Posted here on UE4 forum.
If I have a community around my UE4 game on Epic Marketplace and I wish to let my users submit user generated content, how would this work?
Could I create them a child account of my publishing account or would they have to signup themselves?
Thanks.
Hi, laernut.
We’re still trying to hammer this out ourselves. There’s been a lot of discussion, such as in this forum thread. The short version is that you need to be pretty careful what tools you share with non-subscribed users. If the users have their own accounts, then you could freely share content with them (and vice versa).
Regards,
Jonathan
We love that idea and see UE4 evolving in that direction over time! Right now, we support this approach philosophically and contractually, but it’s a manual process as much of the technology is unimplemented. So…
You can build a game using UE4 and release the game to the general public through any and all distribution means available.
You can open your game up to modding by anybody who is a current UE4 subscriber (or: was a past UE4 subscriber who had access to the versions of UE4 you used to ship your product). These UE4 subscribers can use one of Epic’s versions of the UE4 Editor to mod your game if it remains compatible with your game, or alternatively you can make your custom compiled fork of the UE4 Editor available to them, in either source code or as precompiled binaries.
These users can make mods and redistribute them for free through any distribution channels, or you can give them permission (or not) to sell their mods for your game though any channels, or you can obtain their permission allowing you to sell their mods yourself through any channels.
Right now, none of this is automated at all, and Marketplace is bare-bones in its functionality, solely distributing Epic content for free.
What’s next is that we’ll be expanding this functionality, one version at a time. The next step is to open up the general Unreal Engine Marketplace to content submissions and begin distributing general paid, user-created assets, manually curated by Epic folks. As Marketplace assets and UE4 games with mod support progress through development, we’ll need to expand this greatly.
Unreal Tournament will be an early test case. We’ll make an alpha version of the game available to the community for free at some point, and then start accepting mod submissions through the marketplace. So, Marketplace content needs to express dependencies on games or Marketplace plug-ins, as well as version compatibility information, etc. We’ll build more automated submission and user-driven rating systems, etc. We see moddable games offering a very rich and diverse set of opportunities for the millions of indie game developers who aren’t being adequately served by the current chart-driven, winner-take-all App Store model.