UNITYPREFABS.COM --> LAUNCHED!

Community Showcases
1

We’ve launched! (Quietly)
It’s a great day for Unity Developers. Not only has Unity Technologies Google announced their awesome work on the Google Chrome broswer + Unity integration, also… Unity Prefabs is now live! We do have to add that it’s a soft-launch: we’re still working on the website and adding content, but everything is functional. From here, we’ll add new prefabs and tutorials weekly.
So what’s so cool about UnityPrefabs.com? Well… here’s what’s happening:

[Lars from the German Unity Community asked us the following questions:]

Q: What is Unity Prefabs?
A: It’s a store where you can purchase ‘prefabs’ (coded art) for the Unity 3D engine. Since many people are building the same thing (FPS, RTS, etc), we thought it’s a good idea to help everyone by fabricating professional prefabs that deploy to multiple platforms.

Q: How much will an prefab cost and is there a difference between studios and indies?
A: Yes. We try to help everyone so we have flexible pricing. If you’re an indie (you work by yourself and make less than 50k/year) you get to purchase the prefabs even cheaper!
Also there are normal, medium and advanced prefabs. Each differ in price.

Q: Whats the goal of Unity Prefabs?
A: Helping developers have a prototype ready the day they think of the game! Eventually we’ll have all the tools you need (AI, Sound, MainMenus, Facebook Implementation, etc). You just select what you need and download the prefabs.

Q: Is there any possibility, that 3rd persons can publish their prefabs on your platform?
A: Yes, in fact, we already work with many pro coders and artists. However, we’re not going to open up the shop to everyone yet, we want to keep quality high. So we only use professional artists and coders at the moment.

Q: If yes, do the people get the full money of their price or are there “unity prefabs tax”?
A: We do take a small percentage of royalties that is way more flexible and not as ridiculous as the royalties you pay on for example Amazon or the App Store as a publisher. We’re trying to help each other as developers, that’s what we’re all about.


NEW PREFABS:
FPS Camera Kit
Kickstart your FPS with this masterly crafted camera kit. Tweak head bobbing, walk/jump and in-air speeds, a replacable gun model that doesn’t go through walls and much more. MORE >>

RTS Camera Kit
Real-Time Strategy games are all about the camera. This kit will set you up with a tweakable camera that crawls the map when you move the mouse towards the edges of the screen… and lots more! MORE >>[/b]

Play demo’s / View screenshots tutorials at:
http://www.UnityPrefabs.com

Cheers!
-TornadoTwins

2

http://www.unity-community.de/vorgestellt/sonstiges/unity-prefabs
And there is the video interview :slight_smile:

3

Doesn’t sound like it :wink:

Congrats on getting this out the door!

4

Haha, you know it!!
-TT

5

Gz on launching it, but u guys are too expensive :wink: 10$ is the maximum.

6

I heard somebody yelling in this thread so I stopped by to see what’s going on here :wink: Congrats on the launch Tornado Bros.!! Looks good!

Thomas P.

7

I agree about the price for the 2 currently available prefabs.

$35 for something you can get from the scripts wiki is overpriced to me.

I really like how professional and well thought out everything on the site is, but the prices is putting me off.

Now I’m not interested in such simple prefabs anyway, but some more advanced prefabs dealing with more technical topics may be interesting, but I’m dreading the prices those will sell for at the moment.

8

Eh…thought these would cost no more than $15…Wowza… :confused:

9

I’m afraid I have to agree about the cost. Unity Prefabs is a fantastic idea, however I can not see it surviving with such high prices.

10

Hey guys!
Feel free to disagree with me guys with some arguments to change our minds, but here’s what I think about pricing:

If I have an RTS cam prefab, it would take a skilled coder about 4-8 hours to create this. If that coder costs around $20 - $35 an hour, that’s gonna add up if you would have this coded (or code yourself).

In that sense, $35,- for a prefab that is highly configurable and easy to implement, is a huge bargain and speeds up your development by a day.

Then, taking into account that all these prefabs will work together, implementing an entire game just became a piece of cake.
These prefabs are some of the best code you’ll find. We hire the best so you don’t have to.

Of course, there will be some useful code snippets for free on the Wiki and other places. But they also take skillful coders to implement, and don’t merge together well.

Tell me what you think.

Yours,

TornadoTwins

11

Congrats!!! :smile: :smile: :smile:

12

@TornadoTwins I agree with your rational, however your target audience for camera scripts is mostly beginner coders, and as such they are on a small budget. Realistically I can’t see many spending $35 for a camera script, especially because of all the other costs associated with making a game like audio effects, GUI, etc.

Whatever you decide, I’m behind you 100%, its just that you would sell 2-3x more if the code was lower priced. Interestingly enough, when people see a low price tag they end up spending more and buying products they would most likely not use solely because they see it as a good deal. This is one thing Dexsoft accomplishes really well, by keeping the cost low they wind up selling large numbers of models, a vast majority of which are never even used.

Financially for you guys the most logical and lucrative course of action would actually be to lower the price. Whilst it may not make immediate sense, in the long run you would see a substantially larger return.

I highly recommend you reconsider your pricing structure, selling a larger volume would also create a bigger customer base and customers would be more likely to re-buy from you later on.

13

Honestly, 4-8 hours to make an ‘active corners RTS’ script, even with nice smooth movements, is just ridiculous. Can probably be done in an hour (even with rotation, relative position, etc). I put one together even faster for a quick RTS style game I made a while back. And can I suggest that the idea behind website sales is not to earn back production cost in 3 sales. The idea behind zero overhead businesses on the internet is that you can make things inexpensive, and do quite well on bulk (and I promise bulk does exist in the Unity Community, it’s just mostly silent). I guess that’s a long winded way of saying, for your own good, lower your prices guys. It’s just foolishness to charge so much for people who only payed maybe $200 for their licenses, with us old guard, or even got them free (because Pro users tend to be able to script an active corners script).

I guess that sounded mean. I didn’t mean it that way. Just a suggestion. All the best wishes for your site, and I really like your aesthetic design.

14

One member of our community said:

I have the same opinion. Sure, there are some hobby-developer who are whineing but the prices are good so like they are. Its not only the prefab which costs, its the whole plattform and if you are a web developer you know how much work it is to achieve something like this.

15

I think it’s true that 35 $ is a little bit much since this prefabs are available for everyone.

It’s the mass what makes the money, but you won’t sell it in masses for 35$.

I would start with lower prices to get the thing rolling, like 9$
You can call it the “early bird” bonus or sth.
after that you see which items sold how many times and you can adjust the price a little bit like 15$

example:
35$ * 10 times bought = 350$
9$ * 50 times bought = 450$

Just my opinion :wink:

16

and $3x300 = $900…

Over time, you’ll make more money if you drop the prices. $35 for a camera system is a lot if you can get a full game for $30 :wink:

The site looks great, though, but I’m also afraid the prices will put people off…

17

Great idea and great site!

I suggest to lower the price to support the diffusion of your site.
As someone suggested, camera scripts should cost around 9€

18

I understand your idea behind the pricing, Tornado, but let me say that even though I’ve never made a commercial game or project I’ve bought a ton of different assets, ranging from audio files, 3d models and texture packs to tutorials and books.

The stuff I buy more or less on impulse is either cheap or it’s simply the best of the best and I buy it even though it’s pricey. Apart from those two scenarios I use a huge amount of time on reasearching something before I buy it or just discard it right away because I know it’s not worth it for me.

Let’s say that the two camera prefabs where $5 each then I would have bought them already just to see how they were coded, what was included, if I could learn from them etc.

Or if i.e the RTS camera included zooming, tilting and rotation of the camera. The ability to click select as well as drag select, the ability to change between left click and right click for selecting units, examples of multiple unit selects, ability to pan with both arrow keys and WASD as well as touching the sides of the screen. Then I would probably pay $35 or more for it. Basically if the RTS camera was an exceptional implementation of a RTS camera then it would probably end up in my impulse buy category.

But as it is now I see it as a basic example of a RTS camera and no matter if I coded it from scratch or bought it from you I would have to either code the rest myself or hire a coder to add the rest of the features.

Also, when dealing with prefabs and scripts a few screenshots of the actual code may let some of us let go of our money. Or maybe just a writeup of the language and coding convention you use at tornadotwins. This may be just me, but I usually stay away from things that are poorly written and/or commented. And seeing as I work solely in C# it would help me to know what language something is written in.

Eitherway I think this site could be a valuable resource for many, including me, in the future with more advanced prefabs showing up in the library.

19

I agree, the stuff I sell is at $2 each, though I look forward to using this site in the future. I assure you that there is enough of a market for you to make much more money from micro transactions.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck in this endeavour.

Kind regards

20

Pricing products that are to be sold en masse based on the hours spent making them is terribly flawed.

By that logic, I should sell my game which I’ve spent 250 hours working on for $5000.