Buying assets on Fab — what to check before clicking buy

You buy a 40-euro environment pack, drop it into your project, and the level looks great. Two weeks later your packaged build grew by 3 GB, the pack ships 8K textures on rocks nobody walks past, and half the meshes have no LODs. The asset wasn't broken. You just bought it without reading the four lines on the product page that would have told you.

It's the last topic on the list this blog started with, and the only one that costs real money. Here's what I check before clicking buy, including two things that changed in the last twelve months.

The license tier is about your revenue, not your project

Fab's Standard license comes in two tiers, and the split confuses almost everyone: it has nothing to do with whether your game is commercial.

• Personal — you made less than $100,000 USD gross revenue from commercial activity in the last 12 months.
• Professional — you made more than that.

That's the whole rule. A hobby project by someone running a $200k studio needs Professional. A commercial game by someone who earned nothing last year is Personal.

Two more you'll meet: Creative Commons (CC-BY) on some free assets, which carries a real attribution obligation into your credits screen, and the legacy UE Marketplace License on products migrated from the old marketplace. Epic is phasing that one out. If a listing still shows it, the publisher hasn't touched it since the migration — which brings us to the next check.

Engine version compatibility is now a hard gate

This is the change most people haven't noticed yet. It used to be that if a plugin was marked 5.4 and you were on 5.6, you could pick the version in the launcher and add it anyway. It usually worked.

Since UE 5.7, Add to project is disabled for plugins that aren't registered as 5.7-compatible. No override, no "I know what I'm doing" checkbox. Users hit this in November 2025 and Epic confirmed it in the forums. The workarounds are detours: import models and textures through the Fab plugin's own importer, or load Blueprint content in a blank project on a compatible older version, upgrade that project forward, then migrate.

So read the Supported engine versions field, not the marketing copy. A description that says "UE5" means nothing. And remember what the engine upgrade post covered: a Blueprint-only or content-only plugin already on disk usually survives a one-line "EngineVersion": "5.8.0" edit in its .uplugin. A binary C++ plugin does not. That one needs a rebuild from the vendor — and if the vendor is gone, so is your plugin.

Update history beats the star rating

A rating tells you what people thought on the day they bought it. The version list tells you whether anyone still maintains it.

What I look at, in order:

1. Last update date. Anything untouched since UE4 is a red flag, full stop.
2. Does the version list include the newest engine? Good sellers ship a compatible build within a month or two of a release. Silence through one release cycle usually means silence through the next one.
3. The questions tab. Not the reviews — the questions. Unanswered questions from six months ago tell you exactly what support looks like after you pay.

What the product page has to state

For meshes and environments: texture resolutions, LOD strategy (or an explicit "Nanite only" stance), collision setup, target platform. If none of that appears on the page, the honest reading is that nobody tested it seriously. Unoptimised lights, skeletal meshes without LODs and stray 8K textures are the three things people most often inherit from a marketplace pack.

Also check what you are actually getting. Fab is multi-engine now, so glTF and FBX listings sit right next to Unreal-native ones — technically fine, and completely missing the LODs, collision primitives and material instances you assumed were included. Filter to Unreal Engine and read the tech specs. One buyer paid for "drivable cars" and received a 1.4 GB OBJ file and a zipped Blender scene.

Refunds: 14 days, and the seller comes first

Narrower than a Steam refund, and worth knowing before you need it:

• Contact the seller within 14 days of the transaction.
• If you never downloaded the product, Epic can verify that and refund it.
• If the seller declines, escalate to Fab Support.
• Approved refunds are processed within about 2 business days.

The practical consequence: evaluate on day one, not in month three.

Test in a throwaway project

Never let a new pack touch your real project first. Empty project, add the asset, check three things: how much it adds on disk, whether it opens without errors in the Output Log, and what it drags in behind it — a single "simple" Blueprint can hard-reference half the pack, which is the soft reference problem arriving pre-installed. Then migrate only the folders you need.

Common pitfalls

• Buying on the trailer. Cinematic footage is rendered at film settings on a 4090. It says nothing about your frame budget.
• Assuming "UE5 compatible" covers your version. Since 5.7 the installer enforces that assumption.
• Migrating the whole pack. Migrate folders, not packs — then delete what you didn't use before packaging.
• Ignoring the license tier because the game is "just a hobby". The threshold is your revenue, not your intent.
• Letting the 14 days lapse while the pack sits unopened. Open it the day it arrives, even if you won't use it for a month.

30-second recap

• Personal vs Professional is decided by your gross revenue over the last 12 months, at the $100,000 line.
• Read the Supported engine versions field — since 5.7, an incompatible plugin will not install at all.
• Untouched since UE4, or no build for the current engine: walk away.
• No word on textures, LODs, collision or platform means it wasn't tested for your case.
• Refund window is 14 days: seller first, Fab Support second.
• Evaluate in an empty project, migrate folders, delete the rest.

That closes the original list — setup, Blueprint patterns, game systems, world building, performance, shipping, the engine, and now the storefront. The voting page is empty for the first time, so the next post is whatever you put on it. Tell me what broke in your project this month.

— Marco