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Epic Games announces Fab, their upcoming asset marketplace. Fab will unify Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel, and the ArtStation Marketplace in a single marketplace where you will be able to buy, sell, share various digital assets.
This announcement makes sense. Since Epic bought several marketplaces over time, such as Sketchfab back in 2021, we were expecting the company to unify at least some of them at some point.
Fab will be offering “3D models, materials, plugins, templated maps, environments, VFX, sound, digital humans, animations and more”, explains Epic Games.
Of course, this new marketplace will remain open: “we aim to support all formats from leading Digital Content Creation Tools and Game Engines”, adds Epic.
In practice, Fab will be available on Fab.com, but Epic also plans native integrations and API connectivity to various content creation tools.
A Fab plugin for Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is already avaiable in beta, and will give you access to Fortnite-optimized assets.
Here are some answers to the questions you might have about this new product:
How much will I earn on Fab?
Epic explains that they will rely on a 88% / 12% revenue share. In other words, as a seller on Fab, you will get an 88% cut.
When will Fab be available?
Even though the Fab plugin for Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) is already available, you will have to wait for a few months before the official launch of the marketplace on Fab.com. At the moment, the official website is an announcement page.
Creators will still be able to sell assets on UE Marketplace, Quixel, Sketchfab, ArtStation Marketplace during Fab’s alpha period. Later this year, explains Epic, they “will all roll up into one destination: Fab”. This process won’t happen overnight and you will have time to prepare for this transition.
Free assets, CC-licensed models, view-only and more
Of course, this announcement raises a lot of questions, which is why FAQs have been published on each marketplace: Sketchfab, Artstation, Epic Games Marketplace, Quixel.
The overall philosophy at this point seems to be to break as little things as possible: Alban Denoyel, Sketchfab co-founder and CEO, told us this was indeed the case.
For example, the dev team will try not to break your existing Sketchfab embeds. And since many people used Sketchfab to share free assets or to showcase 3D models without allowing people to download them, this will still be supported by Fab.
Of course, you should still expect that some feature may be deprecated, but at this point Epic Games is clearly trying to be as reassuring as possible. If you are using a specific marketplace, don’t forget to follow the upcoming announcements, as more information will be made available in the coming weeks and months.
