Asset Developers, where do you promote your assets?

Personally I don't do any real outside promotion. I did a quick getting started tutorial post on my blog which gets a fair amount of traffic. I also have it in my signature so when I'm participating in other discussions around the forum it's visible. Also, I offer two purchase options (Asset Store and Fast Spring) and while 90%+ of my sales are through the asset store, the additional option is nice for those who can't or don't want to use the asset store.

 

Twitter is a nice way, since the AssetStore has its own handle and is reaaally supportive of the assets authors.
Other than that whereelse should you get most traffic than from unity's own page. It's not billions of users, yet
And a site where you could do to and just advertize your product....how would feel about such a site personally ? I would never visit or even use it
This is a niche we are targetting - well a really big niche - but there are no big external sites covering assets for a product in an impacting manner.

Being active on the forums, offering help and NOT constantly talk about a product in other threads surely helps to shape your public reputation and people may get interested in checking out your stuff
There just is no secret shortcut - 1000% same procedure as with game development/selling.

 

This is something I would like to know as well. I haven't done any special to promote my assets.

 

Yep. Just don't go digging through all old threads that are vaguely related to your product and post the same message in all of them. That's spam and will be deleted. It's fine to mention your product in a current thread as long as it's relevant, and not overtly rude (such as trying to push it in a thread about a competing product).

--Eric

 

The whole process sees to be very hit and miss. Yes we do appeal to a very niche audience, but I think more could be done to promote newer packages and assets. The sales are cool and all that, but it seems like (and Im not accusing anyone of anything) it's a bit of a teachers pet style club to get into the sales. With all of the Indie Game review sites out there you would think that there would be something like this for Unity Assets too.

It's also very easy for great assets to get lost in the mix and just fall behind in ratings because of this.

Another big problem is that users rarely rate assets, so you may have thousands of downloads, but no one would know it because users don't bother to rate them. Case In point I have one asset that pulls about 100 downloads a month, I have 4 ratings and 2 comments...wtf!?

 

We promote our assets mainly through the forums and Twitter.

I try to make it out to local Unity groups whenever possible - we have a set of fantastic user groups in TX (Houston, Austin, and Dallas), and have actually found a large number of people there interested in the assets that we work on.

I would love to see something like a community site that goes through and reviews/spotlights various assets. I think we'll get to that point soon. The store is growing quite a bit these days, and more of Unity's community in general is keeping an eye on the store. When the store first started out, many people I talked to didn't even know how to open the Asset Store... that has completely changed these days.

 

The problem is exactly the same as with games on mobile/whatever market, imo.
It's not anyone's task to make sure the product gets exposure than the creator alone. We might get some mentions on social media or the forums or even a unity conference, but that is just a chance. We don't have any entitlement or guarantue that unity or asset store owes us any exposure apart from being listed on the store.
Of course it's hit and miss. We don't know what asset will be popular. This is not welfare. Not wveryone gets a nice dinner by just showing up.
An example: We thought we had a clue about what people enjoy, yet our second product sells significantly lower than the first, even though we worked on it twice as long. I can't blame unity or its users for that.
Indie game review sites ? These sites that mostly only benefit the creators (who ask for money for reviews) and trick poor devs into thinking this will help them ?

I don't think that it's easy for great assets to get lost.
Since everyone has the same issues about not getting too many ratings, I don't see that as a problem, per se.

Tools that extend unitys workflow greatly, look and feel professional and serve a loooot of people's needs, get more love. That's just the way the world works.
So our task is to hit that sweet spot. We certainly can't expect some poor man's saviour via unity.
It's highly subjective on what makes a "great asset"

 

Agreed, I would love to see a space for Asset Store developers, both large and small, to showcase their products at Unite at a reasonable rate. Right now, most booths are going to the larger middleware developers, or platform/service developers. Getting some of the very talented individuals and smaller companies that make up the backbone of the Asset Store ecosystem to show their stuff off to attendees would be awesome.

 

I think that a weekly webcast on the Unity site with a handful of asset developers would be great.

 

People seem to mostly rate something if they really like it or really hate it.

Your first kit was a 2d infinite runner, so anyone that wanted to buy a 2d platformer would buy it, your second one i am not even sure what it was but it was alot more niche. The more niche you go the less people will buy it. You sell something that everyone can use like say a GUI then everyone will buy it.