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.
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.”