[Feedback] Versioning, Release Notes, Notifs, Previous Release Downloads & More...

General Feedback & Requests
1

One of the major pain points with the Unreal Marketplace was never knowing when assets were updated or what changes the updates consisted of… the constant scanning of product descriptions and seeking outside channels of communication for further information does not create a pleasant user experience.

Can we PLEASE get:

  1. Mandatory semantic versioning
  2. Mandatory release notes (per release)
  3. The ability to download ANY previous release; since we all know that updates don’t always fix bugs and often introduce new ones
  4. A listing of what platform(s) and version(s) each INDIVIDUAL release is compatible with
  5. Asset update/release notifications on the site & the option to opt into email updates for individual assets

Additional Feedback:

  • ADD QUESTIONS/REVIEWS & MIGRATE EXISTING ONES FROM OTHER PLATFORMS
    They are an integral part of the buyer experience and failure to add them will ultimately hurt your sales… which will drive away creators.
  • Ditch the 5 ratings requirement, this only helps bad assets sell and good assets fail
  • Provide sellers with analytics and other meaningful metrics for marketing campaigns - @Loden - Heathen
  • Provide sellers with a way to view sales and verify buyers
  • Provide a public-facing API for sellers to integrate with and do everything the can do manually on the site (as a seller)
  • Provide a more advanced search with the ability to do a combination of fuzzy and exact matches with the ability to have required, optional, and negated terms
  • Add some form of likes, bookmarks, favorites, collections, wishlists (without a silly 200 item limit), etc. to help improve the buyer’s experience and organize/categorize items they may wish to purchase at a later date

Other "Nice-to-Have"s

  • Add native support for “Bundles” that include other assets that are handled as a sort of collection instead of requiring sellers to create an “Item” for their bundles
  • Add support for some sort of “BYOB” (Build Your Own Bundle) that gives sellers a creative way to market their assets by allowing buyers to gain discounted pricing without necessarily buying assets they may not be interested in
  • Add option to require payment for major version releases / updates - @Loden - Heathen
  • Add product product tier support, so sellers can have (for example) a “Base” and a “Pro” or similar tiered offerings instead of creating multiple listings for essentially the same asset - @Loden - Heathen
  • Add subscription support for assets that may require ongoing development cycles - @Loden - Heathen

For more feedback, see my post about the Unreal Marketplace from Jan 2023.

If you agree, please upvote for better exposure!

2

This!
Release notes directly on the store page and in the library are much needed!

2 Likes
3

I would add to that there MUST be some means of

Paid update, Major update, Lite to Full, Updates/Support Subscription or some system so that a developer of a software tool can account for the ongoing development and cost that supports their customers properly.

As it is, FAB is only fit for purpose for 3D models and 2D textures. Maybe audio … but software No this is not gonna cut it. We will be here for a year at least but we cant remain after that if there isn’t some means to address this.

Major Update / Paid Update
Is not ideal but works in a pinch

Lite to Full
Is required for various use cases

Subscription
Is the gold standard … no I am NOT talking about SaaS
I mean a “maintenance” subscription aka Updates and Support subscription.

The idea that you can buy once and receive life time updates and support for that initial purchase is not sustainable and Epic knows that they are a functional software company with various systems in place for recurring revenue.

What we would ideally like to see is a subscription model so that clients can buy updates for the period that suits them be that a month, a quarter, a year whatever and such that returning customers dont get screwed but can simply pick that sub back up to get the latest updates.

Major / Paid Update can fake this via annualized paid update and a steep discount for existing customers but the MAJOR draw back to that is customers that purchase any time after release are losing out on that first year, even if you add a Grace Period system in place its still not ideal

The ideal is that you can subscribe to get updates
The license to use it is perpetual, but if you want updates and support you need to pay for that service as a service e.g. a recurring cost.

For our direct customers they can sponsor us on GitHub or Patreon and that gets them a site based perpetual license to use all our tools. While they are “subed up” they have access to updates and elevated support channels. They can cancel at ANY time and they DO NOT lose access software, the license doesn’t stop, etc. they can keep using it all … they ONLY lose access to updates and elevated support channels.

As a subscription a user that subs up for a month on 6th June, can choose to renew on 6th July if they want

Where as the Major updates if we release on 1st Nov (as we tend to do) and you buy on 3rd march then you just lost 4th months of that 1st year, come 1st Nov you would either stop getting updates as we moved to the next years release or you would be asked to pay (for us 20% base price) for the next year worth of updates.

We NEED a maintenance subscription tool
At minimal we NEED Major / Paid updates

And without at least the Major / Paid updates the store is not fit for purpose we will have to disable our asset on it within the year.

We cant give FAB users free for life updates
1st that isn’t sustainable at all
2nd that isn’t fair to every other channel user who pays for updates and elevated support if they need them.

1 Like
4

While extremely unlikely, I agree… added to the list. :+1:t3:

5

… And did I just notice there is no way to see page visitors, number of sales, or any sort of page metrics at all?

How are we supposed to market, handle marketing conversions, get feedback on what is or isn’t working, etc.

1 Like
6

Added seller analytics to the list too :+1:t3:

7

There hasn’t been any metrics of any sort the entire 10 years we’ve had the UE marketplace… they’ve said, numerous times, that they were working on them - never got them. Now with fab they’ve said they will add them “in the coming months”… we’ll see

8

With the prior marketplace we at least had report which showed sales on what day 25hrs later

Which was crap compared to other platforms but better than nothing … I don’t see anything at the moment where we can monitor at all in any way.

9

The old report still works, or at least exists. Time will tell as to whether it works I guess as the update time hasn’t come yet for today

10

I didn’t expect it can work but maybe
Still

Silly that Epic has launched so many stores, owns so many digital platforms and didn’t thing this through better :smiley:

Do hope they get it sorted
UAS needs something to check it, love the idea of a multi-engine store front and internally we build on UE anyway so Epic is more “native” to us and would rather make it home

But ya its miles off from being good enough at the moment