The flood of automatically generated AI assets is getting out of control, and the quality goes down with it. Some “publishers” literally automate the creation and publishing on FAB.
Here is an example of a publisher clearly abusing and not even adding the AI tag on half of his assets.
This publisher released 30 000 assets since November 2023. This is around 55 new assets per day…
So I think this comes to a point where it’s time FAB charges to publish an asset, this would do a serious filter on the low-quality automated content, even if it is 5$.
The 5$ could always be refunded later if certain conditions are met (for example, selling 100$ of that asset).
A fee could be complicated from fab’s perspective. From a legal+financial+software standpoint.
What would be WAY easier would be to cap the number of product you can publish per day/week IMO.
More than 10 new assets per week and you are definitely a bot.
I think a less-trusted state for new sellers could work too and is cheaper to implement.
You’re new to Fab? Only 1-3 assets first that need to make X revenue before uploading more. Prove that you can meaningfully contribute to the platform.
A small fee wouldn’t weight on a legitimate seller publishing normally but would add up if you’re a seller abusing the store by using some automated submission system. Either a fee or a cap on the number of submissions per day (as has been also suggested) could work to solve that, IMO.
I’m not sure what the proper solution for that problem is, but this is a huge problem.
I seriously don’t know who benefits from that?
buyers - no, because that’s garbage and limits visibility of other assets
publishers - no, because they lose visibility because of that
Epic - no, because they lose resources on handling it and I doubt there are enough sales to justify it.
Moreover the reputation of whole ecosystem is suffering because of that. It used to be in the past that some other stores were seen as “low effort garbage piles”, and UE Marketplace was seen as a place to get high quality assets. Now Fab reputation is as bad as those other stores and it’s getting worse
It’s a very good idea! Imo, the money earned this way, instead to be refunded, could be used for charity or the sponsored program or for Fab development.
It would help, but it’s already too late. Fab will not ask him to pay 200k and the store is already full of them.
They need to actually moderate their website and that would have fixed this issue before it started.
Maybe add this costs if you want to sell stuff. As there are people with hundreds of good free assets. I would support this. They are losing money with people like these, so I think they will do something about this.
As someone who just launched our first plugin on Fab — after months of polishing, documenting, testing on multiple engine versions — I absolutely feel this.
When you’re a small, serious dev trying to bring something genuinely helpful to the community, it’s disheartening to see your work buried under a flood of low-effort auto-generated content. Not just because of visibility, but because it dilutes the reputation of the whole platform.
That said, I agree that some kind of friction is needed — whether it’s a nominal listing fee, upload cooldowns, or new seller trust scaling. Not to punish creators, but to protect the discoverability of thoughtful, high-utility content.
We made Asset Optics as a real solution to a real pipeline pain: the chaos of asset tracking in Unreal projects. And right now, it’s harder to reach the people who would benefit from it — because the storefront is so noisy.
I’d love to see Fab champion creators who invest in quality — whether through curated visibility, “trusted creator” tags, or better filters. Otherwise we risk losing the very thing that once made the UE Marketplace special: clarity, curation, and craft.
Appreciate everyone speaking up here. It’s a tricky issue, but necessary if we want Fab to grow into a store we’re proud to publish in.
It’s hard to specify what should be an allowable size for an asset without distorting what kinds of assets are possible.
I’m preparing to launch a single, very complicated post process material I spent the last two months working on! It would not be feasible to launch this if I had to make multiple just to launch.
I completely agree with the above. FAB need to sort the content somehow.
In the old market, you had to include at least 10 units in the package if these were low-level props.
You had to have at least 10 materials, and at least 10 effects. Or the asset was returned to you for revision, or simply thrown in the trash. Since it was of no use.
Now, you can publish anything you want in 1 copy and spam the entire page.
And even a really cool pro won’t be able to make more than 2-3 assets a week. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day.
This is not UE marketplace, users on Sketchfab very often upload assets with a single object. This will hurt legitimate creators way more, as instead of making an asset in 3 days, they will have to spend 30 days to make the 10.
As for someone spamming AI content, they would just need to tweak their bot, so instead of it taking a few minutes, it will take like 20 minutes instead.
There might be 10 times less AI garbage, but there also will be 10 times less real content. So the problem stays the same.
This could be a solution. Currently it’s so hard to even browse the content on FAB. I scroll down the content for fun to see what people are releasing and once you hit a a “wall” of 50+ soccer shirt products it stops being fun. Those products can also decrease visibility of ones which are published less frequently (such as game mechanics code plugins).
But, what about the existing bunch of products? They wouldn’t charge someone 5$ x 300 products published in the past.
I wonder if I can even reach people through FAB, and consider additional marketing.
And then there’s the amount of AI generated or low quality products. They have a place on the market but not like this. I’m seeing a lot of content which might be copied directly from games (sly raccoon, DBZ etc.) but those listings could also be people recreating those assets (learning how to create them etc. then putting them online for sale). There is no quality control on that and the latter is trademark infringement. They should be hidden.
Well, I agree with this too! Would it help if FAB could group together those products as a collection? Person X creates 50 soccer shirt designs and it shows on FAB as “soccer shirt collection”? You’d be able to click on that and browse the individual products inside of it. I imagine the UI a bit like a Youtube playlist.
Exactly, “Size” (amount of content) does not reflect value. Some very useful code plugins (engine tools etc.) can be just a few text files in size and take more than a day to create. Meanwhile AI can generate entire character icon packs for the UI while people take a nap.
My products are code plugins which all solve specific tasks independently. I chose specifically not to release one large framework of features, because small independent plugins are easier to integrate with projects and are cheaper for the customers. You buy just the parts you need. If FAB had support for plugin dependencies I would have added more listings already .
As an alternative, I see only adding sorting. For packages and for individual assets.
I fully admit that it is okay for someone to buy 1 material. No matter how it sounds, well, you never know.
But it is definitely not a good idea when you go to assets and you have several screens of new items with 1 leaflet and 1 material of some surface (by the way, from Quixel this is all free).
Yes totally! Sometimes I just see something that I want to study, like rain effects on material surfaces, and I’d like to be able to buy just that instead of the whole pack. A pack of 50 euros vs a few materials to study for 3 euros makes quite a difference. If I’d get the whole pack I’d not use the other assets.
Currently that “model” (selling just 1 material of a pack of 100 to a customer) isn’t realistic because FAB’s pricing system isn’t that flexible. Basically sellers can only set the price for the full product (like a material pack). That one sale (would somehow) have to cover for future updates, support, and any other costs. The smaller the product (sales price, per product costs) the more difficult that is to be a realistic goal. Or, small products (like a shirt design) get unrealistic prices (someone paying 25 cents for a shirt design to study, then asks for support isn’t realistic).
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