Epic is merging its digital asset stores into one huge marketplace

Epic Games’ next big plan for the metaverse is to unify all of its disparate asset marketplaces under one brand, Fab. The new store will include assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel Bridge, Artstation Marketplace, and Sketchfab, and Epic will give creators 88 percent of earnings on the store, like it does for the Epic Games Store.

“In the old days, every game developer built all of the content in their product from the ground up. Increasingly, content marketplaces such as Unreal Engine Marketplace and Unity’s Asset Store have provided huge libraries of content which game developers can license from independent content creators and use in their games,” Epic said in a blog post. “We think this trend will grow significantly as creators of experiences across Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and other 3D worlds look to these marketplaces as sources of metaverse content, and as players increasingly build out and customize their own 3D spaces online.”

On Fab, you’ll be able to get a vast amount of digital assets, including “3D models, materials, sound, VFX, digital humans, and more,” Epic says. And the company is positioning it as an open marketplace that will support “all engines, all metaverse-inspired games which support imported content, and the most popular digital content creation packages.” In theory, that means you won’t need to be an Unreal Engine developer to get value from the store.