> With today’s acquisition, Epic Games is making some immediate changes. Starting today, store fees have been reduced from 30% to 12% — just like on the Epic Games Store. The company lowered commissions on ArtStation immediately after acquiring ArtStation as well.
This feels very impressive and community friendly. Buying a company and then intentionally cutting their revenues by more than half. Unreal is well poised for the future.
Let's do see. Epic has a pretty hard stance on 30% being a punitive threshold for a marketplace.
Sketchfab is an enabling marketplace for creators to generate revenue on arbitrary, self-directed 3D content at crowdsourced scale. Maybe Epic pushes to 19% on those costs, but even at 12% the market effects will likely drive revenue an order of magnitude more than any fee increases could over the next few years.
I think part of their goal is try to lower the cost to Game Development which is getting insanely expensive. It was also how they started the whole middleware / Game engine. Currently the vast majority of cost are Graphics Asset and ArtStation / Sketchfab are keys to this goal.
Although in reality the cost reduction will likely be spend elsewhere to makes things a little better. So it is either cheaper or higher quality games.
> Although in reality the cost reduction will likely be spend elsewhere to makes things a little better. So it is either cheaper or higher quality games.
I agree. Photoreal asset libraries will make it a lot cheaper to finance games though, like to build your demo to get the funding could decrease radically. This is the strategy behind these acquisitions.
In May of 2019 they acquired Psynoix too. There's been some good addition to Rocket League, but the micro-transactions have definitely increased/become more expensive.
That's a great portfolio, a very focused and intentional portfolio.
I'll be honest. I'm pretty astonished, solely from the things Unreal has put out recently.
I'm not entirely sure where Artstation fits in though, it seems to be a portfolio website for artists more than a marketplace. It has incredible potential though, if I owned the company I would turn it more into a social network, more chat/communication/group features rather than use it for its assets. I think its only serious competitor is DeviantArt and that website is well, how shall I say it, full of deviants.
Like how Google has positioned itself as the interface between users and most of the internet, Epic seems to be positioning itself to be the interface between game developers and the game development ecosystem. Who will be next, Gamasutra? For Google, this makes sense because they are an advertising and tracking company. I wonder what Epic's model will be - to become a mega-platform, or something else?
Given Epic's recent success via free-to-play software, I think there's room for optimism. Free or inexpensive software is a huge draw to the talent pool needed to make such software valuable long-term, and from what I've seen of Epic's business strategy I think they would appreciate that.
True, I don't have a negative opinion of Epic and I think it is a good and sensible investment for them. Still sad to see smaller companies getting bought when I thought they would be quite successful.
Even if they did, art assets (meshes, textures, and often animations) generally are very easily transferable. I don't think the Unreal Engine marketplace licensing says anything about not being able to use commercially with a different engine. Could be wrong, but when I checked a few years ago that was my impression
They also acquired Quixel Megascans, which you can use in their Unreal Engine. It seems this is part of a strategy to move up the chain to game assets.
This feels very impressive and community friendly. Buying a company and then intentionally cutting their revenues by more than half. Unreal is well poised for the future.