Epic/UE4 shifting from 70/30 payout for Marketplace publishers to 88/12. Thoughts?

The automated part worries me, actually. It requires a store that is working amazingly well, and not even Valve has managed to crack that egg yet.

So you would pay 50% for more front page coverage (presumably). Is this were most sales are driven from? Or is it from forums?

What if this results on pretty terrible assets dominating the front page, since most more reputable developers can't really afford to give more than 30%. Wouldn't that make the front page less relevant for the users?

What if everyone chooses 50%? There would be no benefit then (everyone would be equal) and everyone would be paying more.

I don't completely disagree with you, but I can think of way too many ways this can go wrong.

 

Idny

I humble kinda like that then with the store and widget having different cuts?

 

I disagree, I still prefer using NGUI over UGUI and don't see that preference changing any time soon...

In fact there are many systems Unity has built in that has better counterparts available on the asset store, such as Photon over Unet, Vehicle physics packages that do a much better job than the wheel collider... etc...

 

Out of line. @Ryiah is one of the most patient and consistently helpful people on these forums.

 

If front page coverage is of value then this actually couldn't work. If I'm not mistaken, basic Game Theory shoots it in the foot immediately. I'm pretty sure that for anyone who doesn't have significant external marketing reach this would effectively just increase the store cut of most products to 50%, because if you don't do it you won't be making sales. Then almost everybody ends up doing it, and it doesn't end up being of relative benefit as a result.

But wait, it's worse. Front page coverage is a very limited resource, so not everyone can have it anyway. This means that some kind of arbitration system needs to be in place to decide who is allowed to take that offer. Because this is operated by the store, it's going to optimise to make front page offers to the people most likely to make sales... which is exactly the system already in place on many stores anyway.

 

I have no problem paying unity 30% of my store revenue, considering they built and continue to innovate the software I used to make my products, spent a decade+ building the customer base that I sell to, and run the marketplace that I sell on. Seems quite fair when compared to every other marketplace out there.

I just wish they would use some of that revenue share to improve the responsiveness of the asset store dev team and fix the myriad remaining issues with AssetStore 2.0. The decisions and performance record in the past year has been quite unsatisfactory. I've seen a bunch of improvements slowly being made recently, which I assume will continue, but this needs to be accelerated for the sake of all parties involved (unity, publishers, customers).

 

You hit the nail on the head. Another big reason why increasing the % is a ludicrous idea is users often (and rightly so) ask pre-sale questions, and post-sale often ask questions or request features or find bugs. After a certain % the support costs just wouldn't make it worth it. This is especially true for code assets that need to be constantly updated to meet Unity's ever changing API, and because so many users are stuck on older versions for years you have to maintain a sensible level of backwards compatibility.

 

In truth I was thinking more of marketplaces like Steam when I wrote that. On the Unity Asset Store I'd be less convinced that front page placement is of significant value, because it's not saturated enough to make it hard for people to find stuff.

Hear here!

 

It seems this recently got activated

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-announces-unreal-engine-marketplace-88-12-revenue-share

This is a true game changer for developing assets on that store, the difference is vast. I wonder if Unity will respond to that, as making things for UE now seems like an amazing idea, which will take away from great systems that could come to Unity instead.

The other issue is that is much easier to develop anything for Unreal, since the introduction of the new pipelines that essentially make Unity as 3 different platforms.

 

Maybe so, but there are other considerations. China can buy everything in the world, but they won't buy me.

 

Huh? Epic Games is an American company, or am I missing the point of your post?

 

Tencent owns 48,4% of Epic Games (specifically, a 40% stake).

 

Ahh, I see. Good to know.

 

That is from 2 years ago...

 

As was the thread until it was necro'd by that user