ArtStation Marketplace has effectively won the race to make a new one-stop online mega-mall, I’d say. Other software-specific stores will still thrive, but ArtStation has beaten out CGTrader and several similar one-stop sites. And now there are some nice changes on the Marketplace, following the takeover by Epic (Unreal)…
* Seller feeds reduced from 30% to 12%, at least for now.
* Sellers can now make bundles of related products.
* Sellers can offer freebies or reviewer copies, via new 100% discount coupons.
All welcome changes. I’ve built up a small but nice WishList there as a customer, and the 12% commission would be enticing if I had anything to sell in future. The main problem is the vast size and overcrowding, though at least they don’t seem to allow the “I’ll just upload 1,000 variants of 3D bathroom taps” shovelware merchants to hog space. There was a time when that threatened to become a problem, but they seem to be on top of it now. You still have to watch out for fan-art though, that you don’t realise is fan-art. It’s “buyer beware” in that respect.
But there is still a lot to sift through. Unless you check it daily or every two days, and WishList items, you’re likely to miss stuff. And there is nicely-priced stuff in there that is useful for DAZ and Poser people because it’s .OBJ or .FBX, and even some Vue ecosystem landscapes from Raffy Raffy and a couple of others. A few brush-sets too for software like Paintstorm. The licences and prices are right, and you only occasionally see the sort of silly $100-200 prices you often encounter elsewhere for 3D models at sites like Turbosquid. I see that even Tafi has started uploading part of the DAZ catalogue there, at their Marketplace Store, and this is ongoing with new items arriving daily.
UI, load speed and scrolling are all fine.
So, all in all, provided Epic don’t ruin it with a UI makeover led by the office tea-boy (i.e. like DeviantArt), it’s now a welcome addition to the 3D content landscape.
What else would improve the Marketplace?
* It would be nice if you could elegantly block sellers from appearing in results. For instance, while I appreciate that “Zhanfeng” (current ongoing upload of what appear to be 30,000 individual landscape videogame plants and rocks) has products that are very pretty, well-made and useful to game-makers, I’d still rather not have them cluttering the pages of “New” items.
* Share your WishList in public, or create a new Public variant of it. WishLists could also be re-sortable and have personal comments added alongside.
* Block items if only supplied in a certain format. For instance, I have no interest in 3DS Max files, with no .FBX or .OBJ versions. Models that are not textured I would not want to block, as they may still have their uses in developing the base layer for a digital painting. For instance…
