TLDR; Epic’s new acquisition of Artstation will promote artist’s education for the rest of the year, and boosting digital creators revenues at a new rate of 12% on commissions.
ArtStation has been a premier Gaming and Entertainment art portfolio site for a number of years. It came about in 2015
Artstation is a major web platform where you can post your digital 2d or 3d artwork via it’s portfolio feature, sell digital assets, has industry job postings, and has become quite an impressive remote learning library. It has over 24 million daily visits per month world wide, with 2 million visits in the US alone. This is second only to the more open ended genre “deviantart.com”, which boast a whopping 114 million daily monthly users.
Though Deviant art has a bigger web presence for digital artistry, Artstation is specifically niched towards gaming and entertainment genre. You don’t seem to make it to the front page unless your looking like you came from a movie still or game off the store shelf.
As with many mergers and acquisitions, there is concern for changing a good thing, but Epic games has indicated in it’s media announcement that it will leave well enough alone, and keep Artstation as a separate independent brand.
First, Epic’s Artstation is dropping the standard fee of selling digital assets on their site from 30% to 12%. I can’t help to draw a connection to their legal dispute with apple stores commissioned fees on app purchases. Epic games is doing some walking to their talking in this instance. This I think is a permanent change to the fee structure of digital assets, simulating a initial bump in creator asset content creation.
Secondly what has changed is that learning on Artstation is now free for the remainder of 2021! That’s gonna be a huge boost in sign ups for inspiring artists, and good faith gesture to the current community to stay with them. Subscriptions most likely will be coming back in 2022, so take advantage of them while you can.
I have to wonder “why”. Why make this purchase. To me, seems to be an eventual long term play towards promoting the unreal engine. Sure, it’s not gonna change in many respects. Artists will be able to post whatever they wanna post, ie from competitor unity. But the huge draw from artist who wanna get into games and movies, I think they will bump up the quality and accessibility towards learning unreal. To bridge the learning curve gap it has with Unity, which has built a great community and learning platform. This is great news for artists, as the unreal engine is making tremendous innovations with its engine. This will help artist get on board with a real time engine that seems to be getting better and better in making game and movies.
Huge news for aspiring artists in the gaming and entertainment fields.
ERIC DONG 
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