Epic Games has sold ArtStation and Sketchfab to KitBash — the company behind KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla. Announced this week, financial terms undisclosed.
If your portfolio lives on ArtStation, that is your shop window changing hands. So let me lay out what is actually known, and what I would keep an eye on.
What is not changing
More than you would expect, at least on paper:
- Portfolios and libraries stay as they are
- Pricing and subscriptions are unchanged for now
- Your Epic Games login still works on both platforms
- KitBash3D and Greyscalegorilla carry on as before
Nobody has to do anything today. Nothing to migrate, nothing to export in a panic.
Why Epic let them go
This is Epic tightening up.
Epic bought both in 2021, at the height of the Fortnite money and the metaverse push, and spent well beyond what was coming in. From 2023 it has been walking that back — layoffs, and selling things that were not core. Bandcamp went the same way.
The official line is that Epic is concentrating on Unreal Engine 6, Fortnite, the developer ecosystem and the Epic Games Store. Given what UE6 is going to take, that is not spin. Merging two engines and moving the gameplay layer to a new language is enormous. Running an artist social network is a side quest by comparison.
KitBash’s pitch is that this makes one connected ecosystem: learn a technique, buy or build the asset, publish the work, get discovered, get hired. On the face of it that is a better fit than sitting inside a games company that mostly wanted the audience.
The part worth watching
Here is the tension nobody is saying out loud.
In December 2022, ArtStation was the site where artists staged the biggest protest against AI image generation the industry has seen. Thousands of people replaced their portfolios with the same red “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES” placard until it took over the trending page. Epic ended up amending its AI FAQ and adding a NoAI tag.
That platform now belongs to a company whose leadership has been openly enthusiastic about putting AI through its operations.
I want to be careful here, because that is a question, not an accusation. Being pro-AI is not the same as planning to flood a portfolio site with generated work — and I use these tools myself, so I am hardly in a position to be sniffy about it. But the new owner’s instincts and the community’s stated position are not obviously pointing the same way, and how that gets resolved matters more than any feature on a roadmap.
The related complaint already on the table: the ArtStation marketplace has been filling up with low-effort generated content, and artists have been asking for tighter quality control for a while. New ownership is the moment that either gets addressed or gets worse.
Sketchfab is the quieter question. Its marketplace was wound down under Epic and it is unclear whether it returns, gets folded into KitBash3D, or stays a viewer. The technical wishlist — gaussian splatting support, mainly — is unanswered.
What I would actually do
Nothing urgent. Genuinely. The continuity promises are specific enough to take at face value for now.
But keep your portfolio somewhere you own. This is the third owner some of these artists have been through, and the lesson repeats: a platform is a distribution channel, not a home. Your own domain, your own pages, everything else pointing at it. That predates this deal — it was true last week too. It is just that weeks like this one are when people remember it.
Check your NoAI tag if you set one in 2022. Settings survive acquisitions until they do not, and it costs thirty seconds to confirm.
Then get back to work. Ownership changed; the job did not.