There are no overpriced items on the marketplace. As stated earlier you’re not buying the items, you’re buying the time you save by not having to create them yourself. That having been said, it may be true that other marketplaces have cheaper items but how many games have those items? Go ahead and buy the soldier pack, and use the animations if you want - but before you use the actual soldiers ask yourself ‘How many other people will have the exact same soldiers in their game?’ I guess what I’m saying is the marketplace is more of a programming resource. You can pay a programmer $90/hour for an unknown amount of hours to come up with the right code/animations/skeletons/whatever, you can spend your time doing it or you can buy it pre-fabricated perfectly. In this sense I think the marketplace is perfect.
You can’t compare them to buying a game, that’s ridiculous. When you buy a game it doesn’t give you right to use the content of the game for your own commercial project. Come back when you bought the IP of a whole game and tell us what kind of price you had to pay.
Exactly!
I paid $13 for Minecraft. Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to acquire Mojang for Minecraft.
I’ve been quite massively undercharging then… I quote for time, how long it takes to create rather than set fees. And models are anywhere from $15 to $1500 so far ($1500 was for almost 2 weeks).
The assets are there if you think they are overpriced then do not pay for them, if the sellers are not getting enough money they will drop the prices. Personally I am waiting a good 6 months before I buy anything as having something look exactly like everyone else is buying right now would make my game not as unique as I want it to be.
6 months?!.. Living costs for 6 months of waiting is how much…? You must be a millionaire, sir, to delay the game release for 6 months, to get a better bargain on $50 asset, that you need to complete the game 
Something else to consider is that this particular engine is being used by professionals more so than hobbyist. With that being said, the price of items on market place is more than fair. I find it highly doubtful that we’ll see a hundred games coming out over the next few years with the exact items in the market place. The professionals will have their own staff to make the assets they need, where the hobbyist, students, and aspiring designers will need to use the ones in the marketplace. I see the marketplace items as prototyping items vs final production items, and it helps those that are giving their time to support the boys (and girls). So the creators of these assets deserve compensation for the work they’ve done.
Keep in mind, it’s a perfectly valid thing to purchase content in the marketplace and then customize it to suit your needs. Or use it as a jumping off point to creating something custom. You have HAVE to use the assets as-is …
Well you can buy assets and customize them. Swapping materials is easier than making entire asset from scratch.
I think the most valuable asset packs will be those, which allow for easy customization.
Let’s say rock pack. What are rocks everyone know. But if the assets in pack are thought of, you will be able to just swap some textures around just to get your own rocks, without trouble of making them from scratch.
Anyone who treied to make good looking rocks, know the pain of sculpting them and baking. But once you have that step done, you create endless variations by simply changing color textures.
Hello,
Just a minute to say that if i had the money for i would buy a lot of assets in market place because for someone “no graphics skills” like me, they are really cool ^^
you can sell a asset for 1$ if the target is 100.000.000 users and you going to earn more money than sell it for 100$. that concept works fine in ex. steam.
but the target audience in UE4 are unknown (for me at least) and the purchasing power of most users, then you spend lots of hours and you want at least got payed for your work and hours spend, if you sell something for 1$ and only buy 100 users you perhaps lost time/money.
what i’am its would be good idea known how good work (selling) the marketplace.
if i see that “pack of materials” for 20$ and they sell 10.000 units, others providers can think if they sell another pack for 10$ they still got payed for their work because there are 10.000 users interested in a pack of materials, and they going to sell perhaps 20k-30k more if they lower the prices, then they adjust the price and can offer something at better price and know more or less their work will be profitable.
and if you see they not sell enough you can decide if lower the price for encourage the purchase or increase it for got payed.
but ATM the market its unknown.
Such informations are never available to , for exactly the reasons you think they should be .
If everyone would, know exactly the sales figures and statistics, then it wouldn’t make market more fair, but would collapse on it’s self. As the prices would most likely get to down the point where most people would think it’s not longer reasonable to make any content.
If you are selling content though, you will get sales statistics (when they are available). What you will made out of them is another matter.
I know it can be frustrating. But like all trade business, you must take leap of faith and/or ask people around. Some will tell you something, some won’t.
markets like google play show how many download/purchases without problems, steam ditto you now how many players purchase the product. You known how many are interesting in certain product.
if i see 1000 purchases on “materail pack” if a made a “material pack” and its a work of 500$ value i can sell its for 1$ or 2$ if i want a profit of 1000$-2000$, and i can got more profit than sell 100 at double price.
i not see any problem with lower prices while i got the profit i want.
for me its better always sell 1000/1$ than 100/2$ but i need a reference of sales for risk to sell $1 instead of 2$
And you ALWAYS sell more if the price its half. Sellers should know how many people might be interested to adjust the price
What happens then, if you sell only a few ones? Will you have to increase the price to give you profit then?
that depend, you must seek the cause compare with other products in the market. (for that, you must known how many sales have others)
and this is basic, if its because price high compare with other similar products with more sales and/or more quality, you must lower, you got less profit for each sale but you going to sell more attracting more costumes with less budget. if its because its very specific content for very specific users you must increase. (of course quality matters in this case more)
or perhaps your work ins’t good enough.
ATM you can’t know the interest in certain product or how many buyer have the UE4 market. Unity at least have the “Top seller” and the ranking, votations,etc to get a idea.
the market more profitable still google play, steam and that with lower prices, of course we can’t compare, they have a millons audiencie, you can’t sell something to 1$ wanting making 1.000.000 sales in the ue4 market. i think i don’t known how many users have UE4 and that another problem… because you “Material pack selling at 1$ perhaps make more money than 20$ if there are ue4 user enough” who can’t spend 1$ its 6 nice materials? (i don’t think so anyway, its a example engines are no something that isn’t widely used)
A good tactic its perhaps make your first “material pack limited” FREE, known how many are interesting (if you can look at stadistics) and adjust the price for second.
What I find strange is the price differences for the same asset in unity store and unreal store. Unreal assets are approx. 40-50% higher than in unity. Why? Melking the cow?
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.
The reason is licensing. Once you buy assets in Unreal Marketplace, you can use them forever, in any project you want. You are not limited to UE4 in that case.
I bet prices would cheaper with per-project licensing.
Anyway. If there won’t be enough sales, people will drop prices. I personally don’t see any issue and don’t see any need for policing prices.
I also noticed this grave issue, the Marketplace loses credibility as an assets platform if they don’t address it (since we’re not talking of a mere 5-10% surcharge).
I think you are wrong. There a plenty of free models and stuff, even on the marketplace available that suffice for prototyping. Assets that I buy on such a marketplace I use solely for stuff I plan to release to at least make the money i spent on them back. You dont have to buy anything stuff, just to play arround with the engine. The engine comes with tons of free assets from all the example projects that are more then you will ever need for prototyping imho.
There is one main difference between the licensing that may be a source of the higher price: On the UE4 marketplace a single license can be shared by a team even if it is not working on the same physical location. With Unity every member would need their own copy.