WHAT
On this week’s livestream, we’re joined by Josh Fleming, senior developer support manager, to discuss upcoming changes to the Unreal Engine Marketplace and the big takeaways from the survey conducted earlier in the year.
WHEN
Thursday, November 1st @ 2:00PM ET - Countdown
Fingers crossed that a last updated date is included in all marketplace listings with optional changelogs (for every update and their date of release) from the seller. This has been a pain point for me with the Paragon Assets where they get stealth updates and I don’t know what’s been updated and when they were updated. Since I’ve moved those assets around in my project (consolidated a lot of duplicated materials and shrunk file paths because the Editor won’t package certain things like Crunch skins as is because the filepaths are too long), I need to know exactly which files have changed to manually import and replace references into my project.
I actually don’t want free stuff to pollute the store, the reason being, it’s very difficult to confirm if you are violating copyright by using the item.
External stores such as sketchfab, cgtrader etc… are full of copyright infringing stuff in the PAID section, the free section I don’t touch unless it’s from a university or an artist I know from unity/unreal marketplace. For example many downloadable animals and people are directly ripped from game content and put up as free cc0 items, some of this content is probably sold on the site too.
Recently I had cause to test what happens to someone on sketchfab for repeated copyright violations on the SAME seller. Models were at the $5 and $20 price mark.
Day 1: Reported for copying static models verbatim, textures where put through an auto cartoon process.
Sketchfabs response : Delete offending item from sellers list.
Day 2 : Report for ripping off an animation and model via poly reduction.
Sketchfabs response : Delete offending item from sellers list.
Day 3 : Report for ripping off an animation and model via poly reduction.
Sketchfabs response : Delete offending item from sellers list.
Day 7 : Report for ripping off an animation and model via poly reduction.
Sketchfabs response : Delete offending item from sellers list.
Seller untouched.
You now get the picture… you buy from here you are at serious risk of being sued.
I want confidence that what I buy on here is legitimate, I prefer what I buy I can actually use in my game and not 6 months down the line have to rip out and replace due to seller being a thief.
Though I don’t really know why the stuff on here costs more than on the unity marketplace, I’m guessing either limited marketshare or percentage cut, I suppose there are a few quirks on import like multiple bones, bone naming etc… to convert from one to the other adding to the workload.
This is precisely why I use Unreal instead of Unity. The assets work on average, they’re not just shovelware. Sure, the stuff for Unity is cheap as chips, but a lot of it looks and performs very poorly (if it even works)
How do we as developers and content creators make money? Learning the skills we have has taken some of us years and the content we create can take hours, days and even months. We do not work for free or at least I do not. If you work a job you expect to get paid the same as any one of us. Fair pricing models is a good rule for any developer. I have not seen anything here on the Marketplace that was insanely priced. This is called Capitalism. Work, Earn, Save and Buy!!! Rinse and Repeat!!!
i would love to hear about being able to use “local currence” in the market, currently using only US currence is very complicated in my country and could be good to
be able to use local currence to buy things in the market.
many others groups are doing that like microsoft, ubisoft, EA, steam are doing that and it’s helping a log.
I’m in EU and paying in EUR, so that is “local currency” for me. Last year, some seller be told the actual US price of some asset I had bought, and some quick calculation seemed to show that Epic was taking rather a large cut on top of the exchange rate (like way more than 5% above the exchange rate + taxes). So I’m not sure if paying “local currency” is a benefit in this case. But I might be wrong, and it was a while ago. If anyone has reliable numbers on this (the actual cut Epic takes in the EU, on top of their “standard cut” (which they reduced recently), the exchange rate and taxes), I’d like to see them. Note that I’m not complaining about the general prices themselves; I bought plenty of assets, but being “punished” because I’m in the EU (here or on another marketplace) doesn’t seem fair, IMHO. It’s not like I can personally help it.
I think they will make great improvements! Epic always does in my opinion. I think a notification system through the marketplace would be great. For example, let the seller know when comments or questions are made on the product page, also a favorites page I agree with that, to check progress on the products and refer to for anything else. As well as notifications to customers or consumers about when the seller upgrades to new unreal engine version. So in short better communication and a reference page Those to me would be the greatest improvements I think.
I hope not…this is actually RESPECTLESS regarding the work and effort of the artist and it has terrible side effects, like attracting the wrong people. FREE stuff often feeds a freeloader mentality.
Free until published would be amazing, it’s hard to tell which assets you are gonna need for shipping but you can’t try everything to find the best one cause of the price barrier.
Every time I’ve tried to sell my assets I get this answer:
Not enough content
Asset not of high quality
Seriously guys, what exactly is “enough content” for you? and how do you measure “high quality” ? (all my props were smoothed w/ quads topology, textured, scaled, lods, etc). I may not be the best modeler in the planet but I majored in 3D animation, so please… be open to receive new assets from unknown developers, not just your favorites.
Well here on BRAZIL it is on US$ and using or currently conversion of 3,70 a 10 US become 37 R$ which is almost 4x the price and we also ending paying a “extra taxe” for paying in US from the credcard, which is also based on US then it can easy go near 40, is really unfair for us, i’m not saying which it is epic fault and is more like our country fault, but as i told normally others companies which make the “conversion” it ending beng much more fair and more like instead of a 10 US become 40 RS it’s ending becoming like 20 to 30 RS at best wich i much more affordable fo us, that is why others companies like blizzard, ubisoft, EA GoG, steam and others use the own way to convert to our local currence it make the products become much more affordable and even in some cases like blizzard, gog and steam you can pay in payments, well it could be really cool for countries/places like here where the US currence is bigger than local currence.
I cant speak for everyone, but “what is enough” depends on “the needs” in correlation to price and available money, at least for me. (and if it fits the game, i wont buy stuff that doesnt fit but still looks “cool”.)
I could have bought a pack of 4 landscapes for 50$, or the “Affordable Landscapes” pack for 100$, but i got the 100$ one because it was a better deal.
In this case the deciding factors were:
I got a bunch of grass for free (its included in the pack)
A dozen?+ Landscapes (allthough some of them are very specific, like the Moon for example)
Quality (for what i needed, obviously performance still matters)
Acceptable performance to make an actual game with these Landscapes
Besides the smaller pack, the other alternative was the “Redwood Forest” from MAWI United GmbH, but i decided against it for the following reasons:
It lacked proper Performance descriptions (Its obvious that this needs more than the average GPU, but the only thing i found after searching was a short youtube-video made with a 1080 lacking more relevant information)
That said, i still have this on my “Wishlist”.
I noticed this multiple times, many Assets in the Store have incomplete Descriptions, not working videos or broken links.
I can not afford to throw around 150$ without knowing if i actually can use it for my needs, even if it is an awesome asset. (which said Forest definitely is.)
I dont know how others decide, but for me there is not a single factor that makes a decision, but a single factor can make me avoid an asset - regardless of its quality.
And then i always fear that some of the unknown Creators might not have gotten everything legally, just like people are uploading stolen stuff onto Steam on a daily basis, which probably explains the scepticism against new creators.
I personally prefer the high quality stuff we have here, instead of a few thousand assets that you cant really put into any serious game, where you also dont know “where they are from”.
We also have a ton of free assets from Epic games, allthough most of them are too specific for most people, but still, they can be harvested for stuff to use in your games.
On the other hand, its obvious that you shouldnt buy a 100$ landscape pack for a free game on itch.io.
I think that there isnt much on the UE4-Marketplace that has an unreasonable price.
[HR][/HR]But more importantly:
We do not have a Wishlist…
There is a bunch of Assets i want to get for the future, but i cant track these at all.
Every single time i am searching for something, i have to deal with the Marketplace and search for a specific asset that i might have seen a year ago, without knowing its name.
This is not great for real game developers not either for their original artist, all these assets are prostitued and burnt by hobbyist, and then customers will see them as flip assets.
Those to me would be the greatest improvements I think.