Correction: The asset the OP is referring to is currently in the showcase section.
The one I was referring to is the weapon’s one, which is from a different seller.
In this 5 day old post alone, we were able to confirm that 3 different sellers are violating Epic’s marketplace terms, can you imagine what would happen if Epic automated the detection process?
Based on my previous experiences, which go back to years ago, I would say absolutely nothing will happen. These sellers will continue manipulating prices, copying other people’s work, and then so easily hide products they copied from other people when they get caught, and eventually Epic will thank them for violating Epic’s terms by either showcasing their products, or by selecting them to be “Free of the month”.
I have directly emailed marketplace support about such violations years ago, and I always received a “After reviewing, we will not be removing the content from the UE Marketplace at this time.”
I know of at least a dozen currently “Not for sale” or “RECORD DELETED” products that were hidden or removed when people discovered they were stolen, yet the same sellers are still active and publishing on the marketplace right now as if nothing happened. Two of these products were selected for the “Free of the month” program, so they were displayed for a full month each.
I have not heard of a single incident where a seller who violated Epic’s terms got banned from publishing on the marketplace. I have just checked every seller I know of who had a history of stealing other people’s work and was caught, some of whom were stealing directly from Adobe - and all of them are still on the UE Marketplace, active and selling, while one of them was banned from the Unity asset store when they were discovered. Epic removed a single product I know of only after being contacted by Adobe’s legal team directly. In short, even if the copyright infringement was obvious, if you’re not the copyright holder your report will most likely be ignored.
So yes, of course such sellers can offer great deals to unaware customers when they haven’t done any actual work, and when there are absolutely no repercussions to their actions, nor any real moderation whatsoever!
This, along with the fact that Epic allowed thousands of AI generated assets to flood the marketplace, then invited the sellers of these assets to participate in all previous official sales overshadowing real game development assets, also the fact that there are major inconsistences and contradictions between marketplace staff when reviewing products ( a literal blob that was created in 5 minutes using Blender’s sculpting tools then auto rigged using a plugin is accepted and is ok although clearly made by a beginner who started weeks, not even months ago…yet a full blueprint system that was created by a seller who had previously posted here about this gets rejected because they used Unreal’s example vehicle in their project, well I have bought multiple assets from multiple sellers who used the exact same vehicle and their products were accepted and are still live!)
and of course, the lack of basic filtering features requested by buyers years ago yet were never even placed in the roadmap, all of these things only tell me that Epic themselves don’t take their marketplace nor the people building their business around it seriously.
I had to wait 6 long years to be able to sell on the UE marketplace (I had the wrong nationality, and although I was the director of a media company in the Netherlands back then and had a legal work permit, selecting my place of birth when applying to become a marketplace seller immediately terminated the application; I had to legally change my nationality to become a seller), so it feels absolutely terrible that the UE Marketplace is degrading this quickly just when I was able to start publishing on it, it also feels terrible that many sellers and buyers care about the Marketplace’s user experience, quality control and rules more than the employees who are getting paid to do this.
I find this extremely frustrating because every single point I mentioned has already been mentioned by many people years ago, yet were completely ignored.
Finally, I would like to compare an asset that has been showcased recently with a simple demo component that I included with my marketplace asset:
First of all, I have no problem with this seller, my only concern is that it is a very, very basic asset, I hope they are making any profit.
My question and my problem is, what conditions did this showcased asset meet so that it was staff picked?
I’m a straight-forward person, and when I read this in your terms:
2.8.b Content should not consist primarily of easily reproduced assets
I simply included easily reproduced assets as demo and extra components in my products hoping someone would find them useful, and planned to release them for free later.
What I didn’t expect is that one of the assets I considered to be easily reproduced that it might not be even accepted as a product of its own to be copied by someone else, and then the copied asset to end up in the showcase section! Absolutely surreal! What does this say about the quality of these picks? or the current standards/expertise of the people picking these products? Most importantly, what message does this give to dedicated, serious sellers?
To prove my point, here’s a simple step by step guide on how to re-create “the most powerful fixed camera system in the Marketplace”:
a) UI_ViewButton
1- Create a new User Widget, call it UI_ViewButton and open it.
2- From the UMG Palette, drag and drop a Button widget to the canvas.
3- From the UMG Palette, drag and drop a Text widget inside the Button widget, make sure to set “IsVariable” to True.
4- At the PreConstruct event of the UI_ViewButton, get a reference to the TextBlock widget, then call its SetText event.
5- Right click on the text variable input of the SetText event, and select Promote to variable, the variable is called InText by default.
6- Make sure the new InText variable is selected, then set InstanceEditable and ExposeOnSpawn to true.
7- Select the Button widget, scroll down to the bottom of its Details panel, then click the “OnClicked” event.
8- Create a new event dispatcher, call it OnViewSelected and add a new variable input to it of the type Integer and call it “Index”
9- Call this event dispatcher on the button’s OnClicked event.
10- Connect to result of GetParent > Get All Children, then from the array call the Find function and set self as input. Connect the output integer value of the Find function as an input of the OnViewSelected event dispatcher.
b) Main views widget:
1- Create a new User Widget, call it UI_Views and open it.
2- From the UMG Palette, drag and drop a VerticalBox widget to the canvas.
3- Make sure the VerticalBox is selected, then from it’s Details panel set “IsVariable” to True.
4- On the Construct event, call the GetAllActorsOfClass function and set the class to CineCameraActor
5- Drag the output array of the GetAllActorsOfClass function and promote it to a variable, call it Views.
6- From the Views array, call the ForEachLoop instance, at the Loop Body, create the UI_View widget, then add it as a child of the Vertical box widget.
7- Drag the Array Element, get it’s Tags, then get a copy, connect the result to the exposed InText we created above, this will set the name of the view based on the actor’s first tag.
8- Drag the return value of the Create Widget function, and call "Assign On View Selected", this will create a new event.
9- At the newly created event, get a reference to the player controller, then call Set View Target with Blend.
10- Get the Views array, then call Get(a copy), connect the Integer input of the Get(a copy) to the Index variable of the event, connect the output of the Get(a copy) node to the New View Target variable.
11- Done! Now simply create the UI_Views widget and add it to the viewport, and of course drag and drop a couple of CineCameras with tags as their title to the world.
Many cosmetic features can be added, for example an empty Actor can be created, then a billboard inside it with a custom camera icon, and a CineCamera with the variables needed exposed to be edited when spawned in the world. But the CineCameraActor Class at step b.4 must be replaced with the class of your custom Actor.
How is this Showcase material? or a marketplace product material for that matter?
Conclusion:
