, post:784, topic:22096"]
The marketplace isn’t part of the plan at all, it’s just a nice-to-have.
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I incline to agree with your statement, as reasonably explains certain things. Yes, the marketplace right now is not in the grand scheme of Epic’s things, and to some extent it is understandable. Realistically, however, we cannot have the pretention of being in the same league, financially and exposure-wise, as AAA titles which employ the Unreal engine and cater to huge masses of public. It is natural that resources and strategies are poured into what makes most revenue and puts the Unreal brand out there. At least that’s how I perceive things at the moment.
I think it would be wise to keep evolving ourselves as craftsmen, improve our products as much as we can, have ourselves healthy business models and become more numerous, and eventually changes will come in time as the marketplace expands. As with everything in life, we have to work to achieve what we want. Nothing ever happens over night.
I did a simple calculation to gauge the size of the Unreal Marketplace, these are ballpark figures as I took the number of products per page and multiplied with the number of pages both regarding total assets and individual categories, here’s the breakdown (as of February 2019):
Unreal Marketplace total assets 7075 (25 products x 283 pages)
2D assets = 250 (25 x 10)
Architectural Visualizations = 250 (25 x 10)
Characters = 875 (25 x 35)
Community samples = 3
Visual = 225 (25 x 9)
Music = 700 (25 x 28 )
Epic Showcase = 75 (25 x 3)
Textures = 125 (25 x 5)
Animations = 125 (25 x 5)
Blueprints = 900 (25 x 36)
Code plugins = 425 (25 x 17)
Environments = 800 (25 x 32)
Materials = 425 (25 x 17)
Props = 1250 (25 x 50)
Sound = 600 (25 x 24)
Weapons = 225 (25 x 9)
I will restate, the numbers aren’t precise, but are close enough to a realistic approximation. 7000 assets, assuming each creator has an average of 7 assets, that’s around 1000 marketplace creators. From my experience with other marketplaces (unrelated to gaming), they contain catalogues of hundreds of thousands (sometimes close to a million) of products and tens of thousands of creators, just for reference. But that’s because the marketplace itself IS their business, unlike Epic which has its business well-spread into multiple branches.
If we’d been thousands and the products would’ve been in the tens of thousands range, I tend to believe that Epic would invest more resources in the marketplace itself. And it will happen eventually, it is only a matter of growth over time in my view. Also, enjoy the lack of saturation, it’s great while it lasts. 