Since its inception, Sketchfab.com, a 3D model-sharing website, has served the invaluable function of hosting and showcasing the vast digitized collections and portfolios of many museums, universities, and artists across the world.

Unfortunately, their new owners, Epic Games, intend to destroy it. 

In 2025, they have announced they will remove the download function, forcing creators and users onto Epic’s “Fab,” an game development asset store that exists purely for the sake of profit. But killing the Sketchfab Store will severely harm independent artists and small businesses. There's no benefit to anyone from "Fab," except for lining Epic's pocketbook.

Sketchfab is irreplaceable. It is the service to host and view 3D models online. It provides invaluable assets, used and shared by everyone, from indie game devs to renowned institutions. Fab would happily destroy all that. Comments are disabled, forbidding users to speak to each other. Downloads will be unavailable, prohibiting the free sharing of content. Everything about this decision goes against the core of Sketchfab’s nature and its significance in our digital modern world. 

This is the virtual equivalent of burning the Library of Alexandria. 

But the "Fab" upheaval was delayed for a year once already. With enough active effort, we can stop it again. And we must. 

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How has the "Fab" launch and planned Sketchfab shutdown affected you? Share your thoughts here. 

(Updated 11/4/24) Long gone are the days of open access and free sharing: in Epic's own words, "we only publish products that we believe provide significant value to our customers." How much is an artifact worth to Epic? Can they sell it? Can they put it in the "metaverse" like the rest of Fab? Can they feed it into AI training data? CEO Tim Sweeney expects AI will consume the 3D world within "three years," feeding the Epic monopoly. They place more value on Roblox and Fortnite than the contents of the Louvre (or the artists who use the site today.) 

Epic has an "aggressive growth plan for 2025," and the rest of us will pay for it. They've now officially killed the Sketchfab Store, damaging artists and small businesses who now must compete with huge companies like Quixel MegaScans -- and "Cultural Heritage" is reduced to "Objects and Decor."

Epic has been hacking away at this mess for 2.5 years, and they still can't make "Fab" work -- but they're trapped in a sunk-cost fallacy. Let's break them out of it.

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(Updated 10/12/24): Here is a PDF copy of the email issued to all Sketchfab Store sellers (I am also a 3D artist, so I received it.) Here as well is a news article reporting on the announcement.

Extra bonus: here is former Sketchfab Cultural Heritage lead Thomas Flynn's extensive document, "Thoughts on Sketchfab to Fab migration announcement, September 2024." Thomas noticed some things I missed, including the incredibly insulting discovery that "Models with the Cultural Heritage & History category will be mapped to Objects & Decor." That says it all. 

One more disclaimer note: I have no financial stake in this, and I don't make anything if you donate to the petition. (Change.org documentation tells me it's used to promote the petition and get more views.) 

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Read here for a discussion of the Sketchfab Store's importance to 3D artists.

Read on for a discussion of Sketchfab's value in preserving cultural heritage.

If you want to get in touch and discuss this, drop me a line at emilyesser1@gmail.com, or on Discord at @paintingsworthlookingat. 
Join the Discord group who'd rather not have Fab: https://discord.gg/sdb5TxwAXM

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Five years ago, Sketchfab celebrated the massive milestone of 100,000 models in the “Cultural Heritage” collection. It’s always been clear that Sketchfab acts as a public good, not only a commercialized marketplace. Researchers rely on the availability and accessibility of these assets — and Sketchfab’s announcement made that same point: "What’s even better is that almost 20,000 of these models are available to download and re-use under easy-to-understand Creative Commons licenses, which means that this amazing wealth of 3D data can travel beyond Sketchfab to be reused in new and amazing ways.”

That is exactly what they intend to wipe out from the site. 

The “Fab” announcement ominously declares that time is limited. “Free content will continue to be available on Sketchfab into 2025, before we remove free licensing from Sketchfab next year.” Out of greed or short-sightedness, Sketchfab now plans to force a massive inconvenience upon all these individuals and institutions that they once proudly partnered with. 

Countless museums have already put in the vast and time-consuming effort of digitizing their collections. They, and all other users who wish to maintain downloadability, are expected to go through the onerous “Fab” migration process, which does not support the common Collada/DAE file format, erases all usage statistics, and, worst of all, rejects many Creative Commons licenses, like CC0, that are used by museums such as the Smithsonian: “Models that are currently licensable under CC0, CC BY-ShareAlike, CC BY-NonCommercial, or CC BY-NoDerivatives cannot migrate to Fab under those license types, as those licenses do not exist on Fab at this time.”

There is no benefit here. Epic wants to convince users that the site’s impending doom is a good thing, but “Fab” has received nothing but widespread outcry. Users have reported that the transition process is filled with technical failures and deeply demoralizing. “Educate, inform and add metadata to your content with Tags and Descriptions,” says Sketchfab's page advertising to museums — data that would be lost when starting over on the “Fab” store. And that very same Museums page promotes the download option. They know how important it is.

Why should academic research materials be forced onto a marketplace? And why should artists and model sellers be forced to re-set their statistics and start from scratch?

Epic Games claims this is an improvement to the site. Do not believe it. There is nothing wrong with Sketchfab in its current form, and its destruction would be a massive mistake for the sake of profit. Epic will lose nothing by leaving Sketchfab intact. But if this site is destroyed, the world of digitized content would lose everything. 

Individual users may be powerless to stop the ruination of Sketchfab in the face of Epic’s attempt at a market monopoly. But I believe that a coordinated effort, spearheaded by its massive user-base, including research institutions, could save it. Please sign this petition, and send the link along to anyone you know. Thank you very much.

Threads of user objections: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sketchfab/comments/1fj7diz/epic_is_killing_the_sketchfab_marketplace_to/ 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sketchfab/comments/1fn18fe/this_fab_situation_need_to_stop_right_now/ 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sketchfab/comments/1fvd7de/fab_store_is_a_massive_downgrade_and_loss_of_stats/ 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sketchfab/comments/1fu0bcp/epics_new_fab_store_rejects_sketchfab_dae_format/ 
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sketchfab/comments/1fui6mo/help_with_migrating_sketchfab_assets_to_fab/