Just thinking out loud. But it would be fair to buyers.
It would be great if asset price history was available. Or if price changes could be made no more than once every 90 days.
Since, in the lead-up to major sales, and knowing their exact dates, many publishers intentionally inflate prices.
Making the price historic available would be fair for everyone I agree.
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Has this (price manipulation before the sale) been really that big of a problem? I don’t think I ever encountered that and as a buyer the 30-day fixed price is for me good enough. From seller perspective tho, it’s already hard to experiment with pricing as sales are quite frequent…
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https://orbital-market.com/ shows price history since the old Marketplace days.
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I really had not considered this point of view, but this is a really good point here.
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Yes, unfortunately. I almost know the discount dates and I’m sure sellers know that too.
At work, I need to make a list of assets that we need to purchase, send it for approval to purchase on discount. Sometimes there are conditions, for example, only purchase if there is a 30% discount. We get the budget approved and ready to spend. Then comes the sales date and the assets is at 50% discount, yet we cannot purchase it, since the seller increased the price probably a month before discounts. A few days later once discount period is ended, the price is back to its previous value. This happens to me very frequently. I’m not sure if that was a thing in MarketPlace times, I wasn’t doing purchases.
As for my own indie project, I don’t have the resources or time to mark assets for long time. even though I notice the price increase, I still need the asset and have to buy it even if it’s discount is %10 of actual price but says 50 or 70 percent discount!
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This doesn’t make any sense at all.
1 - The seller alone decides the price; no one should care what it cost before. Maybe there was a mistake and someone forgot to add the 0, and the buyer thinks the item costs 10, but now it costs 100.
2 - When a product is updated and becomes more complex, it’s logical to increase the price. If a character was priced at 1, and then blendshapes and animations were added, it’s logical that the price would also increase.
3 - When you go to the store, you don’t see yesterday’s price on sausage.
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Of course, forgive me for saying this, but millionaires rarely come to buy assets on the FAB marketplace. Most of the time, these are ordinary indie developers or people who are just learning. And buyers like that genuinely care whether they’re being blatantly deceived by price manipulation, or if they can actually save at least something.
It seems to me that Epic itself runs these sales so that buyers with modest incomes can afford to purchase more — or at least buy something — since they simply can’t afford full-price assets. The sales were definitely not meant to be exploited by cunning, dishonest resellers looking to make a quick profit.
If a buyer later realizes that they’ve been blatantly deceived — that they bought an asset for the same price or even overpaid during a supposed sale — they simply lose trust in the platform. And it’s the honest sellers who suffer from that, not the hustlers who only think about how to trick someone for profit.
P.S. FAB isn’t a grocery store — it’s a digital marketplace where, in general, you can easily track price history and see whether a buyer was actually misled or not.