Package prices are too high.

[thankstipscom]

@;324082

Unfortunately, implementing this would not be simple. The only way something like that would work is if it’s enforced, and who does that? It’d either be the honor system, or implementing DRM. Speaking as the guy that would be responsible for implementing this, these are the different scenarios I see:

1. We implement a “hobbyist price” with no other strings attached. Everyone on the Marketplace opts to pay less instead of more, all prices and revenues plummet, and the Marketplace economy bottoms out. The top tier of talent would leave because there would be no profitability, and quality and output would drop. People would publish content commercially in violation of the license, and it would be the responsibility of each individual seller to legally enforce this, because they own the rights to their content and Epic cannot legally act on their behalf.

2. We implement a “hobbyist price” and, in order to verify that no one is publishing content commercially under the hobbyist license, this would require Epic to significantly re-engineer UE4, the package system, and the Marketplace in order to add invasive digital rights management (DRM). Epic’s customer service and developer support would receive a massive surge in support requests due to the well-known problems inherent in any DRM solution and its deployment. It’s very likely that this would anger our licensees and affect our business, both from a practical perspective as well as an ethical one for those opposed to DRM. Even then, this wouldn’t work because it would require everyone to update to the latest version of UE4, which people interested in circumventing DRM would immediately stop doing. The only way around that would be for Epic to choose to deliberately start breaking the engine to force people to update and comply, and likely to deny support to people that won’t cooperate. The amount of manpower involved in enforcing this is not trivial.

I’m not writing this to throw a wet blanket on your idea; I’m actually entertaining the concept as a thought exercise and laying out precisely what would be required to make it happen, and highlighting the reasons it’s not likely to work based on my experience in running the Marketplace and convincing large organizations to do the things I want.

Fair enough.

Though, is it not semi-honour system based for nearly every software product out there though even with DRM. Everyone on here knows how to find software, music, movies etc illegally if they want to. The only reason we are all so passionate about this topic is because no one on here WANTS to obtain software illegally. The people that do always will. Unity and UE assets are not exempt from that. And even without the hobbyists pricing plan in place, the same is still true today for the assets at full price. Maybe it’s naive to think that making things more accessible curbs stealing them but I do believe this is the case for a lot of people. I mean realistically, how do you even enforce it now right? Like anyone can go spend a few K and buy up every asset then just give them to others for free if they really want to. Regardless the end risk is the same at either plan:

the user can release something having not paid full price and are they worth going after for it? If they’re making several million dollars… yea probably. If not, probably not.

The real questions are, do the creators of the content make more in the end selling the same product fewer times at higher prices or would they make more selling it at lower prices many more times. Most importantly, would they even sell it more if the price was lower?
Thats kind of the point of this discussion. If people say yes i would buy many more assets if the price was lower. I would use only a fraction of that in my release since I’d choose the better of the options in the end so only one or a few would get the release pay out. The others still get something.

I think at this point anyone with the same view would be afraid to voice it for fear of being yelled at. lol
There are a lot of assets I’d like to check out. I’d love to see how the inventory system, level up system, melee combat systems are in other packs compared to the ones I built myself. Maybe they’d help optimize mine. Maybe not. I’d pay a few dollars to find out. It’s more like paying for forum help at that point since I dont need their whole systems.

Realistically no one is gonna buy all the assets for under $20 and then get rich making a game simply cutting and pasting other peoples assets together. Anyone that has more drive than that to make a game most likely wouldnt be in it to rip off the original creator of the asset they used.