[=“EntrpriseCustomr, post:936, topic:22096”]
Similar to / @ and others abandoning the marketplace I guess. So much of what’s left now on there, is low or mixed quality imho. But after the 12 / 88 revenue split change, it seemed like it should have led to a golden time for marketplace sellers.WTF???
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The following is my perspective only. I do not claim my reasons to be fed up with the Marketplace to be universal.
It has nothing to do with the revenue and everything to do with people and all their “justified” demands. People believe “the customer is always right” and have no interest in what is actually right. Here are a few examples:
- The gentleman above, quoted below.
[=“coalminds, post:939, topic:22096”]
It hasn’t worked since the version I bought it with (a code error prevents the sample project from working) last august, and also hasn’t been updated since then (3 versions ago). The ticket was opened in November.
The way instant refunds would work is that they have people assigned to process the latest versions of marketplace assets, and if they are non-functional, requesting buyers should have it refunded instantly. It certainly shouldn’t take 6 months.
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He’s referring to my product (UWorks), which belongs to the “Code Plugins” categories - not “Blueprints”. It’s advertised to work up to 4.22 - the code works perfectly fine and the blueprints are bonuses because, again, it’s not in the “Blueprints” categories. On that note, the fact that the blueprints are screwed isn’t even my fault. The always-wonderful Epic Games reviewers deleted an entire folder from my plugin and e-mailed me that the update was successful. It took me 5 and a half months to put the initial version of product on the Marketplace because of incompetent reviewers and I’ve encountered all sorts of **** ever since, almost every single update.
And he not only wants a refund for something that works as advertised, he wants an instant refund after he had already downloaded my source code. Fair. Also worth mentioning here is that sellers don’t even get notified of refunds. If I have 10 sales and 9 refunds in a day, all I see is a “+1” - only the Marketplace stuff ever handles that stuff and they should notify you, but in reality, they never do.
- … whatever you want to call him, pirated my entire plugin, in true “Braindead Robin Hood” style, then posted it in my own Discord:
Yea, watch out for a “Yakim3369” thief.
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I spent an hour with a customer teaching him how to compile a dedicated server because I originally thought my plugin was the, but no - the customer had no clue what he was doing.
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Another customer wasted 2h of my life by talking and mentioning me on my Discord, only to come to the conclusion that my plugin wasn’t even part of the project he was running because my plugin was on a SSD which was unplugged.
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Countless customers have no idea where the universal UE4 log files are.
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While I was waiting for approval on the Marketplace, during the 5 and a half months it took, I gave about 5-6 copies of my plugin for free, to people I respected for various reasons.
- One owner is now selling blatant copies of my plugin.
- Another owner is a forum moderator and gave me infraction points for writing the word “fkcing” with a “u” in it, on an anti-piracy thread, which didn’t even affect my products. Maybe “fkcing” was unnecessary, but I tried to do a good thing, never did a wrong thing on forum, and I got sanctioned for it, while others get away with much more.
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Several Unreal Tournament contributors and I got banned on the UT forums 3 years ago after showing the UT team that they had severe security flaws in their game. Instead of admitting them, they silenced about 5 of us, at least.
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I used to have 4 versions of my product, for various purposes. I had submitted all of them at least 3 times, for the “Free For The Month” stuff. Again, all of them are “plug-n-play” Steam integration tools. Most UE4 games end up on Steam. They are undeniably useful to a lot of people. And, instead, I see icons or obscure sound packs or stylized packs which were 5 USD anyway, while my product was priced 60-160 USD, depending on the version. So yea, no one wants a 160 USD tool to be free, but 5 USD icons, sure, hand them over!
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Back when I submitted my first product, I waited for 5 and a half months for it to get approved.
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When I submitted a new product a few months ago, the reviewer thought he was smarter than me and told me something didn’t work as it should when it was definitely working exactly the way it should - but that’s what happens the reviewers have no clue what they’re doing and not even reading my documentation. I saw product pages written entirely in Spanish and even the infamous “Fat Unicorn” pack, but my 10 USD interface kit, full of utilities, got rejected for that.
I could go on, but you get the point. All these headaches are 100% generated by people. And it does not matter at all whether the reason people generate all . Whether it be stupidity, weakness or even evil, at the end of the day, where’s my incentive to continue all ? That 88% for me, post taxes, translates to about 80 USD (I think) per sale. Considering the sporadic and decreasing frequency of the sales, no matter what I do or update, along with the above-mentioned headaches, that’s not worth it.
gentleman launched what is, without a doubt, a very high-quality product: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…e-water-system Take a look at the old comments, where people constantly complain how “high priced” that product is. He even made a blog post, outlining the most outrageous of those (yes, he also writes very briefly about my work, since he was an old customer of mine): https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…e-water-system
If you ever want the Marketplace to be good, then there is a desperate need for moderators and better anti-stupidity regulations.
Everything I said, whether it seemed dark or harsh, are just facts. But nevertheless, I’d like to end in a positive note so… The feeling of creating something on your own and seeing that it actually helps people by saving time, energy or money for them, is amazing. It’s indescribable how nice it is to read “Your work made mine a hell of a lot easier!”. As an experience, I think everything should create and sell something on a marketplace, at least once, because there’s just so much to learn from it.
