Epic have bought game art portfolio site ArtStation, and lowered their fees to 12%
Bringing it in line with the Epic Games Store cut
Epic have bought ArtStation, the 2D and 3D artist portfolio website. The site is popular with artists in the games industry, and ArtStation say they will remain accessible to all, "including those that don’t use Unreal Engine."
They've also dropped the cut they take on the site's asset marketplace from 30% to 12%, bringing it in line with the cut Epic take from developers on the Epic Games Store, and made the site's learning resources entirely free until the end of the year.
ArtStation has become the de facto site of choice for game artists looking to build an online portfolio. For example, it's where you can go to look at the work of the Halo Infinite art director (pictured above), which I wrote about last year.
It's also a useful resource for those looking to get into the industry. The marketplace offers reference materials, tutorials and plugins for modellers and artists, while the for-now free learning section offers tutorials from industry experts on texturing, animation, composition, and pretty much every other part of the art creation process.
In their announcement of the acquisition, ArtStation CEO Leonard Teo wrote that Epic gave them grant funding last year "which helped immensely during an uncertain period."
As well as reducing their standard fees on the marketplace from 30% to 12%, members of ArtStation Pro (who pay $10 per month, around £7.25) see their fees drop from 20% to 8% or 5% for self-promoted sales.
I'm no artist, aside from doodling pictures of dogs for the amusement of my five-year-old, but I've always enjoyed poking around on ArtStation to look at the works of others. I also enjoyed messing around recently with Epic's new MetaHuman Creator beta, a character creation tool that's so easy to use I struggled to create something truly hideous with it.