Epic Games recently revealed and launched Fab, one of the company’s biggest developments in 2024. Fab is a unified digital content marketplace that will allow developers from several Epic-based ecosystems to access a range of assets. As a singular marketplace, Fab offers a place to discover, sell, buy, and freely share digital products for the development of digital entertainment.
Interestingly enough, the marketplace also holds an asset store section that offers Unity game engine elements, while Epic wants to expand that to all game engines in the future. This cross-platform offer is somewhat unexpected but welcomed by Unity users. However, in the near future, the impact of Fab on user-generated content creators in the gaming space might be even more profound if Epic uses it to steer more UGC developers towards its tools and marketplaces.
Fab isn’t a stand-alone project. It is the direct successor of Sketchfab Store and Unreal Engine Marketplace. It is also the new hub for Quixel Megascans. By combining these store and asset hubs, Epic is centralizing its offer of digital elements, but also expanding the number of supported tools. That is why developers can now find on Fab the assets that they can use in Unreal Engine, Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UFEN), and Unity 3D. These cover things like game-ready individual elements, entire environments, audio and SFX files, VFXs, characters, plug-ins, animations, and a lot more. Creators can access their Fab assets directly from Unreal Engine version 5 and UEFN.
The process of building Fab included a number of acquisitions. The company’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, has a clear vision of bringing several big entities working in the digital asset domain into a singular space. Because of that, projects like Artstation became a part of Epic Games.
The company believes that it offers millions and millions of digital assets that are of high quality and easily accessible. The results of that process are already visible. According to Epic, half of the games currently being built in Unreal Engine use assets from their marketplace. Many of them are exclusively built using these assets, with little to no in-team adaptation and modification. This represents a massive cost-cutting opportunity for smaller teams that do not have to hire their own professionals to create quality assets. Additionally, the speed with which developers can access these is also a huge benefit to any team.
Epic Games took nearly three years to connect all of Fab’s moving parts and launch the unified asset space. One of the reasons for the long development was the company’s desire to provide opportunities for asset creators as well. This means that anyone working in the UGC domain can now consider the possibility of creating and selling their assets through Fab.
Many bigger teams are taking the chance to do that, so organizations like KitBash3D, Leartes Studios, and Dekogon Studios are already active in that market. The platform also comes with an improved and expanded seller analytics tool, that can help creators finetune their offer, as well as their pricing – both of which are completely up to them. A new review and rating system for Fab will also be rolled out soon.
In the long-run, the ultimate goal of Epic Games is the metaverse. Here lies the true strategic value of Fab – according to the team that created it. The company is bringing many individual markets into a singular location and adding more tools to it as time goes by. As these connect back to their game engines, the offer of assets and possibilities on Fab will grow thanks to Epic, but also through the communities around it.
The UGC gaming content creators are already well-positioned in the strategic plans, as much as Epic Games is. With Fab, more experiences built in UEFN will have an authentic look and feel to them, distancing these games even further from the original Fortnite Battle Royale. The other side of that connection will be the potential of UEFN asset creators to publish elements of their work directly to Fab. So, with a two-way connection, UGC content will go from games to assets and the other way around. Both points of that connection will be instantly monetized as well. This is a big incentive for the currency UGC developers, and also for those asset creators who now have a reason to transition to both Fab and UEFN.
