Getting asset sales

I'm looking for some advice and insight.
I've had an asset up for about a month now. I personally think the quality is good; I've put a lot of work into it and it serves a solid purpose.
I've attempted to advertise it both on the Asset Store forum here and on Facebook and Twitter, through my own accounts and those for the Unity Asset Store.
I've even looked up a bunch of different guides on how to handle and optimize asset sales.
Yet I've not made a single sale. In a whole month, not one sale.

Clearly I seem to be doing something wrong, but I don't know what. Have I not advertised well enough, is the asset just that terrible? Maybe its just overpriced?

Here's a link to the asset, and a link to the forum page which has more detailed information on it.

I would really love any advice here.

 

I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn't pay $20 for that.

 

So might be the price, then.
Is it a quality issue that makes it not seem worth that much, or just because of what it is (stone assets)? Maybe the amount of content there?

 

• read the post here,
• went to AS to check it out,
• read "Procedural Stone",
• thought "ah like that 3DsMax plugin",
• then read description and realized that it was models, not a plugin to procedurally generate stone-ish meshes.

1. Unfortunate naming
   
2. From what i can tell from the screenshots the stones are of good quality, both in mesh as in texture; but your package is 145mb which i don't understand. Does each stone have its own Texture instead of them all sharing on Atlas or being creatively mapped to the same Texture? Not usable for mobiles because of high fillRate
3. Why is there not webPlayer demo to check them out "live"?
4. And yeah.. 8 stones for 20 bucks does feel a tad unbalanced

• Start it off at a low price with a starting set of content,
• while (true)
• {
• Add more content in updates,
• Increase price to match content..
• }

That way early adopters will always get that good feeling of having discovered a treasure that keeps on growing and you'll already have customers to spread the word for you.

 

Well the title is misleading. Also there is enough different themed stones but only per 8 per theme. I think at least half of the 8 stones have such unique sharp shape that they can't be repeated or used a lot in scenery cause its easy to recognize them after a while even if scaled or rotated and players would think a lot "I saw that before".

I also see that the 1st picture does good use of them mixed and scaled and your description says about it but I think you should have more stone variations (more common shaped) and/or more example pictures.

Lowering the price does not help if there is not enough variation for use that need only one or of the themes. I would rather say keep the price but add more models to add shape variation and reuse the textures.

 

Consider your competition. Look at the other rock packs that are being sold (or given free!) in the Asset Store and you'll see the quality bar is pretty high:

Real Rocks Vol II
Rocks Collection Vol.1
Rock Pack 01

Those are all sold at $10, half of the price of your asset pack.

And as long as there's pretty ok (i.e. passable) free stuff that can work for what they need, customers are going to flock to that. Free Rocks is the most popular right now in the Landscapes section.

I guess my advice is: keep practicing, get better at what you do. Perhaps look for some customer need that hasn't been addressed yet and maybe you can fill that: perhaps a different art style, or some landscape feature other than rocks, if you're really into landscapes. My point is, if no one needs it, no one's going to buy it. If there's a lot of it in the store already, it's hard to get noticed.

If you're making something, you could post a work-in-progress here in the forums and ask: "Hey everyone, if I were to make this kind of stuff on the Asset Store, how many of you would buy this? How much are you willing to pay for it?" or maybe "This is the kind of stuff that I can make. I want to make a new art asset pack to sell in the Asset Store. What do you guys want/need?" Something along those lines.

If there's a lot of good feedback, then you're on the right track. If your thread is getting little to no useful replies, well, at least that's indication it probably won't sell much and you'd save yourself wasted effort of continuing with it.

 

1. I named them Procedural Stones because they rely on procedural textures/materials for customization, which was the main selling point. I actually did find out about Max's Procedural Stones later, and can see how that might be an issue. I believe it would be too late to change that now, though.
2. Hm... the file size comes almost entirely from the presence of the two input textures per mesh. The meshes and substances have a fairly negligible file size.
The textures total roughly 15mb between the two per mesh. I hadn't considered the size an issue, but looking it over, it seems I actually can get away with much stronger compression than I used. If I do that in an update, I can probably drop it closer to 50mb total.
3. I was considering making a webplayer video. I was hoping that the video and screenshots might be enough.
If I were to make a webplayer video then I would also need to code in run-time customization of the textures to show off the customization, but I don't currently know the exact process to do that and it'd take a while to figure out. That's why I was hoping to avoid it.
4. If they were normal I'd agree, but I had hoped because of the level of customization that it would be worth at least that much. Just one stone could potentially have hundreds or even thousands of different textures, and I even provided ten different preset textures per stone.

@Ostwind
Yeah, I considered making more models as well. I just wasn't sure exactly what shapes were needed that I hadn't covered yet.

@AnomalusUndrdog
I can see that as well. With a lot of free alternatives it makes sense that people wouldn't be willing to pay as much.

Seems to me so far the best option may be to add a couple extra models, lower the price and compress the textures.
I can look into adding a webplayer demo as well, since I can see how that would be really helpful. I'll just have to poke around with it and see how reasonable it would actually be to do that.

 

There's no problem with renaming. Just post a new update to your asset but change the name this time around. You could perhaps explain in the reviewer's notes why you changed the name.

But I think, if that's the main selling point of your asset, it's exactly what you need to show off. I highly suggest taking some time to learn some enough scripting to be able to showcase that feature of your rock assets.

 

Good to know I can rename it easily. Any suggestions on a better name?

 

Go simple. Maybe "Custom Stones"?

I'd also change the picture on your asset's page. When I browse through assets, I wanna see what can they be used for. All you have now, is some rocks placed in a 3D void, which does not give a good context of how they'd look in their natural environment. If you have an ability to do so, try to make a tiny mockup scene and do some fancy screenshots (lightmapping & shadows mandatory) that show your rocks at their best, and show the community that your stones rock. (pun intended)

 

Yeah that's a good idea. Maybe even some sample scenario why it's nice to be able to change the textures during runtime. I don't know, maybe some rocks getting blasted with fireballs and slowly getting a lava texture? If it's possible to animate them that way.

 

Rocks! Rocks! ROCKS!!!!

 

ROCKANATOR FROM HELLLLLL ( death metal voice )

 

Its really a niche item i guess if i needed rocks, then i would compare it to the other rock packs.

 

Rocks rock.

 

It's definitely not as easy as just making something, listing it and sales start pouring in.

It might be the subject matter itself. I don't know. To me it just seems like if I was in the market for buying rocks I would expect to get a lot of them for very little money unless they were something absolutely fantastic.

I am not an artist but by using a reference image I was able to make a rock that worked for my needs at the time.

Granted mine is 2D hand-painted image not a 3D model. I never went into Blender to model a rock so am not sure how it would turn out.

I'm not saying your work is not better. Mainly just that it is possible when it comes to simple things such as rocks that people may just do it themselves unless they see something that is of phenomenal quality?

 

I have one additional suggestion as well. I noticed that your asset Requires a minimum Unity 4.5.2 which means you used Unity 4.5.2 to publish your asset to the asset store. I would highly suggest downloading and installing an earlier version of Unity (you can install more than one version, just put it in a different folder). By targeting only 4.5.2 and above you cut out a large part of your target base. Publish it to the asset store with the absolute lowest version of Unity that it will work on. I use Unity 3.5 to publish my asset because it's the lowest version it will work on and ensures a higher target user base.

 

Ah, yeah. That is a good idea.
I think some fairly recent versions have included updates for the support of procedural materials, so I'll have to look into that, but at the very least I can drop it by a couple of versions.

 

I believe you can go back to 4.0.

 

Substance mobile support was added in unity 4.1

 

Yeah I guess that's something in ever thought of, your disadvantaged by updating.

 

My impression is that there are only 10 actual stone models, and whatever procedurality in appearance is kind of not obvious.. or if there is versatility in adjusting the appearance, there isn't a clear representation of that. And then... they're just a bunch of stones. I mean, in terms of marketing, you have think about what it is you're selling and if it's models of objects, how people would feel about those objects in real life plays a significant part in how they will evaluate it. Yes its a model and you can tweak it.... but it's just a bunch of stones. You're not selling models of gold bars or super-cool warriors. Stones are in the back of people's minds and are generally boring and not interesting. And your models don't really go outside of that boring factor, they just look like warped blobs. I think you need to consider different subject matter and think about how the audience might engage with or react to your asset. As it stands you might get a few sales at $5-10.

 

I just had a good look at the Asset Store listing as well as your associated forum post.

I agree with imaginaryhuman (is he really imaginary though?) on the marketing.

After taking a good look at what this is now I see why you are surprised there are no sales.

First, your Asset Store listing is not doing a very good job on the marketing. It is not doing your work any justice.

In all of your screenshots all a person takes away is "a bunch of rocks".

Yet, in reality, these models are highly customizable via GUIs! That is where everyone is lost with the whole procedural thing. Nothing in the screenshots presents that. All we see are a bunch of rocks.

Put the video from your forum posting over on your Asset Store listing.

Keep your existing screenshots but put them at the end.

Create some new screenshots to use at the beginning of the list.

Screenshots from your video would be perfect showing you changing the colors of top and bottom of the rocks independently. Changing the smoothness. Making them look "wet". And so on.

Each new screen shot you make do one of those dividing line things showing the original on the left and the altered version on the right. And be sure to show a screenshot of the GUI panel itself and have a caption "Change anything easily and see the results in real-time in your scene!"

Finally, try changing the price to $15.

Now that I understand what you have actually created I find it far more impressive. You just need to get that across in your listing.

 

stoner

 

My opinion? The price is a bit too high. Even tho the "procedural" part is pretty good, its still 8 rock models for 20$. I'm selling 10+ beds for 2$ and still only sold once. xD

Sure beds and rocks aren't the same, but they're pretty much on the same level when it comes to how "needed" they are. Rocks are a bit more needed than pretty beds tho. Here's the asset if you wanna check it out for some reason.

My Custom Teleporter Pad is doing pretty great tho. Almost 150 downloads in two months. But its free. xD

EDIT: I like the procedural thing. Heck I think it would be 10 times more popular if it was procedural bricks or even walls instead of rocks. Dungeon walls that is.

 

Would be awesome if we could get statistics across all assets to see what users are after.
Doesn't have to be sales numbers, relative values would also do.. maybe sent to all publishers bi-weekly via mail

 

We sort of have it by sorting by popularity, or clicking on "Top Paid/Top Grossing" but yeah more stats is always nice. xD

 

If I was in the market for buying rocks, I'd want to see some next-gen PBS shaded rocks, with nice detail textures & maybe some cool specular highlights that look like tiny bits of other minerals/metals in them.

 

@GarBenjamin
That's a really good idea; showing some before/after tweaks in the screenshots.
I actually have the video listed on the asset page as well, at the bottom. Apparently it isn't visible enough though XD
For some reason it's also refusing to link directly into the image section.

@GoGoGadget
It actually does include PBR versions for both the Metal/Rough and the Spec/Gloss types.
The Metal/Rough type in particular actually looks really badass.
I didn't include any of that in the screenshots or video though, because the only source of PBR shaders I currently have in Unity comes from Skyshop, which I have yet to actually get working because for some reason Skyshop keeps maxing out Unity's memory and crashing it while I'm still in the process of setting up the freakin' skybox.

 

@Grimwolf try using Lux for PBR, it works really well and is also free.

 

@GoGoGadget
Awesome, thank you.

And wow, that compression... It was stupid not to handle that before. I've dropped the size of the asset by like 75% with no loss of quality.

 

There is a rule for Internet Marketing... you have about 5 seconds to grab the visitor's attention.
People are always doing a very quick scan of the content. Maybe make the video link at the very top and possibly like this: WATCH THE VIDEO

 

For a little more than $20 you can get an entire environment if you catch it on sale. I'd recommend lowering the price to be more competitive

 

Indeed my first thought was of Manufactura K4 and Philip Schmidt. Both asset authors not only provide a lot of content for an affordable price, but they also know how to properly showcase their product.

Rocks & Boulders

Keep in mind that the biggest aspect of your asset is the procedural textures. Getting some rock meshes to use them on should really be more of a bonus than the primary selling point.

Rather than show the parameters being changed in Unity, you could try showing a simple scene with scripts that are changing the textures to match seasonal changes.

 

Hm... creating an entire environment with multiple seasons to showcase that ability feels excessive. I'm already working on a webplayer demo to let people customize the stones in real time, which I think should be good. I have to consider the cost to reward ratio.

Also I worked with Lux, and unfortunately it has a SUPER bizarre proprietary set up that requires you to build textures for it specifically, with different maps embedded into the same texture on specific channels.
Since that's probably what a lot of people will be using, I'll just have to create an extra substance for Lux.

 

Not all of his packs have scenes. His Rocks & Boulders 2 only has two screenshots. One with the variations of texture and one with the rocks themselves.

A webplayer demo showing off the textures is probably good enough.

 

From my experience, the "Bumped Specular" shader in Lux uses a fairly standard workflow - it's just a Diffuse + Normal + Specular/roughness map, I've even bought assets that weren't tested with Lux and had them appear as intended.

 

Without skimming most of the thread:

1. Agree with the misleading title. I would consider $20 for a procedural stone creator. Not for a pack of procedurally made stones.

2. There are plenty of other rocks/stones available, many of which are cheaper or free.

3. Agree with the price being too high. There's nothing there to really differentiate your pack from the other, cheaper (and free) rock packs already available.

4. Between cheap/freebie packs and the rocks that come along with stuff like Michael O (Manufactura)'s larger packs, I personally have no real need for something like this. I can't see what sets it apart from other similar products.



A couple of questions to ask yourself to help guide decisions about stuff like this:

1. Why would I want your product over similar products already available? Find a niche, a thing you can do better than the others or that can be unique about your product. Satisfy a need or fill a gap.

2. What about your product makes it a good buy at it's nominated price point? If your product's niche is particularly unique or especially strong, that is when you can command a premium price point.

 

Oh God, no. If I had used a procedural stone generator to make those things automatically, I wouldn't even try to sell that. At the very least I'd need to have hundreds of models in there.
It uses procedural textures to allow easy in-editor customization.
More proof I suppose that I've both named and presented the asset very poorly, and it doesn't demonstrate nearly well enough what it actually is.

As to using Lux for PBR shading; if I were to make a material in the asset set to use the Lux shader, and someone opened the asset without having Lux installed, what would happen? I'm hoping it would simply fail to find what it's looking for and that particular material would simply not work.
The nature of that will determine if I can actually set up prefab PBR stones to help guide the user, or force the user to do it all on their own.

 

I've not done an excessive amount of environment building, but in what I have done, and from working with an art team, I have never experienced a problem where I was thinking "Man, I just wish I had more textures for these rocks!"

From what I can tell, the shapes of the rocks is generally far more important than their texture. Also, you need to keep the GPU in mind - uniquely textured rocks means more VRAM and more draw calls.

 

Why not? Put the right price on it and you'd immediately dominate the Unity Asset Store rock market.

I've seen assets handle this kind of cross-asset integration by including optional packages. For instance, I've got an AI package that integrates with PlayMaker and a bunch of other stuff. When I import it, a bunch of other package files are also added to my project. If I have PlayMaker I just install the PlayMaker integration package and away I go. If I don't care about integration for a thing I just remove its relevant package.

 

Another thing you might want to try is give away free stuff to get on people's good side. Then when they click on your name they'll see your other products. I see some character asset creators do this like Dozer. Think I've purchased some assets from him due to this so it's gotta work

 

After a lot of research, I've found that in order to make some massive and necessary improvements I'll have to basically re-do the asset from the ground up.
I suppose it's good then that no one has bought it yet, because there'll be some pretty large differences.
Anyone know if it's possible to temporarily hide the asset until the next update?
It's not necessary, but on the off-chance anyone does buy it before then, it would help to avoid support questions that will already be fixed after anyway, and avoid dealing with refunds if someone is unhappy with the massive changes (which would likely break an existing project if they tried to update).

 

yeah you can actually tell the asset store to remove the asset then later add it back but i wouldnt bother with it. If no one bought it in a month they probably wont.

 

Leave it up and add a note to the description if they let you.

 

Or just release the new thing as a new product. If the changes are that massive, why not sell both? Once the new one is up drop the price of this one to $2 or $5, it might pick up some change of its own.

 

Well, the problem as it turns out is that I made some mistakes with it. Most importantly I doubled up on materials; apparently substances self-contain materials as well as the textures, and I created outside materials that point to the textures inside the substances.
I then built up the readme and the demo video around the misconception that it was supposed to work that way.
It was also probably unnecessary to use outside textures that get input into the substances; I did that believing that it would reduce file sizes, but since each substance generates new textures at run-time anyway I effectively just created extra textures on top of those that would otherwise not be needed if I simply embedded them. I did indeed reduce file sizes outside of a running game, but that isn't a huge concern and I created other issues in the process.
I had also made some minor bad choices in the texture compression formats which lead to large file sizes and some small artifacts.
And then the textures themselves I'm simply not happy with. I'm planning to redo them all with hand-painted textures, then embed them in substances for customization, rather than having the whole texture generated by the substance.

And then there's all those other things discussed earlier, like reducing the price, changing the name, improving the description, replacing the screenshots, adding a webplayer demo etc.

 

On that note, why did the Asset Store stuff let it through? It's kind of bad for everybody...

 

What do you both mean? That was literally the only way to give prefabs with different settings. You can't apply the same substance to multiple objects with different settings.
If anyone wanted two stones that looked different, they'd have to do exactly the same thing anyway.