Is there any plan to add Houdini engine directly to the UE4 marketplace as a plugin? If not, there really should be.
Epic only allows assets on their marketplace to rely on plugins that are also available directly on their marketplace. This is why people can sell substance assets there, but are not allowed to sell Houdini digital assets. Because Allegorithmic placed the substance plugin directly on the UE4 marketplace.
It would be extremely useful, both for asset developers and for SideFX (more exposure), if we were allowed to sell Houdini digital assets there.

We are exploring offering Houdini Engine on the Marketplace. It helps me to know that there are asset developers out there who would like to develop for Houdini Engine. If there are others reading this please post and let us know what types of Houdini tools you would find most valuable. Thanks!

-Judith Crow (Director, Games Segment, SideFX)

Sounds great. Would be great publicity for Houdini for games in general.

For my own purposes I am developing HDAs to help design my levels inside UE4, something like the stuff you guys showed off at Siggraph 2017 [vimeo.com] (even though you never released the files to help me do it, grumble grumble).

I think given how difficult it is to create a custom editor in UE4, compared to Unity, game devs would bite your hand off to get stuff to help them. I think HDAs could fill this gap very well.

Of course there is nothing stopping anyone using the HE plugin via the github repo right now, but there are no ready-to-use Unreal HDAs at the moment and hence chicken-and-egg.