see a lot of 3D models and whatnot that are super-cheap on Unity, but the exact same Asset is like $20-$40 on the Asset Store. And what did they do to warrant an extra $20-$40? Hit File > Import and imported their asset.
I think the Marketplace needs more policing in the sense that if it wants to be competitive (Just like Unreal Engine itself is a competitor to the Indie Scene’s Unity) then there should be a clause about Unreal Engine being 5-10% higher maximum of any available price for the asset anywhere on the web.
It’s just a thought of course; But I believe people are trying to get away with reselling their work because people buying these assets don’t understand that there’s a totally cheaper version available on the Unity Asset Store.
The worst part is with most of the Unreal Engine assets which are also on the Unity Store can be bought cheaper in the Unity store and then just export > import into Unreal Engine 4. Surely, this shows that Epic Games will lose money because this method exists.