How we form a verdict
The Unreal Radar is opinionated by design — but we sell on this marketplace, so we hold ourselves to rules that keep an opinion honest and keep us from grading our own competitors. Here they are, in full.
What this is — and what it isn’t
A radar is a curated verdict, not a chart. Where our Marketplace Index tells you what is true about the market, the radar tells you what we think you should do about it. That makes it an opinion — so we label it as one, and we back every call with something you can check.
The one rule that governs everything: no rating named competitors
We are a seller on Fab. A vendor handing out “adopt this / avoid that” verdicts on rival products would be marking its own homework — so we never do it. Rings only ever go on:
- ✓Epic’s own engine — Nanite, Lumen, PCG, Niagara, Verse and the rest. We don’t sell the engine, so we have no stake in the verdict.
- ✓Asset categories and sub-niches — “VFX packs”, “game templates” — never an individual listing by name.
- ✓Development practices and tool-classes — “in-editor profiling”, “Perforce-style version control” — the approach, not a product.
And where a category or tool-class overlaps something we sell, the write-up says so out loud. We’d rather disclose the overlap than have you wonder about it.
Every verdict is justified one of three ways
A ring is never just a vibe. Each edition states which of these it leans on, and each blip links to its evidence:
The three routes
1 · Epic-anchored. For engine features, the maturity verdict is tied to Epic’s own published status — Experimental, Beta or Production — cited to their release notes or roadmap. This is the one place we point you to an outside source by name, because it makes the call checkable.
2 · Data-grounded. For market categories, the verdict is a published rule over our Marketplace Index — and the figure behind it is one click away, with the data downloadable as a CSV.
3 · Community-attributed. Where a verdict reflects what developers think rather than what we think, it comes from a survey, reported with the sample size, never extrapolated. (No survey edition has run yet.)
Where our market numbers stop
When a radar leans on the Marketplace Index, it inherits the Index’s coverage windows, and every figure is stamped accordingly:
- ✓Catalogue, pricing & engine data — complete through May 2026, shown “as of”, not “live”.
- ✓Buyer activity — questions, reviews, ratings — complete through September 2024 and shown unchanged for later periods. We never extrapolate it forward.
This guards one trap in particular: a brand-new category has had little time to attract questions, so we never read “few questions yet” as “nobody wants it”. A young, quiet category sits in watch — never in crowded or declining.
Rules we hold ourselves to
- ✓No invented revenue. The marketplace doesn’t publish unit sales, so we never sum list prices into “revenue”. Our demand proxy is buyer questions per listing.
- ✓One named editor, no fake committee. Each edition is signed by a real person. We don’t invent a panel of experts to borrow authority we don’t have; where we need many voices, we run a survey and credit the respondents.
- ✓Opinion stays labelled. Verdict editions carry an “this is our view, not a measurement” note, and use their own ring names so an opinion is never mistaken for a number.
- ✓Movement is honest. Because buyer-demand data is frozen at September 2024, a category’s position can only move on fresh supply data or a stated change of mind — never on demand we can’t see.
- ✓Free to read, free to cite. The verdicts live on the open web under CC BY 4.0. A link back is all we ask.