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.
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?
then read description and realized that it was models, not a plugin to procedurally generate stone-ish meshes.
Unfortunate naming
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
Why is there not webPlayer demo to check them out “live”?
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.