I’m thinking about putting my robot character up on the Unity Asset Store in order to make some money to help fund my game’s development, but I’m worried I might be cannibalizing the game, it’s uniqueness and possibly my ability to get an investor or publisher for the game later on down the line. I’ve had someone suggest I do it and someone say not to. I was curious what your thoughts on this might be.
In general, do people have thoughts on funding a game by putting pieces of it up on the Asset Store? For instance, if you would say don’t put a character on the asset store would you say yes to putting up environment assets on the Asset Store? What about scripts?
I can only speak for myself, but I don’t find unique pieces of art like this compelling purchases. I mean, what are the odds someone wants this exact crazy-colored, butterfly-looking robot for their game?
If you’re going to release assets to help fund your game (and if you’re capable, you should!) you should do small sets of art. If possible, multiple sets that go well together in the same style. This way, developers with little to no art skill (and there are a lot of us) can get a collection of art that will work for our games. I think we’re generally willing to pay more for a complete set than we would with individual items, if that makes sense.
Keeping it generic is a good idea, with stuff like terrain and town/village packs. Characters and weapons are cool, but they have to be rigged and probably animated for them to be considered worth our time for the most part. There are a TON of sets out there, but plenty of holes to fill, too. I recall recently a fellow looking for a set to recreate a town like Marseilles. If you can put sets like that together, you should do well.
I get what you are saying. Thank you for your reply.
I guess part of my dilemma is that I already have the character pretty far along so it is already rigged and in game at the moment. You can see a video of it in action here:
I also read this article that seemed to suggest that characters might be selling really well and are needed, but maybe they are just generic ones like you suggested or maybe they aren’t really selling at all. When I looked at the asset store I didn’t see a lot of character models or reviews on them, which seemed to maybe suggest they weren’t in high demand.
I have no problem with using non-unique pieces of art anywhere in a game myself (even for the whole game). In fact for anyone who wants to make a decent-sized game on their own, it’s pretty much a must. And I think the most important thing to be original about is the story of the game, and the way that the gameplay plays out (the structure of the gameplay).
But if I was making a game and I’d already made an original character for it, I can’t imagine that I would feel good about selling it for other people to use, at least before I had released my game. The art is a chance to make your game more unique, part of your personal stamp, and a way to make sure that people identify your game strongly with you when you release it.
The other thing I have to say is that as far as I know (not a character artist myself) characters don’t sell well anyway. This may be because they’re not versatile for different contexts, in the way that environment art is - they often carry a lot of the story of a game and the emotion of a game in a way that you can’t change. And I think perhaps people who buy assets often want their main character to be the central piece of their own game, and if they end up paying an artist for original art, it’s probably going to be the main character.
If I were you, I’d sell the environment assets, and use the materials and the artistic ideas you’ve already spent time creating, to make a collection of models that is as versatile as possible.
You’d be closer to very very mildly adding awareness about your game than cannibalizing it.
You’d be amazed of how difficult is to get your game known (and how volatile that awareness is) among so many other indie games, it’s overwhelming either in quantity and quality.
Your problem is being too deep in the shadows, not over exposing your art.
In any case, you’re the artist, you can modify your art as much as needed.
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Assets that match in art sell better because it’s hard to match style in asset store. But there are always personal projects, prototyping, or people that simply manage to make your art work. And many people will dig your art style.
The rewards most probably will be rather slim. You probably will not get many sales, and at the prices 3D models trade at in the store, not worth the hassle really if you are unsure about it.
Even generic, good 3D models seem to struggle on many online storefronts if you believe some 3D artists. I am sure there are some success stories, and of course what is nothing for me here in switzerland (like selling 10 copies of a 3D model priced at 40$ in a year… wouldn’t buy me a new graphics card really, and only pay for around 20 lunches… its less than 0.5% of what I make in a year on my parttime job) might be a lot for someone living in a country with a lower average income and cheaper cost of living.
Still, if you look at the successfull asset devs on the Unity store, they have one thing in common: they sell something EVERY Unity dev could use. Thus its mostly shader frameworks that are looking better or giving additional options over the standard shader (UBER, Alloy), scripts/shaders/tools that solve problems with Unity (Terrain shaders like RTP, Performance hacks, stuff like UI improvements), and tools that enhance functionality of the editor (EasyRoads for road creation, Vertex Painters, and so on).
3D Models AFAIK are less successfull BECAUSE while everyone could have a need for better terrain creation or an easy way to create roads, 3D models tend to be already bound to an art style, a certain game genre and a certain period (sci-fi, fantasy, modern day, historic).
How many people need a pirate captain? How many people need a sci-fi robot?
Unless you have 3D Models of things that are “trending”, like “military brown shooter” stuff some years back when everyone was working on a CoD Killer, or anything related to Zombies or derelict cities now. Then you might get better sales, altough never on the scale of successfull non-3D Model assets. 3D Assets are just never as generally useful as some scripts or tools.
Thus, really up to how much money you need, and how urgently. If getting 400$ over the course of a year or more is worth potentially having your character pop up in one or two other games, maybe even a game that is a direct competition to yours, then do it.
If you don’t need the money that urgently, or the sum looks rather meh to you, don’t.
Probably you are better of creating models specific to sell on the store than trying to sell models created for your game anyway. This way you can create models that will sell better, AND you will not have the dilemma you are in right now.
Of course that is additional work… but then, you will NOT be able to get money for work done for your game already without putting in additional work anyway. Creating the asset to sell is only half (or even less) of the work, supporting your asset and communicating with your customers is actually the important part, else your sales will taper off quickly (because people will assume your asset is dead and buy from a more active dev with better support).
TL;DR:
Don’t expect the asset store to be a shortcut to easy money. Its not.
You need to create assets that fill specific needs to be successfull. And you need to offer awesome support to get good reviews, and keep customers come back for more.
You will reap exactly what you sow… if you don’t put in the work to develop an asset that fills a need, and offer good aftersales support, thus not really put in the work needed, you will get bad rewards.
How many games need a robot dragon fly? I don’t think putting it up in the store will make an appreciable difference to your bottom line, or to overuse of the model in other games.
Thank you all for the feedback. This has been really helpful. I am starting to setup more modular environment asset packs now, which I would love you to get your feedback on as well, but I did have one final question and comment about the robot asset first though in regards to the question, “How many games need a robot character or any kind of specific character for that matter?” Given that some games will need a unique character, why isn’t there more of a premium or market for unique, well done characters. I understand that art styles may differ and that could always be a challenge to overcome. I guess part of my thinking is that, in lieu of a large number of sales perhaps there could be a few sales and the price for the model could be high, but given the fact that it would be public it could essentially be subsidized and cheaper than paying for a character artist to create something unique upon request. This would also free up artists to make things more to their taste and liking and I think could result in higher quality overall. If you look at the art that comes out of contests like Art War, the Comic Con challenge, Dominance War, etc, the models that come out are really good and unbound from some of the restrictions of, “I need another pirate, medieval knight or Master Chief esque character.” I don’t necessarily disagree with all of you, I guess I am just somewhat saddened and disheartened by the answer.
I feel like it is also worth mentioning here that there are some people who rip characters from other games and then use those characters for their own projects. There are Overwatch characters out there making all kinds of appearances to give one small example. People feel really strongly about those characters which speaks to their design. Someone could grab a cheap character from the asset store and use it for their project, but they may choose to take a copyrighted character and essentially make their project a violation of intellectual property and copyright for that character’s design and recognition. Why not have artists just make better characters and put it out there at a cheaper price? How many people would buy a Tracer? Probably not a lot, but what is that character’s worth now? What are your thoughts on Unity-chan or Hatsune Miku? Do you hate those characters or do you appreciate that there is a half decent character out there that is usable if you need it. If they had more of a backstory, could that not be really valuable?
In regards to environment asset packs, would you prefer a “rocks pack” or a “vegetation pack” or would you rather a more well rounded pack like a “platformer pack” or “low poly pack”? So basically, do you like specificity of the pack and perhaps at a cheaper price like $5 or $10 or would you rather a more complete pack that is a little more expensive, like $20 - $40.
I think the problem is that people want unique characters… but then are not ready to pay for those. Paying a freelancer to create a unique character AFAIK can easely run over 500$, which is prohibitively expensive for many game devs frequenting the Unity store.
Now, as for your idea, I don’t think its really a good one, not for games anyway. The fact that the character is sold to other people kind of defeats the purpose of paying extra for a “more unique character”… its just a stock asset available to everyone, so why pay the premium?
Unless your character is that much better than other characters on the asset store that the premium is justified this way. But exclusivity? No. People who want exclusive characters pay a freelancer to create a custom model for them. The others most probably are shopping smart and get the cheaper characters.
About the “frees the artist of creating stuff to their taste”… that is not how you sell stock art IMO. If you are a freelancer and happen to be very lucky, you might run into a customer that leaves part of the art direction to you as he either has no idea about it, is not that creative, or simply respects your opinion because of your prior work.
You MIGHT be lucky that what you like to create kind of happens to fall into trending categories, and customers really dig your style. But really, that is buying lottery tickets now.
Creating models for your own game or for fun is a different beast to freelancing, which is a different beast to creating stock art. In freelancing you have to really find out what your customer wants, and then be able to deliver that in acceptable quality at acceptable prices in an acceptable amount of time to have a happy customer. In stock art you have to find out what the market wants at the time, and deliver that before the market trends shift, ideally before everyone else, at the best possible price (ideally undercutting the competition if quality is similar, not going too much over the competition if you happen to offer better quality, or asking what the market is ready to pay if there is no competition), at the best quality you can afford for the price you aim for.
A lot of people really dig what artists do for art competitions. That doesn’t mean they could find a space for those results in their own games, as this is often very specific stuff.
Remember that most game devs already have a story they want to tell. Most art competition stuff I have seen was extremly characterful, basically telling a story of its own. That character is exactly what you usually don’t want in stock art, because it would require the game dev to adapt his game to the 3D art, when in an ideal world its the other way around
Well, if you HAVE an idea on how to create unique characters for people, that are somewhat customized to their games, and sold for an affordable price, you certainly could make a ton of money.
Unless you can make a better “character creation tool” than Fuse or similar, or a really cool kitbash set that contains tools to make it easy for the artistically illiterate to create an optimized and rigged character from parts, I would guess that you end up either with generic characters that sell but are not really that unique and cool, or unique characters that do not exactly fit peoples requirements.
Lets not forget, as cool as the overwatch characters are, without the big boost in popularity thanks to overwatch, they might not be just as recognizable and cool.
Personally I feel the environment sets might be the more stable source of sales. And if you do sets, clearly bundle them by art style before anything else. If you sell a “rock set” to me with high and low poly art, don’t expect me to pay extra for the bits I cannot use because I just need low poly or high poly ones.
There is a market for this - it’s called freelancing, artists are hired all the time to work directing on projects to create ‘unique’ assets for specific projects. And I’d also point out, there are some high quality character/creature assets in the Unity asset store that are well done.
This really defeats the desired purpose of a character being unique - for one specific game. This is comparing apples to oranges - if a developer wants to have a ‘unique’ character for there game - they are not going to want the character to be available to everyone in exchange for a reduced total price to create the character. Developers want custom art because they have a vision for there game and they want there game to look different. This desire comes at a premium price when compared to asset store prices.
Unique art - same as unique game mechanics are a selling point get attention and to attract gamers to games.
Although I agree art contest character models are truly master pieces, you are short sided in knowing what goes into a art contest piece compared to what goes into a game ready character model. Although this is a common stance because the models look so great, the model and textures are only half (maybe 60%) of the job of creating a game ready character.
The extra work involved in rigging, and animation cycles is not trivial, and commonly the art contests have very little direction on guidelines/restrictions towards rigging, number of bones, setup with only 4 bone influences, no twist bones, suggested 2 spine bones, matching standard humanoid rig for retargeting, using cloth physics instead of 100 bone chain for a ribbon, setting up ragdoll physics, dynamic elements of a rig, swappable mesh, animated FX not just static for the hero pose, etc. etc.
With these standard game ready limitations in place most art contest characters would not be game ready, as they are, and would have to be revised greatly in order to be compatible in engine.
Most of the discrepancies between art contest characters and game ready characters resides in the rigging, although there would also be considerations to animation cycles that would change the characters final outcome as well.
Lastly - most art contest characters are usually ‘hero’ characters. Very rarely do non-hero characters have polygon counts above 12k and 4k textures, not to mention unlimited bone count, bone influence limitations, and FX that is created to be animated, not a static hero pose.
As proof of this - there are very few art contest characters ever submitted to asset stores and made available to the public. There is a lot of work needed to convert art contest characters - into game ready characters with proper rigging and animations.
When you find the correct answer to this question - you will be a successful asset provider. There 10 different ways to decide which way to go. It is up to you to decide which way is best, and revise if you choose wrong.