I need your advice! Сreating MY FIRST AAA pack for unity asset store!

I am developing my store on Unity Asset Store and want to learn advice from more experienced sellers.
I would be very grateful for your help!

Key Questions About Growing a Unity Asset Store Business:

  • What are the main factors that drive successful sales on the Unity Asset Store?
  • What’s the best way to promote assets within the Unity Asset Store? (SEO, tags, descriptions, etc.)
  • What are the most effective ways to bring external traffic to an asset page? (Social media, YouTube, forums, ads, etc.)
  • How do you write asset descriptions that actually convert visitors into buyers?
  • Are there any proven strategies for getting more reviews and boosting ratings?

My store - https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/106580

I’m not a seller on the asset store but I thought I’d share my thoughts. There are a few factors I consider when buying assets.

  • I have a specific asset type that I’m looking for e.g. zombies.
  • The seller has a large range of assets that work well together like synty studios.
  • If the asset pack is small then it needs a theme that works well with other assets e.g. league of legends art style is fairly common.

Probably the best advertisement on the Unity store is sales. It might also be worth releasing them on fab.com as limited time free assets. These tend to get youtube promotions. Maybe also include wireframe images and videos so the buyer can get an idea about the quality.

I’m not sure how well scanned assets will do on the Unity asset store. I’d say they’re more useful for Unreal so I’d look at releasing them at fab.com. Scanned assets will also end up competing against megascans. I ended up getting the 17,000 free assets when they had the deal on but I’ve found I don’t use them. They make the game size too large and I’d need to have high quality animations, characters etc to match. They also make it difficult to add additional content that isn’t scannable e.g. it would cost a lot to have a robot that fits the environment.

Sales :laughing:

No, seriously, it’s the sales periods that amount for most of the revenue of many publishers. Provided that you can get the asset into one of the sales. This means having a decent revenue in the 3-6 months prior and not frequently changing prices and such. I think the publisher guidelines have some details.

Then also 80% of the assets on the store are underpriced. Look for competing assets and by all means do not underprice them. Instead if you feel your asset is better than theirs, price it higher. Making a tool or template asset that doesn’t have a normal asking price of $50 or more is pretty much pointless (art, audio, etc assets are a little different). Most revenue is made by assets priced between $50 to $150, or even more.

50% off during the initial two weeks. Nothing else works better to get you in the “New and Hot” categories.

In the long run: frequent updates. If you let the asset just sit there and don’t invest in light of few sales, the sales will never ever pick up. Customers read assets with no updates as “dead in the water, stay away”.

Anything you can manage. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet. Make announcement wherever Unity assets are announced but be careful of the rules ie Reddit has a special place for Asset promos, they will delete your posts if you advertise in the regular Unity channels.

This is the key question!

Most assets advertise themselves as “easy, fast, saves money, adjective, adjective, superlative, detailed feature list”. This is guaranteed to underwoo potential customers.

First, ask yourself: why are you making this asset? What need does it satisfy, what pain does it alleviate if any? If you’re making a tool you got to answer this with utmost conviction. If you can make a trailer video showcasing the benefits of the tool, even better! Example keywords that most Unity devs would understand out of the box: prefab painter, hot reload, serialize anything, streaming worlds.

Grab them emotionally! Sometimes all it takes is ask a question most would answer in a certain way. Like:
“Are you tired of waiting for domain reload?” … instant interest!

Show, don’t tell!
A prefab painter that drops things on the terrain and it instantly looks good in a 5s video snippet is a sure seller. If you just write “place prefabs with ease, saves time” nobody cares.

A good practice to writing your asset description is to remove any and all adjectives and see what’s left. A good exercise is to pick some popular and some unknown assets and copy their descriptions, then remove the adjectives and other “fluff” words that sound good but don’t actually add anything meaningful.

Pretty sure the popular ones are still clear and convincing sentences without all the adjective fluff like faster, cheaper, powerful, innovative, and so forth. The bad description will end up reading like “This … tool … loads scenes and … workflow.” oh yeah, if that’s all, the marketing stint ain’t working! :wink:

More tips and cautions mostly:

If you’re making yet-another-xyz good luck, nobody needs yet another of the same thing especially when there’s an already hot-selling #1 or even #2 and #3 assets you compete with. Don’t even try, pivot to something unique in that case! :wink:

Avoid the overcrowded assets, like character controllers or “(insert game genre here) engine”. There are a few leftovers that are untackled but those you need to really dig deep whether they stand any chance of getting bought due to lack of developer interest / extreme specialization.

If you’re in some other category, like art, audio, etc … good luck. These categories are extremely challenging to get noticed so unless you truly provide AAA quality with all nooks and crannies AND uniqueness, you may not even get many views let alone sales. The problem with art, audio, and such is that there’s just too many publishers already doing that rather well and them usually being located in low wage countries, they dictate minimum wage prices upon everyone else. Plus you can get all of these non-Unity specific assets from other sites like CGTrader and a gazillion others, and quite often for very, very cheap.

Research your competitors. All too often development on an asset moves along only to find out as you publish that you’re not even half-way there in terms of features and presentation that a $25 asset already covers. This will be a hard sell.

Research your target audience. What do they want? Say, you’re making an online multiplayer game template that’s a 2d tile based retro game. Can you guess what’s wrong with that? I’d say those retro game devs ain’t looking for networking since the retro games themselves were rarely networked to begin with.

Don’t go overboard trying to support old Unity versions. I cannot stress this enough. Between Unity 6, 2022.3 and the only recently out of support 2021.3 these account for pretty much all of anyone’s sales. Nobody who is still using 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, even Unity 5 is still buying assets specifically because it supports those really old versions. It’s just not a thing. In fact, it can be beneficial to support even the latest 6.1 beta and 6.2 alpha features if you have a good use case for it. Even going for Unity 6+ exclusively is a sound idea if your asset greatly benefits from a specific new feature.

You may want to quickly publish something cheap or free, just so you get to understand the review process and its duration, as well as being able to request and gain access to the closed publishers-only forum because there’s a TON more info in there. Like what the Unity version distribution currently is, and what customer preferences are in terms of genre and render pipelines.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate your perspective as a buyer! You’ve mentioned some great points about asset selection. I’d love to learn more about how you make your choices.

  1. How often do you purchase assets? Are these one-time buys for specific projects or regular investments?
  2. What factors influence your decision the most? (Price, quality, compatibility, size of the pack, etc.)
  3. What graphic style do you prefer the most? (Realistic, stylized, pixel art, etc.)
  4. What types of assets do you usually need—environments, characters, VFX, animations, UI?
  5. Do you prefer assets to be part of a large collection, or are standalone packs fine as long as they fit the theme?
  6. Have you ever had issues with purchased assets? If so, what were they?
  7. Have you encountered any problems while using assets? What are the most common issues that frustrate you?
  8. Are there any assets that you feel are missing or hard to find? I’d love to understand what buyers like you are looking for!

Thank you so much!

Thank you so much for taking the time to share all this advice! I really appreciate it—it’s incredibly helpful and gives me a lot to think about.
Seriously, this kind of insight is exactly what I needed!
Thanks again!

By chance, I found a nice asset that, removing the fluff words, describes itself as follows (bad example):

The X Package is a … set of tools that … scripting within Unity, offering game developers … X is celebrated for its … scripting capabilities and is a … choice in the gaming industry.

This package is … designed for … integration with Unity projects. It … the scripting process, enabling developers to … attach the X component to any GameObject in the Unity inspector. Equipped with a … built-in editor, the X Package not only … scripting but also … the overall game development experience, making it a … tool for developers.

You can see there’s almost NOTHING there except it’s something about attaching scripts to a GameObject and it’s a tool for developers, yay! :smiley:

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just random comments from a quick store view:

  • would be nice to see wireframe images of those models
  • polygon counts, texture resolutions and counts if its multiple…
  • why no LODS?
  • general internet rule: don’t say AAA, unless it really is, or that you have AAA experience…
  • for models, have 3d previews (i don’t know how its used in those, sketchfab?)
  • for models, have additional assets that go well with the same style (its always difficult to mix and match assets)

*but definitely i’d be interested on nice scanned assets (mainly nordic foliage stuff)

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Thank you so much for your advice! A lot of useful ideas to work with! :heart_on_fire:

  1. I probably buy a few assets about four times a year. This tends to always be during sales or in a humble bundle. A lot of the time it’s just seeing something that I think might be useful for future projects.
  2. Most of the time I’m just looking for placeholders so I’m not too worried about quality. I’m more interested in keeping the file size down and fast loading when I’m making a prototype. I do find compatibility quite important so I have a lot of Synty Studios assets.
  3. I tent to stay away from realistic as having consistent assets can be quite expensive (animations, audio, gameplay etc.). It’s also quite easy to end up in a uncanny valley situation and anything I make will be compared against high end games. I prefer stylized 3d (particularly toon shading) and sometimes 2d graphics.
  4. I normally get environments and characters. Sometimes I get UI. Recently I’ve been interested in 2d so I’ve bought a few assets from https://itch.io.
  5. Large environment packs are nice. I also don’t mind buying single character assets if they also include animations.
  6. I’ve never had an issue purchasing. I did have one odd case in the past where someone had taken a shader I’d released for free and sold it on the assets store. Probably my biggest worry is that the assets I buy might have been ripped from existing games.
  7. I do avoid code related or template purchases as they normally don’t match what I need. Normally I just stick to buying art and audio.
  8. It would be nice if there were more animation assets. Not just humans but animals and creatures as well, although these would probably need to match the models.

I really appreciate you taking the time to answer every question—thank you so much! Your insights are incredibly valuable and give me a lot to think about. I truly appreciate it! :heart_on_fire: