Asset store publishers, how are your sells last month?

I experienced significant drop in sales last month. My sales are down by 80%. It was not steady decline over time, which is something i would expect as assets get "used up" on the market over time. This was sudden. At the same month, new asset store look arrived. Maybe my visibility was lost cause of it. Or maybe that is just coincidence. I need to note that my assets are heavily niche, so they cant be used as general reference. But, this is why i'm asking the rest of you, is everything normal, or do you also have drop in sales?

 

Sales dropped to almost 0% for me. I do know that my products are a niche, but I did have a few sales every month anyway. This has stopped now.

 

Pretty normal month for me.

 

Dropped very low for me in the last month. I was suspecting the same thing.

 

Note that the new asset store look is not yet in use for most of the users (AFAIK)

 

Same thing. August's sales are terrible in comparison with all previous months.

 

Nope. My sales have been extremely consistent for nearly a year now!

Nov 2016: $0
Dec 2016: $0
Jan 2017: $0
Feb 2017: $0
Mar 2017: $0
Apr 2017: $0
May 2017: $0
Jun 2017: $0
Jul 2017: $0
Aug 2017: $0

 

Same here, I thought it was weird because I had recently uploaded new stuff to the Asset Store, and sales dropped.

To be fair, you only uploaded 1 asset .. and that was over 2 years ago :-\

Looks pretty cool though, I love customizable assets...

Spoiler

 

I don't think I have access to the new Asset Store yet,
but the prices have been increased by 25% within the last month.

Not sure how much impact it has in total, but it has definitely made me think twice before checkout.

 

Yeah, this was one of my rare joke posts that just didn't land.

 

My sales saw about a 25% increase over the average from the last 5 months (and a nearly 50% increase from June which was a slow month). So far this month my sales are on pace to be about even with what they were last month as well.

 

Abruptly went to zero sales for July which has never happened. Even published a new asset, no uptake.

I think the way the store promotes assets now is quite different than it used to be and has changed the way people shop in it. There is a lot of focus on featuring packages, themes and groups of new high-potential assets and I think it's pushed a lot of the old way of just browsing around on the store into the background.

There's no data available to confirm it, but it seems like the 'featured' space is much bigger. A lot of sales go to that specific space which leads to depopularization of non-featured assets and dropping a lot of assets off on sales.

That's totally just speculation though. Overall to me it just feels like if you don't get into some featured category or special then sales are improperly lower than they used to be.

 

Thank you all for sharing your experiences.

This is exactly what i fear as well. When i go to browse the store, and i imagine myself as buyer, it is tremendously hard to see anything except featured stuff. It is to early to jump to conclusions tough, and i will certainly give it a go with new assets in the future to test this out. Maybe now we will hardly make any sales, until (and if) we get featured. And when we get featured it will skyrocket beyond any imagination?.... Somehow i would prefer steady income to that. But, that is jut my opinion.

To test this theory i will ask those of you who wrote your sales are the same or higher, are you being featured in some way?

 

FWIW, I keep an eye on my Google Analytics data. The overwhelming majority of traffic to my asset comes from the forums (either from my asset thread or multiple other threads - meaning linked from my signature). I've also noticed a direct correlation between my forum activity and sales. In months where I've not been able to be as active, my sales have been lower. Keep that in mind for your marketing strategies. The forums are a very powerful marketing tool, even passively because I don't actively go around promoting on the forums. I just participate in General Discussion and help out with unrelated (or sometimes related) things in other forums like Editor / General and Scripting.

 

That is truly interesting info. Thank you.

 

Though I don't keep as close of a tap on my GA I have noticed the same - there does seem to be at least some correlation between forum presence and sales. After all, it does increase visibility and the people here are basically the target audience.

That being said, I was really active in July.

 

Well... Lol.

 

When I first saw the new look I fully anticipated another torches and pitchforks mob, like we had with the Lithium incident. I was surprised that no one seemed to care really when I showed a screenshot on slack. At the time not many had seen it yet. I found the usability for finding things to be far better in the old version of the store. Some of the search features where also nonsensical at that time (star rating filter only filtered down to equal number of stars, not equal or greater) . I haven't used it since to be honest. But that correlates with me having no time to work on my game at the moment. Would love to hear official statements on global sale volume going up or down. Wouldn't surprise me if it has gone down significantly.

 

@Peter77 updating the asset store link in your signature might help

 

The signature is actually pointing to my publisher page in the new Asset Store. Isn't it working for you?

 

It seen to work only for the new asset store

 

New asset store links are different. New Store is not public, don't use links from the new store.

 

Alright, I replaced it with the old store. Thanks for letting me know!

 

Come to think of it, I probably do too. I never really thought about it. Now at least I have an excuse to pop in here and goof off every once in a while. I don't think I can post often enough to get my sales up to where I need them right now though!

 

I notice a sales drop whenever I open my mouth.

 

It is now, sorry for not saying you should "un-update" it, that was news to me too

 

I experienced a significant drop. My theory was that users of 2017.1 don't want to purchase assets uploaded for 5.x, and most users looking to purchase new assets have recently moved to 2017.1. To test the theory I re-uploaded all of my asset packages with 2017.1 and I'll see how things go in around a month.

 

Good theory, I'm about to test it out myself as I have an update to push. I'm having one big struggle though... 2017 supports using experimental .NET 4.6.... but the DLL mapping does not support specifying .NET 4.6... so I have absolutely no way to publish a package that has BOTH .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.6 support. While my asset works fine in 3.5, it doesn't support the language features of 4.6. I can send one off updates (which I'm working on building at the moment), but can't publish as such and I've already got a second customer asking for it so my guess is that will have an impact on sales.

 

I think it related to new Asset Store testing?

 

That's possible. I happened to be one of the guinea pigs and there was a major problem. I would click a link in the forums for an asset and then the store would redirect me to the new store and wouldn't take me to the asset.

 

And i think the new asset store design favour 2D/3D assets more. It is more difficult to get visible if you not a 2D/3D assets.

 

I have a 3d asset, released in june. I sold less in july, but anyway my numbers are pretty low.
I didn't appear in the "new" category... i guess Unity didn't like my stuff enough :/
Getting some visibility has been difficult so far.

 

July was a good month but August is really bad so far, looks like it could end as the worst month ever for me.

 

You panicked me into checking my sales for the month. They aren't that much lower. I suspect it'll end up about the same. Clicking on the asset store did take me to the new one though, and I couldn't figure out how to get to the publisher area without telling it to take me back to the old store. Did I miss something obvious in my panic? Does anybody know where they moved that link to?

 

I also have no idea how to access publisher with new store. Always need to go back to old store to do that.

 

I've just always gone to the URL directly (bookmarked)
https://publisher.assetstore.unity3d.com/

Was there a link in the old store?!

 

Yes, there is publisher login in tab above when you browsing the store.

 

I guess it is missing because the new store is still totally beta. Access to the new store is limited to 0.1% of the users.
I don’t like the new store as it is and hope they will improve it.

 

I like the new store for the most part. Also seems they are rotating users. I'm back to the old store.

 

Are you sure? Are you using your publisher Unity ID or do you browse the store with another Unity ID? I think publishers always have access to be able to prepare their artwork and make suggestions in the publisher forum.

I think it generally takes longer to browse the store now due to the larger icons. I prefer it to see more assets per page.

One really weird phenomenon I’ve noticed:
Where the new page design with its larger icons should make most sense is clearly 3D models – but this is unfortunately not the case. Most of the models look comparable good in the new icon size – even those of substandard quality. This is highly misleading for the customer, at the end there is no improvement, you still have to open the entire page of each asset to get a good idea of the quality.

 

I still have same old ugly store? How does the new look like and why I dont see it??????????????????

 

Yes I'm sure. Yes I have access to it as a publisher but also was part of the test group and for awhile was redirected to the new store. Now it's back to the old.

 

At the beginning you had to manually switch to it. A while after they introduced the new store the switch was forced once by a redirect and a cookie was set so each time you visited the store, even by a direct link to any of its old pages you’ve got redirected to the new store.
But It was always possible to switch back to the old store – the cookie was set accordingly to your last choice. Possibly they just have forced a change of the cookie again? Don’t you see the large banner on top of the front page? (Experience the new Asset Store beta)

You can see the new look here: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/06/22/introducing-a-new-asset-store-experience/

 

Of course I do, and I know what the new store looks like. I'm just saying they stopped force-redirecting me.

 

I wish it would be the same here, I’ve just tested it again: when I switch to the new store it still automatically redirects me to the new one the next time I visit the store (and vice versa).

The look of the new store was a reply to Devison4.

 

Update. after i have seen your comment regarding posting on forums, i lowered the price of upgrade to my popular pack significantly and i made forum thread on assets and asset store about it. I made sales right after that. I don't have google analytics unfortunately cause i don't have website yet, so i cant 100% verify forum post was the source of purchase. But it is probably the case... Regardless, after reading all the other comments, it is clear to me new asset store is making me and many other people less visible. Is that temporarily cause it is still beta, or is this new strategy of Asset store leaders to focus more on selected assets rather then on all, that is good question.

 

But outside publishers most others are still on the old asset store no ?

Also it's summer, i don't know about Unity Store but other similar store usually have less sales during july / august (holidays)

 

Well, this is my first summer as publisher on asset store, so i don't know

 

Yes, they’ve wrote on publisher forums that only 1/1000th of registered users can see the new store. I can’t see the banner at all when I use a different browser to visit the Asset Store.

 

I'm actually surprised they approved your asset without a website. It's usually a requirement. But, you can setup Analytics on your asset store page itself. It's pretty slick. Don't have to set it up on your own website.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AssetStoreAnalytics.html