Epic Fab - multi-engine competitor asset store

News & General Discussion
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Just read the announcement from Epic for Fab and it looks interesting to say the least. Its a multi-engine, multi-platform, digital asset store for content creators to sell their products on. That includes assets for Unity and at Epics 88% revenue stream. Its a little unclear at this point if Fab will only be for digital content like models, textures, or if they will include scripting packages, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t include everything.

Honestly I’m kind of surprised at myself for never even considering that companies could sell and support assets for other game engines. I guess it just seemed so natural that Epic, Unity and others would stick to only supporting assets for their own engines.

However now the cat is out of the bag it will be interesting to see what Unity’s response will be. I think this will be especially true regarding the tiny 12% fee that Epic will take vs the ‘traditional’ 30% that Unity charges. Maybe there are some differences between the stores that when accounted for means the difference is not quite as large, but I don’t see that closing the gap that much.

So will Unity have to drop the percentage they take from asset sales to compete from Fab? I would say its inevitable, unless they can really find some way to add value to selling/buying an asset on the store, and sadly at the moment I don’t see any - certainly not the painful package manager interface to access ones assets.

I doubt we’ll see an exodus of content creators from Unity asset store, but I’m sure they will push hard to direct buyers to Fab instead. Since if they charge the same price or even at a small discount they can still earn more than selling it on Unity Asset Store.

Luckily Unity have a bit of time to respond as Fab website wont go live to later this year, but time is ticking.

I think overall this is just another indication of Epic doing something good for their community. Just another in a long list over the last 3-5 years where I’ve been impressed and interested in something Epic are offering that makes me think how cool a company they are for developers ( though sure they have issues too ). Compared to Unity’s announcements which are frequently lacklustre, do not target myself or often what I feel the demographic of Unity is, buy company’s with little to no value, make then abandon anything that is interesting etc.

Which is not to say that Unity is bad ( though its easy to argue they have been ) I think its a perception issue. Every announcement Epic makes is generally a positive or exciting even if I don’t use their products, whilst Unity’s are just meh.

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Sounds interesting. Though I hate the scroll-based design of their page.

Regarding “what should unity do”… I think this is not my concern and not my problem. Tools come and go. Same with asset stores.

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Interesting comment about scroll design, as I’d say the same thing about Unity’s paging system, but actually I think its more nuanced than that. If I’m honest both scrolling (infinite) and paging are not ideal, while I’d prefer scrolling in general, that’s only true to a certain limit, infinite scrolling does become annoying. Not sure there is a good solution other than providing a really nice and functional filter/sort system.

As for ‘not my concern’ it would seem to be a little short-sighted as Unity will have to respond to this in some form. What if they went with a provision banning selling assets on competing stores? How does that impact sellers, and would it mean that assets you want are suddenly split across stores? Maybe they can get away with just offering sellers a better deal, in which case changes would be minimal, though that will affect their bottom line.

Maybe you are someone who really doesn’t care ( great for you ), happy to have you assets across dozens of stores and dozens of stores looking after you private data and don’t view it as a negative. Though I find it hard to believe it wouldn’t have the capability to become frustrating in the future. For example I only have a few of the game stores installed and purchase from, but even then I still have to double check everytime i look to buy something in sale to make sure I don’t already own it, and thats just on PC.

I mean some Unity sellers have already set up their own store fronts for purchasing or subscriptions and that is a concern to me, not least due to the ramifications around data protection and payment security. Granted the size of a store ( or company behind a store ) doesn’t guarantee safety, but it certainly provides a greater level trust.

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The state of asset store does not affect me specifically in any noticeable way, as I barely used it. Hence the comment.

Asset Store does not appear to be a significant income source for unity either.

Whether sellers decide to migrate and what unity should do about it is unity’s problem, and not mine. No matter what they do their API will remain available.

Now, if someone threatened to nuke github, for example, that would be a good reason to worry.

Regarding “banning selling assets on competing stores”: there’s no point. I’m not sure if you know, but one positive thing about asset store is that its content can be used with any engine, though on other hand you’re only allowed to access it through unity. So “multi-platform” part advertised by epic is actually copied from unity, though unity didn’t quite advertise it widely. It is just allowed. There’s no point in banning competition because there’s not much gain from asset store in the first place.

Regarding “private data”: I think at this time I have at least a few hundred profiles all over the internet, and whoever spent plenty of time online are in the same spot as me. Meaning the idea of being “private” online is long dead by now. But that is just my opinion.

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It’s brilliant (again) actually. FAB will cancel the Unity Asset Store and convert many Unity users to Unreal eventually.

On every meaningful level (technical, content offering, business strategy and execution) Unreal seems to have the upper hand. As a long time user I hate to say it, but the future of Unity looks dire if major changes at high(est) level aren’t implemented soon.

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epic will be cool as long as they have competition. Once they defeated all the others then they’ll become the ultimate bastards.

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Success of it depends entirely on the execution, and there are already many unanswered questions, like how will the multi-engine approach work, via plugin or just downloads like on typical CG stores like Turbosquid and CGTrader? Will the existing Quixel scan content remain free? Will Fab be integrated into Epic Launcher which is probably the worst piece of software in history? Will it have bundles/sales, which are great on the Unity Asset Store?

We’ll have to wait and see. By the way, Unity’s Package Manager is million times better than what Unreal has at the moment. Anytime I occasionally launch Epic Launcher I wanna kill it with fire, I don’t understand how people live with this on a daily basis, and purchased asset management on Unreal using their launcher is absolute nightmare to deal with.

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So many get hung up on the 12% vs 30% issue. However, for a dev selling assets I’d rather get 70% of 100k in sales than 88% of 40k in sales. Now if you can get both that’s the best for sure, but the fact that you get to keep a higher percentage of your revenue on a store that is most often still generating less than half the revenue than the competing store means these 88% are just not enticing for devs to sell only on the Epic store.

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Ah that makes more sense.

Really I thought it was or at least used to be a decent chunk of revenue. A quick search doesn’t reveal any numbers though.

Banning content has been a thing, though most examples that come to mind funnily enough originate from Epic/Unreal, but its a tried and tested method to lock content to a single platform. While Unity and Unreal assets could be viewed as multi-platform, depending upon the content they often require a fair amount of effort to convert unless you have access to asset source files. So while Unity technically may offer assets for other game engines, they don’t to my knowledge come with say an Unreal version that could be dropped in, nor quick and easy to convert - I think that is likely to be the difference. One positive of this is that you might find more publishers bundling multi-engine versions into a single asset, maybe at a discount.

Not private data, but data security, you know your credit card numbers, personal information etc. While I too have had hundreds of profiles most are ‘low level’ meaning they have limited to no real personal information beyond say email tied to them. Those I don’t worry about, but anything linked to banking thats a concern.[/QUOTE]

That is a good point and can probably be backed up by the ‘middling’ success of the Epic game store. However in that case other than free games, the paid for games are rarely competitive, whilst I feel Fab.com, may take advantage of that more.

I know I’ll likely be checking both stores whenever I want to buy an asset. Though perhaps in time we’ll get to a point where instead of checking stores for assets we’ll just go to isthereanydeal.com instead.

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Small tangent but I agree about the scrolling.

Infinite scrolling bothers me personally because it’s impossible to locate your “position” in the results and know whether you’re halfway through, or close to the end, etc. Basically I don’t like feeling there is no end in sight or not knowing just how long it’s going to take me to look at everything.

some webpages really take “infinite” to heart and will start showing you things you’ve already scrolled past before just to keep the scroll going, it drives me crazy because I want to definitely know when I’m out of new results.

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Unreal is a bloat install from hell. Get outta here with that ten cent trolling stuff.

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The reason why they originate from unreal because Unreal has a habit of offering “golden goose” level technology for free. Like MetaHumans. Assets they offer are also often very high tier, like Infinity Blade. It is against their interest to offer this sort of thing for free to their own competitors.

Unity does not do that, or does it very rarely. Unity does put tech demo content on the store occasionally, but it is often experimental or hard to use.

So in case of unity there’s no point in locking it.

If a model comes with an FBX, it can be dropped into unreal. You’ll still need to set up its material, though, but that’s the same thing as with unconfigured fbx in unity.

Expect all of that to be leaked too. At some point of time I had a hundred spam emails mention my full name and street address despite never posting it anywhere. The leak apparently originated from amazon or paypal. Bear in mind that I’m t he kind of person who has no facebook account.

Also keep in mind that’s the reason why in my area all online banking transactions have 2 factor auth. You pay for anything online - you have to confirm it with a code from your phone.

It would not surprise me if it ends up with 88% of 100k and 70% of 40k in the long term. No offense intended.

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is just another asset store… or did i miss something?

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I’d care far more about the standard license terms and the quality of curation than I do the royalty figures.

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Hard to imagine them doing more than 2D/3D assets, I doubt Epic will have a team testing if a Unity editor extension actually runs in engine. I’d love to be proven wrong though.

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Didn’t Unity update their license agreement a while ago to block anyone outside Unity from making such extensions? Basically, you are no longer allowed to distribute Unity editor extensions that download stuff into the user’s projects.

There was quite the uproar because this directly affected Google’s android packages, which managed dependencies on its own.

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You misunderstood what Panten said. They meant whether this new store will also verify Unity-targeted packages which would require Epic stuff to run the Unity editor.

As for your remark, this is new for me and would make an asset like impossible: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/asset-inventory-226927

As a buyer. But also as a seller?

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It is possible to make a tool to generate *.unitypackage without running unity. The file format is neither difficult nor secret.

They can also ignore the package format completely and provide assets as archives or git links.

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How would that help for “testing if a Unity editor extension actually runs in engine”?

Hence why the question was whether this new store would offer anything for Unity besides “raw” 2d and 3d work. No code. Would be surprising if they even verify that Unity materials are set up well.

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Does Unity Asset store perform this sort of check? Because I distinctly recall encountering assets where users complained about compile errors and explained manual steps necessary to make an asset run.

Basically, uploaded archive could be made author’s responsibility, and if the user has a problem with it, they would report the asset.