As you may (or may not) know, all products inside the Tools & Plugins category on Fab are purchased on a per-seat basis. Or at least they are meant to be according to the EULA:
2. Content License Grant:
[...]
e. Plugins. Code plugins that are being offered on the Epic Marketplace, including Unreal Engine Plugins and Unity Plugins (“Plugins”),
are offered to you on a per-seat basis and may only be used by the number of users that you have purchased licenses for.
[...]
and
5. How you can share content on its own:
[...]
b. Plugin Distribution. Distribution of Plugins in source format to your employees, affiliates and contractors is permitted so long as
use by those employees, affiliates and contractors does not cause you to exceed the number of paid users you have purchased for the Plugin."
[...]
It became clear that many people do not know about this policy, which I think is totally understandable. The Fab store does not communicate this in any way. As far as I know, it is also impossible to buy the same license multiple times using the same Epic account. This is in stark contrast to the Unity AssetStore that allows you to specify the number of seats you want to buy the product for.
So even if you, as a customer, are honest and want to buy a plugin for your whole team, the current system makes this unnecessarily complicated. Each Team member would have to buy the plugin using an inidividual Epic account. Do your employees then use their personal accounts to do this? What if the employee leaves or is a freelancer? Or do you as an employer need to have a bunch of generic Epic Games user accounts just to make these purchases the correct way?
I think that most developers also ignore this policy. For many tools it is just nonsensical to expect that multiple licenses are required for a single project. Take for example Narrative Pro 2.
But what would be a possible solution for this issue? Under what assumptions should I price my plugins in the future? Should I tell people about the EULA on my store listing? Should I ignore all this and just hope that enough people know and respect the policy? Should I write that I personally do not enforce this policy and the plugin can be shared with the team?
I’m eager to get as many opinions on this issue as possible, whether you are a customer or even a seller yourself.
Hiya @Philoko, and thank you for taking the time to reach out on the Epic Developer Community.
Under the current Fab End User License Agreement, plugins must be purchased on each developer account intending to use it. If developers wish to discuss alternative solutions, they can contact Fab support.
As a note: All products sold on Fab are licensed under the Fab EULA. You are free to work with customers directly on custom terms outside of Fab, but no custom terms should be listed on the Fab product page.
Hi @SkyeEden
thank you for your response! When you are suggesting to contact the Fab support, do you mean that in the form of a feature request for the Fab store? Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution for this issue. My post here was intended to raise awareness of an existing problem that, I think, all plugin developers on Fab face. I also don’t think that there is an easy solution for this issue, because it concerns plugin developers, customers, and the Fab store itself.
But now that I have at least raised your awareness, maybe someone is willing to put this issue on some kind of internal to-do list? So that it is at least discussed internally by the Fab Team. I know that you guys have a lot of things to do already and I also understand that the plugin section of the Fab store is comparatively small by revenue. I would argue, however, that this is a direct cause of the ambiguity of the status quo. It’s not really financially viable to develop plugins for Unreal as things are right now.
@Philoko you have made some very good points. I share your pain in a current game jam where time is ticking and the end goal is to just make a game for the fun of it and will likely not get published. This use case wasn’t in your list but I think it’s a special one that my research doesn’t even cover.
More could be done to accommodate this in way of a connection to itch.io game jams that would work with the solution I will propose below.
@SkyeEden I appreciate you bringing up the agreement and alternative solutions. I do find some inconsistencies in the verbiage on Fab. For instance, when purchasing a license, it says for ‘an individual creator or a small team’. That could easily be interpreted that this license covers my team.
Regardless, there are real conflicts of information and no good paths to take to compliance. I believe this shows how much Epic Games actually does want a solution to the problem. After all, most games aren’t made by just one person.
Let users share conditional, per-project plugin licenses with variants for authoring or simply running the project.
In my current conundrum, I’m the only person that will actually use the plugin in my game. The rest of the team is not even really programming but doing characters and assets. So they only need the built version, not the source code. The full breakdown of proposed solutions based on this and another idea are in this DeepResearch which of course is addressed to me based on my basic idea. I think there’s some version of the distillation of this research could be a feasible solution.
So that it is at least discussed internally by the Fab Team. I know that you guys have a lot of things to do already and I also understand that the plugin section of the Fab store is comparatively small by revenue. I would argue, however, that this is a direct cause of the ambiguity of the status quo. It’s not really financially viable to develop plugins for Unreal as things are right now.
