Try before you buy. I think it is not really fair to your customers that you do not have a try before you buy feature. Even with video showcases and demo projects you still may not get to fully understand the product until you can use it yourself. I know I am not the only one who has bought products on the market place and find out it is just not what I want. There is nothing wrong with the product but until I actually am able to dig into it I just don’t know about it. So a try before you buy button that adds the content to your account for 30 days would be really nice to have and fair.
I would totally agree, but it’s simply not technically possible.
There is no DRM for assets (source files), so if you download it once, you can just copy and upload the files to wherever you want to. No way to track if people own a license, no way to track if it was pirated.
The most that creators can do, is provide you with clear documentations, demo builds and other info that “could” help you find out if it will be good for you or not. If that didn’t help you, contact the creators and maybe they can tell you more specific details about it.
This is impossible. Marketplace creators already make little to nothing, with this, they might as well not place it in the marketplace.
I understand what you are saying about piracy that is a problem but I suspect you can already find assets from the marketplace that you can pirate now if you want. I guess it is really are you going to penalize people who want to know about your product because some people will pirate it? I guess what it comes down to is unreal needs to implement some type of license system to help prevent piracy.
@ UnrealEnterprise I usually download tools or other assets that have configurable options that you have to really try out to see if it works for you.
@Divivor Technically it should be easy it is just a matter of them wanting to do it. They already have the big part in place with the Epic Games Launcher. The launcher already tracks what products you own it actually would be simple for Unreal Engine to check to see if the product you are using is in your vault. Example I own plugin MyPlugin listed in my vault. When I open Unreal Engine it sees that I am using MyPlugin in my project and does a query to my vault to see if I own it.
@Trent_4 I am not a marketplace creator but I thought UE had a good percentage rate for creators. Some of the creators I know make thousands of dollars.
For Plugins it could be possible, but it really is not just a verification from the Epic Games Launcher. It needs to be implemented directly into the Unreal Engine and make sure that you can’t copy or modify any source files. This is not some small feature. (And I think plugin developers are required to provide source code)
But for anything else (Blueprints, Materials, VFX, …) it will never be possible.
In the case of Blueprint Assets half of the Value is the fact that you can see, learn and modify the Code to fit your projects. Putting them behind a special “try before you buy” mode will only make it impossible to see or modify the code. You will not be able to understand if the code is good or not.
Let’s say that it will only keep you from exporting/copying the Blueprint Nodes. You would still be able to see everything and you are able to manually copy everything in it.
On top of that, there is no way to reliably track changes to source files. (Copy Nodes between projects, rename them, done: Tracking failed.) The whole Unreal Engine would need to be restructured to allow this kind of use.
Those changes in UE, to allow this, would also be Open Source. So anyone with enough knowledge can revert this and/or build a custom engine version that simply ignores the Tracking and “Try before you buy” mode.
You also have to keep in mind that you can get and use the Unreal Engine without the Epic Games Launcher.
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As Marketplace Buyer and Publisher, we feel Playable Demos are Fair, but, post-purchase Support is exponentially more valuable. Thus we pay firstly for support that follows the product.
We believe anything is possible. A ‘Try before you Buy’ solution may be offered in the form of a Virtualized Client/Desktop using Pixel Streaming Technology with metered controlled access (no media import/export/copy) for full execution and review.
This Virtualized Client could support Free Unlimited Use, Free Timed Trials, Pay-per-view, and Pay-per-Use. It could also be useful for Toll usage of other Applications and Games, if designed well. We’re always opened to discussions for developing such a Client, Modular Game Assets, and Unique Games so lets Discord.
As far as being able to see the code that is a very valuable part and needed. Yes someone could just copy the code and not buy the plugin. I guess it is a tough thing to solve, is there really that much of a concern of people stealing your software instead of paying for it? Of course I know it will happen but from you all it sounds like your expectations is stealing software is more of the rule then the exception. Maybe that is the case and that is very sad. You all deserve to get paid for your work but as a consumer I have bought many plugins that after playing around with I consider trash and end up wasted money. So as a consumer we loose a lot of money on wasted products because we can’t test them. A playable demo helps it just depends on the product. If the product has many adjustments then a playable demo will show the main features but not what you can do with it to adapt to your scenerio. I guess I am just more on the side of hey if I have a good product people will pay for it and yes with every company, product, whatever some people will steal no way around it no matter what licensing system you have. If you google you can find cracks for just about any software. As a former web developer I know you could steal my html,javascript,css yes you can obfsucate it and make it very difficult to just get the source but it can be done.
I hear you dan07070707. But as Divivor said source included.
The problem really isn’t the try before you buy, it’s there is no consistent pricing model or way of rating a content creator. Some creators feel their $20 items are worth $400 bucks, were others give away $400 bucks worth stuff for $20 bucks.
And you don’t really know what “state” the content is in, until you start to work with. Some of packs I’ve gotten are completely unusable and waste of money. Some are good but always require work. I’ve not found anything in the level of professional/great on the marketplace or usable “out of the box” as some like to claim. Really view the market place as a place to learn from.
Here are the guide lines I use:
- Read all reviews
- Read all questions - if any unanswered, especially if the question was asked over a month ago. Pass
- If only documentations is discord - Hard Pass (definition of discord is chaos not organization)
- No documentation hard pass.
- Download demo if available.
- Watch any videos if available.
- Compare item price with other similar items. Is it within the same range? If not why?
- Then ask is the value worth it to you. If not add it to wish list and wait for a sale and decide then.
Out of all the content I’ve gotten off the market place, only maybe 20% was throw away. But even then I learned what not to do, which has value as well.
When a $20 purchase is a make-or-break decision for me, I don’t spend it on marketplace assets.
It’s up to the artist to show how the assets are built in the preview. If they don’t, I know that I’m buying a pig in a poke, and if the asset is low cost, I might buy it anyway if it seems like it could fill some hole I’m trying to find a stand-in for; if it’s a higher-cost asset, I will buy it if it has good documentation and some of the screen shots show overviews / meshing details, rather than just glory shots.
If an asset is obviously not what it was supposed to be, you may be able to ask Epic to refund your purchase price. In general, if you don’t abuse this system, I think they’ve actually been reasonably liberal on doing that. No idea if that will be the case for you, though.
This is a bit late but I do agree that this would help a lot with choosing quality assets and finding the ones that aren’t what was described before making the purchase.
The most annoying thing about UE marketplace, by far, is that there is no sorting mechanism like all major marketplaces (for games or else). By revenue, trending, sales, new sales, etc.
You have to go through an unbelivabl amount of low quality assets, with many being straight up spam, to find something extremely good that’s buried 60 pages in. Searching don’t help often, many wouldn’t have the titles you’d expect.
Yeah better search and organization tools for the marketplace and your vault are very much needed.