How much money the Asset Store can provide to you?

Wow, I'm glad you thought they'd be useful Didn't think they would turn out that useful to people, but I guess it's more likely an issue with getting exposure? What do you think?

(Btw, if you still can't purchase them for whatever reason, PM me)

 

Exposure is hard. put them in your forum signature, that helps a ton. I have Google analytics setup and I get lots of traffic from random forum threads and you're very active.

I'm going to try the asset store again tonight. If PayPal doesn't work I'll just use my credit card, but thanks!

 

It worked this time. I'm a ways of from testing the object Pooler but I'll try out build automator tomorrow or Sunday. I have a bug fix to push out soon so this will save me a bunch of time on testing. Thanks!

 

Well, I improve the quality but charge the same price

@passerbycmc I didn't have my product advertised excessively, I only made a thread about the asset, share it on reddit, on Google+, tell some friends. But I think it's okay, this package is meant for tight-budget developers. And I will try to upload a new asset to the Asset Store. It seems that the more asset you have for sale, the more you get. But still, quality over quantity

 

yeah having multiple assets helps a lot, if there is something i need from the asset store, i am more likely to to buy from a dev or artist i already had a good experience with if they offer what i want. I think things are a lot harder for artists since people are often looking for some pretty exact things.

 

The problem is that up to a point, people associate price with quality. 300 of anything for $2 just seems like you don't consider it to be worth anything at all.

Free is different, because there can be many reasons for something being free (such as advertisement) but once you slap on a price, that price tells people a lot about what you consider your work to be worth.

Lastly, don't take this the wrong way but I think there's a lot you could do to improve the package. You have to consider that when someone is making a game that probably takes weeks or months of their own time (equating to thousands of dollars of lost earnings), they are probably going to be willing to pay $20 for a package that looks really great, to make sure their game sells well. Most people have at least a few hundred dollars to spend on development, and most of that is going to be for artwork. You need to angle for at least the middle of the bunch.

Anyway, that's the way I see it.

 

Also, QUANTITY. When you increase the size of a package, people don't see this as you adding value to the package. They see it as you thinking - indeed, knowing - that the work you were selling wasn't worth the price. They go "what, exactly, is wrong with his product... that he has to bribe me with this extra stuff?"

 

I'm not sure I agree. Some packages such as universal sound fx have grown massively in size for relatively small increases in price. And once you have a package that's selling well at a good price point, it's easy to add things over time to make sure people are still looking for it.

But I can see how adding tons of stuff to a package at $2 price point definitely doesn't come across well. When a potential customer can see a huge price deficit compared to the size of the content, and you're still cramming it, I don't think it looks good.

The way I see it, selling stuff is a bit like the economics of relationships. Everybody likes to have a friend for a low investment, but the lower the required investment they have to make relative to what they get from you, the lower they see your value. Sometimes it's worth being 'hard to get', and require a high investment, to drive up your perceived (and experienced) value

 

That's social proof. Once it's selling well, you don't wonder what's wrong with it, because it wouldn't be selling that well if there was something wrong with it. Changes the whole equation. The rules really are different for successful people.

If you want people to appreciate what you do, stop doing it.

 

One thing to note, perceived quality definitely is influenced by the price of your asset. I started making more sales when I raised my prices from $5 and $2 to $10 and $5

 

Look on the bright side, it's another opportunity to bask in Lithium's awesome Glaring White Expanse styling!

I've been following this thread with quite a bit of interest. In my real job I get a big kick out of writing all sorts of utilities and tools, so I've been feeling an urge to provide editor/scripting assets -- but everything I've built so far is pretty specific to our own projects.

I thought the Asset Store rules prohibited people from discussing sales?

 

For quality asset, it should maintain a higher price. Don't set it too low. People will buy it if asset have a good reputation.

 

But then the question is, how does one build the reputation in the first place?

 

Quality support. Good support will encourage people to rate your asset. A forum post with fast respond also make sense. Also a good doc or tutorial.

 

I'd say I handle the support requests that I do get very quickly and well (that's what they seem to say anyway, and they usually review if I can't just give a simple reply and need to dig deeper into their situation), but I don't get many to start with. And my forum post is more or less dead since no one uses it and I can't talk to myself

I don't have a tutorial but a promo video; I might look into a tutorial but I'm not sure if it's necessary given my assets self explanatory nature (for Build Automator, Master Object Pooler could probably do with a simple tutorial)

As for docs, do you mean hosted online?

 

Hosted online may be add benefit which somebody can search it in google. But what i means is a good api docs or quick start tutorial. Users may have more confidence to use the assets if it is clear and easy to use.

 

In that case, surely they'd need to know it has good documentation before buying it which goes back to reputation? (although I agree these things are a must)

 

Getting a good reputation is just basic. There also other factors affect the sale such as promotion, etc..

Most of the sale come from Assets Store search. Good rating and comments should enhance sale and increase the chance for begin chosen by Asset Store for promo.

 

I would add that getting featured is really essential to getting early momentum for the asset. So far it seems that in the 3 or 4 days my asset was kindly featured by Unity, I will make around 2-3 months worth of non-featured sales, and possibly my asset would not even be selling this well now that it's not featured, had it not gotten that first boost. And to get featured, I think all you can do is polish the hell out of it and provide good customer support.

So in the end, there's no substitute for getting a shine on your work.

 

Hmm, I see. Maybe I'll make it free for a short time to get some reviews. It's because my package has only two reviews, and it shows "not enough ratings". After that, I'll try to make a price jump. Thanks for the information!

 

Personally I wouldn't. Not just because I don't think 'freebies for ratings' is a good business plan (it's along the lines of the 'race to the bottom' mentality that ultimately doesn't get very far), but from what I know, free stuff gets rated a lot more harshly than paid stuff. People treat it like roadkill, if it has issues they will have no problem simply flagging it as such and moving on, whereas a paid asset I think they are more likely to see as a product that someone is responsible for and attentive to, and put more effort into communicating to the developer what their concerns are.

Personally in your situation, I would make a big update to the pack, improve things as much as possible, and set it at at least $10, and see how it goes. My main impression having had a look at it, is that there's too much stuff which is not as good right now as the competition. I think that once it hits a certain level of quality, it will become very useful to a lot of people who will have no problem shelling out $10 for it

 

Whoa! I'll take that! I'll prepare an extremely big update to the pack and update the key images to make it more attractive. Thanks for the advice!

 

Be aware that 3D models generally will sell less units than systems, code or tools. The guy you are responding to sells plugins and tools for unity, it seems.

These tend to be useful for much larger audience, and generally the Unity population lacks programming and math skills more than art skills... also, art has a much higher chance to get payed for custom solutions than tools and plugins which are less visible to the end user. Nobody can check if your road creation system is the same as the one used by 100's of other games, as long as you use custom textures and 3D Models. If you are using the same charactermodel for the Player character as even 10 other games, it will stand out to the player!


TL;DR: don't compare yourself to tools and code assets when selling 3D models... you will always make LESS per assets than those. You MIGHT get away with less need for support and keeping your asset up to date, but of course you will also have to provide good support to your customers via the forums and/or e-mail or your assets might quickly garner a bad rep no matter how good they are. Some things will not work 100%, and if you don't respond to users that have problems, they will leave bad reviews.

On the positive side you can sell your assets on more storefronts, and are less bound to a single engine. The UE4 asset store is smaller AFAIK, but going there, on turbosquid and other storefronts can give you a much broader source of income than a Unity plugin which can only really be sold on the Unity asset store.
Just keep in mind that different engines have different needs when it comes to a 3D models file format, and other stuff.

 

Totaly agree. 3D models sell less. I watch the store everyday, and it's the case everytime.
I've made 3 Pack of 3D models that i've posted on the Store.
The first has been declined.
The second has been accepted but nobody buy it
The third was a huge pack named [MEGA PACK] 200+ Tons Furniture LowPoly 3D Models .
Anybody has bought it yet. So i'm waiting for my First Sell.
The problem is that when you create assets, you haven't got tons of way to show people that "a new asset is on the store". There is less editor extension on the web, so they are more visible.

 

Well, you could start by using a URL that leads to your asset on the store instead of telling me I'm not a registered publisher.

When I construct one manually for asset 254081, which is what your URL has in it, I get a 404 page.

When I search for "furniture mega pack," I find asset 83166 by NextVertex for $35 with not enough ratings over the last week. But I also find asset 68913 by OneSquareFoot, for $10 with four stars and 13 ratings over the last five months.

That is not a particularly hard decision. By every metric you can name except sheer quantity of models, OneSquareFoot has the better product. The screenshots are nicer, the features are better, the price is lower, the reviews are higher, it's been around longer, and the buyers are raving about it. What do you have?

90 more models.

That's definitely something, but it's also not "forget all the other things and pay $25 more." Most people already think $10 for 134 beats $35 for 224. Your pack is already designed to appeal to people who want lots of models, but aren't willing to pay for individual pieces. That's a consumer who calculates "cost per model," and yours charges fifteen cents a model to the competition's seven.

The problem is that you're not promoting effectively. Here's what you do.

1. Put a working link to your asset pack in your signature.
2. Start hanging out in the "graphics" and "external tools" forums.
3. Answer all the questions you can about making and displaying furniture models.
4. Engage with other people in threads about modeling furniture and building scenes.
5. Do not ever tell anyone "by the way I sell this thing, you should go buy it."

The end result here is that every time someone is trying to make furniture for a Unity project, you are there helping them. You never ask for anything and you never push them to buy your stuff, but hey - they are having trouble, and you do have something to buy, and when they look at your post history they see you doing a lot of that. You must know what you are talking about, so your models are probably really good.

Communities respond well to that kind of thing.

 

Very well said. I've automatically subconsciously decided some stuff must be good quality simply due to the publishers community engagement

 

I will frequently buy something from someone just because I like them, even if I don't want or need it. This also applies to games - particularly F2P games. Even if I don't need it to play, if I really like a game, I'll dump somewhere between $20 and $80 into the IAP just to support the developer.

 

I do the same, and sometimes compulsively. Since I get income from the asset store, I often dump money back into the asset store buying random assets that I may never use.

 

I think better to have a new assets listing in the front page to help new assets for exploding. People seem seldom to run into the new asset page.

 

Well, even if we do, it's more of a job than an adventure.



When there are about 200 assets released every week, what do you expect? I mean, that's even worse than Steam's "Indiepocalypse."

 

The list can cycle though the new assets and as lease get some exposure. Or like apps store, will have a new release list in each catalog.

 

I expected this kind of answer by posting what i've posted. Thank you for all you wrote, this is very helpful.
Btw the wrong link was just an typing error.
Ty anyway

 

Hi everyone. Not going to bore you all with the story of how I couldn't find a solution to a problem and ended up making something myself. How I came up with the concept. How people thought I was crazy for trying to do something that's "probably not even possible". How I worked on it non-stop for months through crazy- graphs, maths problems, algorithms. How I burned myself out. How I now think it could help a lot of people and so am thinking to release it on the Asset Store.

I just have some questions and want to join the conversation.

Will need to charge money for the asset, so I can keep doing this, but I think if your main goal is money, you probably better off getting a job.
I'm in it to help people and make them happy, so always thinking what's best for the customers.

- Does anyone know if you can do coupons/vouchers? For example it would be nice to give out to existing customers, so they could buy a new asset with a nice discount.

 

You can use vouchers but you only get about 12 per year per asset. It makes it free, not discounted. You could also give it away for free for a short time to get some reviews hopefully, because a lot of people will never buy something with no reviews even if it sounds awesome. Well unless they have other assets by you. Or you could sell it really cheap at first to get some reviews...

 

Been thinking about the features question myself. So far I decided I must add features I deem essential for user XP and go slower with others. Need to carefully balance on a thread at the beginning. Fall on one side: lacking support. Fall on the other: lacking features.
I think support is especially hard until you have the resources. The product needs to be solid enough so you can handle all the support and keep the users happy. Also it shouldn't have anything that have any chance of being a show stopper for a customer until you have constant support. (What if you are abroad and cannot look after someone right away?)
I agree with Eric. Good features should drive more sales and you are just perfecting your product. User feedback is a huge help, but you need to judge what is actually good for the customers. If you are changing your product completely, that's a whole other question.

Also want to stay away from bloating. The whole concept of the product is to be a walk in the park, while giving a lot of power to the user so they can get results lightning fast. This concept was the reason why it was so difficult to make and why people thought it was not possible. Could have made something complex so much easier.

 

Thanks jerotas,
That's sad. This is one reason why some might end up bloating assets. You add another product to it because that's the one way your faithful customers can have the new one cheaper. I guess I'm going to have to figure out some other ways to do nice things for them.

 

As a tool provider, we are a bit on the fence about the asset store. We would like to bring our system in, however we won't be able to sell it. The Asset Publisher EULA states that Unity can force Asset Publishers to issue refunds, however Unity still gets to keep their 30% cut. Also, we've invested heavily in the tools we have created, and we aren't sure how the asset store can help us recoup our costs.

We believe the community could benefit from what we're working on, but we may be excluded from selling or even distributing our free version on the asset store..

 

Well first of all it is a basic business rule. Price it too low people will think it is cheap crap, price it too high and people just won't buy it because they have been burned before. Got to find the right price point (not including free in this, free is awesome I don't care who you are).

There are some people/companies that just do their assets, make a decent living, give good customer support, update regularly and that is great for them. Usually those assets fill a common need that fits multiple types of games, are of high quality, and easy to use. Editor extensions are the best for those marketeers as they get the cushy 1 license per seat deal where others tend to get abused a lot, with no way to even purchase a second license if we wanted to be honest about it what do we do? I have contacted devs personally to try and give them more money when I bring on help using their asset, and it is remote telecomute help. I think it is fair, but be honest how many people do you think do that.

The power of the asset store however is you are cruising along, making your dream game, and as you go you make little packs out of your content you made for your game, stick it up there get some extra cash you can put back into your development. Everybody wins. That is the true intent and nature of it, other than Unity making a chunk, but hey they are a business and it is a standard publisher cut they take so no harm no foul.

Right now if you can get some quality stuff up on Unreal that is a much less saturated marketplace and it is starving for good content, should do both if you can, Unreal is a special child with some things though you gotta stroke it a bit to get your asset right lol.

 

Unity is only going to do that in extreme cases. If you false advertise or don't provide what you claim that would be an extreme case.

 

Perhaps, however the EULA does not state what such a case is. It just says Unity can do it on it's sole discretion. Asset providers have no protection against it, and Unity does not provide a dispute mechanism. At the end of the day it produces a business risk. That said, we provide a free version of our asset, however it's not clear to me is we can put it on the asset store because it uses a cloud service on the backend to provide distributed team support.

 

They have to do that to cover their own behinds. I mean take Unity out of it, credit card charge backs can hurt badly as well. I could dig ya up a great example of such a case if you like affecting around 30 people to the tune of several thousand dollars.

 

Forgot to ask the other question. Saw that you can mostly get paid through Paypal. What % is Paypal's cut, or what fees do they charge?

 

Paypal is pretty standard for a merchant services, 30cents per transaction + 1.5%. Also note a currency conversion if taking foreign payments.

Though with lump deposit payouts like this I think its 2.5% flat.

 

That's an apples to oranges comparison.

Chargebacks are fundamentally different. They are on a case-by-case basis and you (usually) have the option to refund the customer directly. Credit cards also take 3%, not 30%. Additional charges exist if you are fraudulent, however if someone used a stolen card to buy something from you, the CC usually just reverses the charges.

Unity reserves the right to make you refund all of your customers 100% of the revenue, including the 30% that Unity has received. This is a bit more than just cover their own behinds. This means they can make you pay back almost 150% of what you received from the asset store, and it means they may be able to bankrupt you in the process.

 

After Paypal the bank and the taxman takes their cut.If you have a well earning product, a lot of people loves you haha.
Calculated for a little fun: to get ~$4000 a month, my sales would have to be ~$9601 and that's still less than what I earned in a job a few years back.

 

Not only that, but you will eventually saturate the market. The income won't last forever, though the support expectations can.

 

That's not at all what it says. You're talking about takedowns, not standard refunds.

As for Paypal, payments from the Asset Store have no fees. (Aside maybe for currency conversion if appropriate; don't know about that.) If you earn $5000, you get $5000.

--Eric

 

Yes, that's correct, Unity can force you to take an asset down and issue refunds. I'm not talking standard refunds, I'm talking about part of the EULA the could be troublesome.

 

You really shouldn't be worried about that if you're legitimately trying to be a good asset publisher

 

Perhaps, however in business you have to pay attention to the worst-case scenario.

If things are too open-ended against you it will always present a risk. For us, it looks risky. If that changes, we engage.