Lets address because its the main point of your post with my own point: It doesn’t matter that if anyone relies on the UE4 marketplace to pay their bills.
That’s none of your business. It’s none of your business how artists, coders, blue printers, sound designers, and animators decide to price themselves or if they decide to rely on the Market Place to make their living in the first place. Moreover there is nothing wrong with relying on the UE4 market place to pay our bills. There is nothing wrong with asking to be paid a fare wage for the work we do regardless of whether we’re selling it on Unreal Market Place, the Unity Asset Store, Turbo Squid, or through freelance work. The places, stores, and market places content creators choose to sell their work is irrelevant to the conversation and your depiction of the Unreal Marketplace as a kind of Dollar General moreover slanders the reputation of the Unreal Market Place on the whole.
To reiterate: I think the major point of thread is to devalue the work of artists, coders, sound designers, and everyone else involved in game development to the point that we are working under unsustainable conditions so that someone can buy high quality work for bargain bin prices in order to avoid paying fair market prices. The Unreal Market Place place doesn’t exist in a vacuum from the rest of the game development industry no matter how much you would like for that to be true. To argue otherwise is cruel, belittling, and ignorant to the general demands of reality where we have families to feed, bills to pay, and lives to live.
is what content creators generally earned in 2014 for their work. sets the rate for what people charge in the Unreal community and the marketplace and it’s important everyone here know whether they are selling themselves, and their work, for too cheap.
Programmers: $93,251 ($44 an hour)
Artists and animators: $74,349 ($35.50 an hour)
Game designers: $73,864 ($35.50 an hour)
Producers: $82,286 ($39.50 an hour)
Audio professionals: $95,682 ($46 an hour)
Quality Assurance: $54,833 ($26 an hour)
The Unreal Marketplace doesn’t exist in a vacuum away from these rates and salaries. These are the rates the industry has set as being the average rate we should earn in a year and so the Unreal Marketplace is subject to these rates and prices as well (as are YOU). In addition the more likely it is that content creators can earn industry standard rates on the Marketplace, the more likely it is that more people will flood the Market Place with higher quality assets, more sustained developer support, and more varied content than what currently exists. That is only going to make the Unreal Market Place a better venue for game developers to shop for their projects. Not worse.