Imagine if you’re a studio, your running past your target timeline, pressure is on for the whole team, working via svn - meeting in a few days with the financiers - you’ve optimized and customized all your assets to fit the game - then you get 500 warnings from 500 products saying they’re going to be locked unless you pay again for each one.
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It’s all cool, no worries. I understand your point of view. For indie devs, which are now called “Personal licenses” I would give them my assets for Life but also have paid upgrades like Unity does, because many Assets need fresh content & fixes. I think that is fair and works for both sides.
Now for Corporations or big studios, now called “Professional licenses” it’s way different. I’m doubling down on having options for “Lifetime” purchase OR a yearly subscription. Why? because they get more income with our assets being purchase forever on their Games longer term (bigger market, permanent income), so we deserve a lot more.
It’s a vague idea but you get the point. Nobody wants to freelance, not you, not your 3D software and certainly not us.
The 500+ warnings or popups can be all be silence and summed into 1 single warning by Epic if they had done things right.
Have you ever heard of Apple Arcade or Xbox game pass? 1 subscription, all the Games you want. You don’t get thousands of warning from each Game studio, no… it’s all handle by a single Entity and then that Entity pays the members inside without disturbing the customer. Everybody is happy. Assets should be handled the same way.
yeah that scenario just sprung to mind - a well organized studio would have prepared for that anyway.
I do get what your saying, and I’ve thought before that it would be nice to have an “Epic Game Pass” where a studio could pay Epic a subscription each year, and the vendors of assets they use get paid each year from that.
As far as something smaller - I think subscriptions rely on a large customer base so the subscription price can be low, I don’t know if it would work for smaller customer bases.
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Epic or Fab Game Pass… I like that 
. Let’s hope someone in charge listens to that wonderful idea.
I’m not so sure it’s a wonderful idea though 
A regular income would be nice, but it would also mean it would be a much smaller amount - sort of like musicians from sites like Spotify.
I also think it would only work if the assets they used became theirs with all the rights to modify as much as they want and retain after their subscription ended - which complicates it a lot as you have to give incentive to keep the subscription up in other ways.
There is one outlet that does this currently, which is textures.com
Let’s hope not :'D in any case…on the idea about subscriptions…
This is actually worse for you as the creator. If you have for example a 1-year subscription on a $50 asset…ok, you might get $150 over 3 years.
Now let’s compare what I suggested above: per-seat costs for lifetime ownership. A large studio buys your asset for their 20-person art team. You’ve made $50 x 20 seats = $1000. Even if you priced your professional license at 5x as you state above and they bought at that price (which indie studios won’t), you would have made only $750 (and only IF they purchased a renewal for 3 years).
So I am not sure why the insistence on subscriptions when this is worse for small studios and also worse for you as a freelance artist. I don’t think the idea of costs scaling with the size of the team should be that controversial, vs. a subscription model that really screws everybody involved.
P.S. This is ALREADY how licensing works for engine plugins on the marketplace. Softwares often also work this way, where you buy per-set for the number of people at a studio who will be accessing the software.
I’m OK with per-seat costs but not with lifetime ownership included.
In reality, most studios won’t pass a 10-person art team. So, let’s compare using 10 and not 20. Also, let’s say the Seller has 10 or more products to become eligible for PER SEAT. I would offer these options depending if your an Indie or Large studio:
PER SEAT to include all Seller products (indie/small studio/person: 50% discount):
10 seats x $50 for 1 year = 500
PER SEAT to include all Seller products (large studio/professional: No discount):
10 seats x $100 for 1 year = 1000
LIFETIME purchase of all Seller products: 5x the cost of per seat.
Indies: 2500
Larg Studios: 5000
The difference here is that if it’s not perpetual licensing, I’m not going to buy it at all 
So you want Netflix, Maya, Adobe to function in all computers and forever too? hahaha. Per Seat is always limited by number of devices/persons or time. That’s how it works. You want perpetual… be ready to pay big bucks for it.
Anyway, it’s all hypothetical. I just hope Augmented Reality reduces Epic’s constant pampering to Game Devs and levels the field with Artist.
Quite literally, yes. Netflix notwithstanding, that is how it used to be. It worked out well for everyone except those wishing for infinite growth, which isn’t a real thing.
I don’t think the pricing tiers were thought through very well. 100k is nothing for even a small studio since you have to pay salaries - why should they have to pay the same amount as a studio making millions?
I absolutely want to get the bag from the big companies, but I don’t want to price out those in the middle or scare away indies who think they need the professional tier because the naming isn’t clear enough.
I’m just kind of sitting on the fence here not having actually published my migrated Fab stuff. I have absolutely no idea how to price the professional tier. I don’t want to ensure no one buys or ensure a larger company engages in some minor fraud by buying the indie tier, but I also don’t want a multi-million dollar company paying 20 bucks total for 100+ seats of my plugin.
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Your products are useful and have good ratings - I wouldn’t worry too much, maybe start at 3-4 times for all but the GSheets (1.5x - 2x maybe) - you can always raise the price later if you want.
100+ seats - that would be a mighty big studio. I’ve been thinking the average studio would use around 6 seats.
You should migrate now because from what I understand, if you don’t… you’ll still get paid but your account name will change to FAB and who knows if they’ll change it back.
Totally agree. Per seat pricing should have been applied. It seems Epic didn’t want to upset any large studio. So for me, I would assume a Professional license is more than 5 seat, therefor, 5x the price of a Personal license. Problem is… that studio may have +50 seats and they’ll be paying for only 5, which is very unfair for us. They shouldn’t keep that info in the dark.
Ugh. 
Maybe true but…just, oof.
I think that’s fine. I think 100x is fine. But will the buyer? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot with this new tier.
I’d like to see an option for FAB to manage a Pro price. It benefits them just as well to see us priced to sell – the highest price that works for everyone involved.
Epic sends surveys for Fortnite all the time. Do some for Fab perhaps?
I like it. If it could translate well to sellers.
UEFN has a revenue share concept but they’re able to base that on traffic.
I like this puts logic to it. The thing is we don’t know. How are we to program this without data lol 
Artstation makes sense at least in the way it says get this if you’re this big.
Maybe I’ll add a note saying (1) what professional means and (2) just contact me if price is too high/low.
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“Hello dear seller, I would like to inform you that we feel your price is far too low, and it is in direct opposition with our policy to pay it. Please increase the price or we will be forced to pirate your content. Thank you.”
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If we priced based on developer hours x developer rate for professional I’m thinking it would be more than 20x the personal price…
So are we sitting around 4-6 times the personal price being what we’re comfortable with?
And how does this even get monitored/enforced?
Epic could have clarified a lot more initially so I can’t blame people. I actually bought one asset I knew I wanted anyway just to get it under the old license, only for it to be wholly unnecessary. Well, no harm done, I like the asset anyway despite its flaws.
For buyers:
In other words, if you buy the personal license while developing in a garage, you can keep that license in perpetuity even if you become Big Evil MegaCorp. There is no “trap door” once you hit over $100k revenue. I still do think there should be one more tier between personal and professional.
For plugin sellers:
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Yes this is good info. I have asked if they can put it all in an FAQ page, hopefully they do it.
IMO the lack of clear communication here was a big misstep
Whatever it is they’ve decided to do, it’s unacceptable to leave everyone scrambling for answers to basic, important licensing questions
I don’t know how she can say it’s per-seat when the license states you can share it with your team.
Yes, you can share Marketplace products with your team but only for the limited purpose of the project that you are jointly developing. Content pooling or sharing products between developers outside of your organization is prohibited. Team members also cannot use products in an unlimited fashion for their own projects.
That’s not really per-seat, especially not in an organization such as those covered by the Professional license.