The technology industry is rapidly moving to a 15% cut for people selling digital goods. Does Unity have plans in the near future to also move towards this? I think this would be extremely motivating for existing and new asset publishers.
It would be fantastic but I doubt it will happen.
Thanks largely to competition. Meanwhile Unity’s Asset Store has no competition.
Where is that?
Which companies?
Any links?
Of most relevance to us are Google, followed by Apple:
Microsoft have changed their PC game sales to use 12%. Note that despite being the Xbox blog, the relevant statement here is that “Microsoft Store PC games sales net revenue will increase to 88%”.
There is of course Epic also using a 12% figure.
Even Valve / Steam drops below 30%, but you have to earn over $10 million (from memory) for the numbers to budge.
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25% over 10 million, 20% over 50 million.
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To follow up on my last post, and to further what @Ryiah already said, the revenue split when selling video games isn’t really relevant to the Unity Asset Store, because they’re selling different stuff to different people in a different market.
Steam does ring the bell for me.
But did Epic touch the heart of other stores, to make them for such move?
Still, it looks like is non relevant for average Joe, selling few copies on average.
What about icho 30% commission? Is. That affected too?
And yeah, I don’t see why would asset store be affected by that.
Unless you manually adjust it itch.io’s commission is only 10%.
https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing
What’s left are payment processing fees and taxes. These are normally hidden and paid for by store commissions but since itch.io allows you to set a revenue share of 0% they have to be passed on to the developer or else the store would be responsible for what could very easily be a lot of money. Full explanation linked below.
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You mean other than the pending lawsuits they have against Apple and Google?
Because if I remember correctly, when Unity announced the Asset Store, they mentioned they would be taking the “industry standard” 30%, so if 15% becomes the new industry standard (and it seems we are slowly headed that way), you would expect them to begrudgingly follow suit.
The percentage stores take is arbitrary anyway, it’s more or less “hey other stores are getting away with 30%, so we can take that too”.
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Nah. Exactly that 
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Is it really different? Every market is different in certain ways, but really it’s the question of how much a store should take for selling digital goods created by other people. 30% seems to have been the norm for a long time for all kinds of things, game engine marketplaces, game stores, 2D/3D art stores and pretty much every store selling digital creative goods, even places like Fiverr. It seems like it just sort of arrived as a baseline and never budged until now.
Unless the asset store sales are low relative to other similar markets, it doesn’t seem any different to me. If the cost of running the store vs the profit made by Unity requires them taking 30% I’d be happy to accept this reality, but it seems worth questioning to me.
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First up, since when are prices ever based on costs? They’re based on generated value and a market’s willingness to pay.
But more importantly, no, it’s not a question of “how much a store should take for selling digital goods created by other people”. It’s a question of how much the vendors are willing to share in order to get customers. On the technical side of things, anyone with the right internet knowhow can set up a website with some e-commerce stuff and start selling digital goods at least as well as Unity are doing it. Anyone selling on the Asset Store could be selling their stuff inside a week without splitting it with anyone. But very few of them do, because getting people to go there is hard.
How many Unity developers look outside of the Asset Store to get assets and libraries for their games? With the exception of music and SFX, my gut-feel guess is that it’s >90% for career professionals and <10% for hobbyists. Mostly that comes from the career people having plenty of opportunity to get exposed to different stuff, where hobbyists are mostly exposed to 3rd party stuff directly via Unity themselves… and the Asset Store.
Of course, there is no such thing as an absolute monetary value, so therefore every price is questionable.
I don’t think there is any alternative to the asset store. I believe some larger vendors have tried selling on their own website and it’s really not worth it, I haven’t tried it myself. So the question is, how does the current 30% cut affect the desirability for quality vendors to sell on the store?
I know for myself, the asset store has not paid me a minimum wage where I live for the hours I’ve put into it. But I enjoy it, I like being able to monetize my Unity knowledge in a product form, but most of all I enjoy providing stuff that people find useful. I believe I can eventually make it work as a decent month to month income - but will it ever pay off the huge capital cost of developing and iterating on the products to get them to where they are now? Probably not for a long time.
I know a couple of the larger vendors there, people who could easily make a very high salary, look at it as a sort of hobby rather than anything they depend on. How many of these people, I wonder, would like to sell on the store but cannot see it being a viable alternative to a normal dev job?
I realize that the market might be too small, and the costs of running the store too high compared to what Unity makes from it - that’s fair enough. And I know the asset store staff are trying a ton of stuff to make it work, I’ve seen loads of improvements and updates and testing happening, especially recently, so I’m very happy about that. I’m optimistic that things are on the up. But I do think it’s worth considering what else can be done to make the store more of a viable business for creators whose knowledge can easily be monetized in other ways.
Frankly I don’t care about %. I want to be able to negotiate less or more in any deals I do. So maybe I give 50% and get 100% more customers.
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I think there is, but that it’s entirely dependent on your audience. Hence Unity not having competition for their 30% cut despite online stores being easy to set up.
Go check out the pricing for something like Audiokinetic’s WWISE. They’re making fists full of cash from people at the high end of the market, and they do that with direct sales - not through a third party who takes a cut. The irony here is that they give their stuff away to small indies for free, because they can and it’s win-win. And they’re far from the only ones with a similar model.
But their audience is very different from that of the Unity Asset Store, and they’ve got the budget to reach them. For the average hobbyist developer making stuff for other hobbyist developers that’s not going to be the case, where is where Unity gets their 30% from.
Yes.
Gamer crowd is different from game developer crowd.
Asset store sells tools, while steam sells entertainment.
It is like a difference between a guy shopping for a chair, and a guy shopping for carpentry tools.
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Nobody said tools and entertainment were the same thing.
If you think there’s a good reason for the current %, I’d be glad to hear it. I didn’t say I know for sure what the right amount is.
Unless you’re a AAA mega publisher, that seems less plausible than ~15% becoming the new standard everywhere.
Also, if baseline is 15% you have more room to negotiate, if somehow you find yourself in that situation.
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Unity owns the store and they charge whatever they prefer. That’s the reason. They have no obligation to match any specific cut percent.
If they end up charging too much, people will leave and create a competitor. So far that hasn’t happened.