Epic Games sold ArtStation on 10 August 2026. The buyer, KitBash, sells 3D asset kits, vehicles and Substance materials, which is a fair description of most of what I have been putting on ArtStation's shelves since 2018. My landlord is now a competitor.
Every piece I have read about it closes with a version of the same sentence: nothing changes for artists.
I am not covering this from the outside. I have been on ArtStation's top-seller lists four years running — top 50 in 2021, top 10 in 2022 and 2023, top seller in 2024 — off a catalogue of smart materials, tileable textures, alphas and base meshes. That is the exact aisle the new owner already trades in. So here is the seller's version.
What changed hands, and the detail nobody leads with
From Epic's own newsroom post of 10 August and the write-ups at 80.lv, Game Developer and 3DVF: KitBash, the company behind KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla, has acquired ArtStation and Sketchfab from Epic Games. Terms undisclosed. Epic says it is narrowing to Unreal Engine 6, Fortnite, the Epic Games Store and its developer ecosystem. KitBash says portfolios, libraries and core workflows carry on as they do today, that there are no pricing changes, and that it intends to listen before publishing a roadmap. I have no reason to doubt any of it.
The detail doing the most work and getting the least coverage: Fab was not in the deal. Epic keeps Fab. So the ArtStation Marketplace, the one I sell on, now belongs to KitBash, while the marketplace it was supposed to be folded into belongs to somebody else entirely.
Remember that migration. ArtStation posted that the move of the Marketplace to Fab was still planned but no longer happening in 2025, and that details on timelines and migration plans would follow in the coming months. They did not follow. That plan now sits across two companies which no longer share an owner, and neither of them has said a word about it since the sale. If you sell on ArtStation, the last roadmap you were given belongs to nobody.
I have heard the reassurance before, and there is a receipt
Not from KitBash. From the previous owner, on 22 October 2024, in a Sketchfab community post written the day Fab launched.
That post says very little is changing today for most of the Sketchfab community. Further down, under the heading asking what changes for a Pro or Premium subscriber, the answer is one word: nothing. Both statements are true.
The same post, a few paragraphs up, says the Sketchfab Store is now closed. Products stayed viewable and stopped being buyable, model pages lost their ratings and reviews, and any seller who wanted to keep earning had to migrate their products to Fab.
So "very little is changing" and "the store you sell on has closed" were not competing statements. They were the same statement, in the same FAQ, on the same day, from the company that owned both.
That is the whole reason I am writing this. Anyone repeating the reassurance this month should say which artists they mean. If you have a portfolio on ArtStation then genuinely, nothing changes — your images are safe, your job leads are safe, this is a non-story and you can stop reading here. If you have a storefront on it, that reassurance has a documented shelf life, and the document is the previous owner's own.
The risk is not bad faith. It is defaults.
KitBash3D's own site lists kits, vehicles and Substance materials. Greyscalegorilla's front page puts its library at over 5,000 materials, models and HDRIs, delivered through Cargo, the app that pushes those libraries straight into your DCC. Those are not adjacent categories to mine. They are my categories, in my file formats, to my customers.
A store that carries competing sellers is a completely normal business, and KitBash has said nothing about touching the Marketplace. I am not alleging anything. I am pointing at where the decisions live.
Search ranking. The front page. The newsletter slot. What gets recommended after checkout. Which category gets a sale event this quarter and which one gets skipped. Every one of those is an editorial decision, and the editor now has a catalogue on the same shelf as mine. Epic never sold a smart material in its life, so for them those decisions could only ever have been about traffic. That is no longer structurally true, and it does not become untrue because somebody promises it will not happen. It needs watching. That is all it needs.
Four things I am doing, none of them dramatic
- Selling to my own audience instead of waiting to be discovered. ArtStation's seller terms pay more when the buyer arrives through your own ArtStation portfolio than when they arrive through marketplace discovery. Christopher Cant's write-up on ArtStation Pro and Plus, updated December 2023, puts it at 80 against 95 per cent for a Pro seller, and 70 against 85 for Free and Plus. Check the current figures before you plan around them, because those are pre-acquisition terms and nobody has said whether they survive. The point is not the fifteen points. The point is that it is the only slice of that revenue which does not depend on somebody else's ranking.
- Keeping every listing as data on my side. Titles, descriptions, tag lists, previews, licence text, changelogs, in a repository I control rather than only in a marketplace's admin panel. What hurt Sketchfab Store sellers was not losing the store. It was re-entering hundreds of listings by hand against a deadline. A migration should be an export, not a summer.
- Spreading the catalogue. ArtStation, BlenderKit, SuperHive, and 358 products on my own storefront where the terms cannot change without my consent. Running your own shop is more work and it converts worse than a marketplace. It is also the only shelf nobody can buy out from under you.
- Not delisting anything. Nothing has actually happened yet. Pulling a catalogue in response to an ownership announcement trades a year of accumulated ranking for a press release, and you cannot buy that ranking back.
Where I think the pessimistic read is wrong
Epic was an engine company that owned an art community as a side business, and it had already decided to move the store into a marketplace built for game developers. KitBash is a company whose entire existence is selling assets to artists. A store is their core competence rather than an inherited obligation, so on the plain numbers they have more reason to care whether the ArtStation Marketplace works than Epic ever did. There is a genuinely good version of the next two years in which the conflict of interest I have just described is the reason the Marketplace finally gets the moderation, the search and the sale calendar that sellers have been asking for.
The thing I would actually watch is not the ownership. It is the AI policy. 3DVF's analysis of the acquisition flagged both halves of it: the Marketplace has an AI-generated-content problem that sellers have wanted cleaned up for years, and KitBash's leadership has spoken publicly about putting AI deep into the company. Those two facts point in opposite directions and only one of them gets to win. Whichever way that decision goes will change my business far more than the name at the top of the invoice.
I am not moving. I am just not going to be surprised twice by the same sentence.
