If a seller is afraid that their asset is so unwanted and low quality that it won’t recoup even $10, then they should rework their asset. Not upload it, by all means to FAB, overloading Epic’s server and wasting the attention of FAB buyers who look for good assets.
Even for a free high-quality asset, a nominal fee is worth it. You get more attention, you promote yourself, you showcase your work to ensure buyers of your quality. Just like many free games on Steam do, by paying the $100 fee.
The fee raises the odds your free HQ products won’t drown in a swamp of free LQ or AI assets.
FAB is a professional asset marketplace for commercial game development. FAB is not a hoster for portfolios of newbies who are just starting out and want to sell or upload for free their first Blender donut without a publishing fee.
Newcomers ≠ low-quality asset spammer. Those should indeed be impeded by the publishing fee. They should not be compared to newcomers, which start by publishing a great asset they worked months on.
That is unfair for high-quality content creators to be drowned in a bunch of low-quality assets spammed by sellers who had not a single extra obstacle to get the same visibility on FAB.
That is unfair for buyers who could spend their time on game developmet but are forced to waste it on scrolling through thousands of garbage assets.
I guess your intentions are indeed different and are not applicable to most FAB sellers. FAB cannot cater primarily to people like you. It would disadvantage many other sellers and shift FAB’s purpose in a wrong direction.
We don’t need this abundance of low-quality assets on FAB. Not even for free.
Beginners, especially, should not be spoiled with poor quality assets. It would do them a disservice and completely deter them from gamedev. There are many lists of high-quality and free-to-use assets like here, here, here. Let’s not forget, beginners still require a costly PC to start out.