The Unreal Marketplace Improvement and Feedback Thread

[_cDub]

I think a wishlist would be cool. Lots of cool stuff that I don't need now, but am keeping in mind if I come across a reason to use it.

[Jon Jones]

a.) That's a good idea, I should probably add my series WIP thread to the description.

b.) The Trello board is currently used to gauge interest in a product before it hits the marketplace, right? The UE4 Marketplace guidelines mention that one of the reasons an item may be removed from the marketplace is lack of public interest. This essentially performs the same function as the Trello board, just not beforehand. If Epic receives content that meets their quality standards, you can simply add it to the marketplace and let the consumers vote with their wallets. I'm not sure what the threshold would be to consider it a failure, perhaps less than 20 lifetime sales by a certain period or something like 6 months. Nothing too strict as you don't want it to be where you are pressured to sell x amount of units in x days/months but a number where you can determine "yeah nobody is really interested in this product."

c.) I'm hoping to be able to help contribute more to the characters categories, going to be evaluating that once I finish up with this summers submissions. =)

Thanks Jon! That's an angle on it I hadn't quite considered, and I like that. I'll think on this.

That's kind of surprising that environments would be #1 with sales counts, since they're usually the most expensive. Cool, though, since its nice to see that those guys' hard work paid off.

It does! Higher-priced stuff does surprisingly well when it's well-made, well-marketed, and useful. Having a solid forum presence and being really good about customer service also makes a big difference.

For those of you that are thinking of selling content on the Marketplace, another way to look at these categories is in examining what the best content in each of these categories is doing well. Even if you don't purchase the content, you can still learn a lot from their presentation, the way they designed the pack to fit a specific need, the way they demo the content in videos, and how clearly they communicate the solution to a development need.

I think a wishlist would be cool. Lots of cool stuff that I don't need now, but am keeping in mind if I come across a reason to use it.

I like that! I'm writing this down. Thanks!

[Jon Jones]

Also, here's another little improvement for today: I just sent out initial sales numbers to everyone whose content was released two weeks ago to give them an idea of how well they're doing initially. This is still a very manual process and I'm handling it personally, but I'll be sending out this "here's how your first two weeks of sales went" report for all sellers from now on. This will hopefully improve things until we launch the Seller Portal later this year.

[Necrophob30]

Also, here's another little improvement for today: I just sent out initial sales numbers to everyone whose content was released two weeks ago to give them an idea of how well they're doing initially. This is still a very manual process and I'm handling it personally, but I'll be sending out this "here's how your first two weeks of sales went" report for all sellers from now on. This will hopefully improve things until we launch the Seller Portal later this year.

That's a really good idea. After you've gone through a couple of waiting cycles, it's not so bad, but the first wait for sale data is a doozy.

[SE_JonF]

Agreed, the first month is where you're constantly waiting by the phone. Cool to see you doing that for new sellers. Jon Jones for marketplace president, man of the people! =P

[zeOrb]

Three tidbits!

a) What would you think if I started adding links to the forum support threads on Marketplace content? We have the contact info and the website info, but a couple people have included the forum threads as well, and I thought that could be a cool idea to expand on for people that want it. It's a great way to stay in touch with your customers and the community, and people really like seeing content that's actively developed with community input. This could provide another path to doing that.

Well, you already know my opinion on that matter!

b) I'm looking for something to replace the public Trello voting boards. Right now I think it mostly just adds time to publishing, and depending on what we put in its place, we could knock 2 - 4 weeks off the time from submission to publishing. We have an idea requiring engineering time that could fulfill that, but that's later in the year and I want to speed things up sooner than that. Technically, we could stop updating the public Trello boards today and immediately increase our publishing speed, but we'd be left without the community transparency that Trello brought. It's tricky, because I want to improve this *now* but our engineering team is solid booked on other Marketplace stuff, so my near-term resources are limited, and I don't want whatever gets put in its place to seem like a regression, even if it would be MUCH faster. What do you guys think?

I think it's a step in a right direction, let's be honest: when project got enough attention and it's ready to be shipped - everyone want it as soon as possible and media environment is hot(SuperGrid 2 month ago or Allar Generic Shooter currently) and it is the best moment to release content, but people have to wait additional month or so and of course interest is getting lower with time.
However, I think some sort of indication what is going on won't hurt. Simple beautiful timeline of ready to go projects or something like this.

c) Top 10 Marketplace categories by individual sales (not revenue):

1) Environments
2) FX
3) Props
4) Blueprints
5) Textures
6) Characters
7) Weapons
8) Animations
9) Sound FX
10) Music

It's interesting, I thought environments won't be very popular, because you can't just "paste" this into your projects o.o

[JJChalupnik]

Can you add the "Add to Project" function on all Marketplace content to simplify Migration?

I've noticed odd issues occasionally when trying to migrate content from one project to another. Most problems I've encountered had materials that would no longer link up after migration. Would it be possible to add the "Add to Project" feature to the drop down list for all the content produced by Epic and the community projects? It works like a dream for purchased content, so I was wondering if it could be down for the downloadable projects as well. That way it simplifies migration, and you get the static meshes, materials, animations, etc.... from alternate projects up quickly, without the need to migrate? But keep migration in the editor for more nuanced control over your files. (So you help avoid bloated projects, because I imagine that is what will happen with this feature) I could see it being very useful when you want to learn or combine projects for variety and/or integration.

Thanks.

[John Alcatraz]

We sellers definitely need a way to verify buyers mail addresses without specifically asking Epic for this. I just noticed I gave a lot of support to one chinese guy who has downloaded my Minimap from a chinese warez forum for free, and my minimap already got 90 downloads there, nice to know the chinese people are liking it I don't want to ask Epic about verifying the mail address for every customer who asks me about support.

[Osok]

We sellers definitely need a way to verify buyers mail addresses without specifically asking Epic for this. I just noticed I gave a lot of support to one chinese guy who has downloaded my Minimap from a chinese warez forum for free, and my minimap already got 90 downloads there, nice to know the chinese people are liking it I don't want to ask Epic about verifying the mail address for every customer who asks me about support.

Make sure you email epic the link to the site where the piracy occurs. piracy@unrealengine.com

[John Alcatraz]

I am very sure Epic knows about these sites, since all the marketplace content is there.

In my case, I directly contacted the uploader and he deleted the thread So kindly asking can already be enough to get such stuff removed.

[zeOrb]

I am very sure Epic knows about these sites, since all the marketplace content is there.

In my case, I directly contacted the uploader and he deleted the thread So kindly asking can already be enough to get such stuff removed.

Yeah, there are nice guys and bad guys.
I've found my project on multiple websites and usually if people just distribute for free for others - they cooperate and remove content, but people who trying to make money with your content usually ignores such requests and they are the real problem =/
One script kiddie had ~10 twitter bots with "paid" download links in their tweets and he removed my comment with "If you want to support this project go to Epic marketplace". Well, now his bot network is removed from twitter

[Smarkoff]

I am very sure Epic knows about these sites, since all the marketplace content is there.

In my case, I directly contacted the uploader and he deleted the thread So kindly asking can already be enough to get such stuff removed.

Hi John,

Could you please PM me with the URL you've found your stuff on? We'll see if we can do something on our end.

Thanks!

Stephanie

[romfeo]

I am not sure if its mentioned before...
It would be good to force sellers to write some release notes for their content updates...
It would be also nice to have the current version number of a pack visible on the marketplace.

[Alaan]

I am very sure Epic knows about these sites, since all the marketplace content is there.

In my case, I directly contacted the uploader and he deleted the thread So kindly asking can already be enough to get such stuff removed.

It takes awhile. I had reported a Russian website that was reselling Marketplace content under price. It was eventually taken down, but took a few weeks. It is a round about thing from you to Epic to the web host who investigates talks to their lawyers then finally maybe something gets done.

[zeOrb]

It takes awhile. I had reported a Russian website that was reselling Marketplace content under price. It was eventually taken down, but took a few weeks. It is a round about thing from you to Epic to the web host who investigates talks to their lawyers then finally maybe something gets done.

=_= I think I know about which site you're talking about and they were down for some time, but now it redirects to reskinned version of the same website with paid premium system.

edit: I checked other websites and twitters of people who redistributed content by paid model - all closed and suspended! Nice job!