Epic Games launched its new developer marketplace two weeks ago. It made changes over the old one such as removing wishlists, allowing sellers to sell copyrighted content, removing the ability to go on sale, removing reviews, removing Q&A, removing direct Unreal integration, and more.

Most of the content on these marketplaces is user-generated. Devs will frequently develop some compartmentalized bit of code or some custom prop or character for their game and then sell it on the marketplace for additional income. This is often more income than what their actual games make.

Epic Games recently had the brilliant idea of combining all of their various storefronts into one mega store called Fab. This was genuinely a good idea. In the process they have removed everything I listed in the title and more.

Every seller I have heard from has reported going from multiple hundreds/ thousands a month down to practically nothing. It has been truly apocalyptic for the Unreal ecosystem.

It's not just useability that has contributed to this though. Users are able to upload copyrighted content for sale with personal or "professional" licenses. Here's Frieza.

Obviously that's easy enough to avoid buying but if you're not familiar with Frieza then it's not unreasonable to think that a dev might unknowingly buy and use that asset in their project. Extrapolating from there, several devs have realized that they could very easily wind up incorporating copyrighted props and not realize it.

If you look at the unreal subreddit you can still find daily sneed about Fab. More than half of the top posts of the month are about this. It has been out for eighteen days. During the first week nearly every single post was about how bad Fab was. There's even more going on than what I've discussed here. Like how in the past if you bought an asset you could directly click a button in the epic launcher to integrate that asset into your project. It would tell you compatibility and everything. Now you just can't. Apparently there's a freshly released official plugin to do this but I haven't tried it yet.

Everyone involved is losing time, money, or both.