Free for the month assets should promote Unreal and stimulate new users to use UE and to shop on FAB. They should neither deter new users from Unreal nor convey a hobbyist, amateurish vibe of Unreal.
Epic often does showreels highlighting assets on the marketplace. Many of the free for the month assets would never be included due to their low quality. However, those same assets are included on the main page of FAB as free for the month.
Many free for the month assets look like they are the worst selling asset of a seller, thrown into free for the month for the quick cash grab of the one-time payment of up to $5000.
To prevent this, we need higher standards for free for the month, e.g.:
I agree with overall goal (to have better free for the fortnight assets), but strongly disagree with most of the above criteria.
Minimum $50 price
I seen bad assets priced at $200 and great assets priced at $10. But also, now Epic is paying âup to $5,000 (USD)â. This is IMO too low for high quality assets. Combined with your extra criteria of 15 sales/month that would mean that itâs just 6 months of sales. I.e., it make no sense to submit stuff that basically stops selling after free period for a while.
Sells minimum 15 times per month
Aside from even more limiting sellerâs participation incentive, this also remove relatively new sellers or sellers with more niche assets. Discoverability is not great on Fab for many reasons, so the fact that asset is selling less than 15 copies a month doesnât reflect on asset quality.
This one idk. There are some assets that are great, that were published years ago and still would bring a lot of value. E.g., Blueprint Assist or Electronic Nodes would be great addition to sponsored program.
What criteria do you see would ensure quality for free for the month assets?
Or are we trapped with bad assets until the one-time payment rises to e.g. $10.000?
Let me start by saying that I donât think that for example current rotation is bad. On the contrary, I think all 3 assets are good. So treat my below answer as a way to brainstorm getting even better quality content in the sponsored program.
I seriously donât know. I think itâs more about WHO is doing the selection, not some fixed set of criteria. I donât know backgrounds of those on the âcommitteeâ, but IMO those people should be actively developing games in UE, preferably should include some trusted people from community (in rotation, something like peer review in scientific journals). There should be someone there that could evaluate technical quality (including code, documentation, topology, etc.) as well. I think though that the WHO part is good. Itâs just that without great submissions there is nothing great to pick from.
The other side of the story is who is willing to submit their content to the sponsored content program. Previous $7.5k was probably too little already for some assets. Now itâs not only $5k max, but also wording changed to âup toâ, inflation went up and dollar value is going down (etc.). Even the best committee couldnât pick great assets if they are simply just not submitted to the program.
Also, IMO changing from âfree for the monthâ to âfree for the fortnightâ lowers the quality automatically regardless of other factors. There are tons of assets on Fab, way more than on UEM, but quality bar is way lower too. And itâs not only my subjective opinion - actual âminimum content requirementsâ were significantly lowered (e.g., now you can submit single Niagara particle system, on UEM you had to have at least 10; 1 prop vs 10 previously; environments donât even have minimal amount of models listed now, it used to have 35 for realistic, 50-150 for low poly, etc.). Add to that various issues with Fab itself (which made a few sellers shift focus to elsewhere). So overall I think there is even less good quality content then before.
Those (and other problems) stack against quality at the moment
We are here with about 10 years of market experience and we have applied for this many times. Despite the products receiving very positive feedback, they never wanted to choose us.
Instead, as I saw the projects that were chosen, I started to lose hope in this. And instead of doing proper work and thinking about the user, I think we should all focus on making garbage content and publishing more. lol. (After all, this is respected and loved.)
Currently, one free for the month asset officially supports only up to 5.4 even though 5.5 has been out for a half a year already.
Most of this sellerâs assets are also only up to 5.4 or even 5.3. The seller doesnât bother to update his assets, but still gets his sweet free for the month spot and cash bonus.
The moderation of free for the month assets is definitely poor.
