Obviously the Unity Asset Store seems to be generating a decent amount of revenue for Unity, but while working on other projects outside of Unity I’m a bit surprised more haven’t popped up. Microsoft hosting one for .NET, Apple hosting one for swift/objective c, etc. seems like common sense especially if they provide a nice web store and integrate into visual studio/xcode, plus they’d get a cut of all sales, I’m surprised there isn’t one unless I’m just missing it.
I know some will mention nuget and it works very well as a package manager and there is a tiny bit of paid stuff on there but for the most part it’s open source stuff. It’s great for what it is, but it just seems logical for the next step to take place. Is there a reason this hasn’t seemed to happen yet?
People are likely to buy assets such as 3d, images, animation, etc. For code, their existing many open source/free alternative and should be less attractive.
The only data points were very old (2015) but at the time code was 52% of the revenue on the assetstore. I’m sure it ebbs at flows but I’d be shocked if it’s that different today, I doubt it would be less than 40% (meaning the scripting and editor extension categories combined).
While I love open source and there are some projects out there, if you have an opportunity to earn revenue, it could only increase the available pool filling in a lot of niches.
I think Unity Asset store generates largely irrelevant amount of revenue for unity. It is only here for people’s convenience, and not for earning more money. The primary source of revenue would be enterprise licenses, followed by subscriptions. The store is largely irrelevant, I think.
Also this kind of idea doesn’t really work for programming languages, because it makes collaboration difficult (since unity asset store license forbids redistribution of modified change).
For programming languages there are bitbucket/github, and in certain languages (python, for example), those mutate into package managers.
2 Likes
Different target audience and goals. Plus both already exist via unity.
You’re probably correct as a percentage, the only figures I could find put Unity at around $200 million in annual revenue and just guessing from my rank and Unity’s revenue from my stuff and other stuff that has been published that the asset store annual revenue is probably around $10 million so 5%.
Is that small, sure, but it’s still a decent chunk of money. I would think the major language players ecosystems would be larger. Also, that’s strictly the money angle, it does promote the ecosystem over competitors that are similar (say .NET vs Java).
Unity and game development is unusual because it has such a mixed audience. About half of Unity’s market segment can’t code. And the other half can’t create art. The asset store creates a link between these two groups.
When I go to a ‘regular’ programming shop, pretty much the entire staff have a similar skill set. Which makes something like the asset store much less practical.
1 Like
For sure and large business enterprises are always going to go in house. Small and medium size businesses though employees are a large percent of their costs in IT and if you could license code packages you may not have to employ as many programmers. Also from the individual programmer’s perspective even just looking at more mature codebases can only help one grow in their skills by looking at what to do and what not to do.
I’d expect 0.5% or less, to be honest. Asset store does not have recurring fees.
You’ll be employing system administrators instead, probably in similar number and at similar salary.
There’s massive amount of code available under free and opensource licenses, so developing anything people would pay for will be EXTREMELY difficult.
Basically, I think this ship has sailed in the 1990s.
Definitely not that low there enough authors that have shared their data to know that. Also the tail is quite long, I’m not even in the top 200 and they make good money from me annually. Half a percent would be around 1 million a year and would mean total sales on the store each year would be 3.5 million which is definitely under the real figures.
This.
As a programmer I’m already aware that existing libraries and tools are around. I don’t need someone to collate them in a store for me. The people who make them probably don’t want to share a 30% cut if they don’t have to. And considering that all of this stuff happens anyway in the absence of a dedicated store front many vendors might not feel that there’s a big advantage to making and maintaining one.
Stuff like the Asset Store works because it’s built around a solid focal point. Lots of developers solving specific, related problems. It makes a lot of sense to give them an easy way to profit from sharing their work. When you broaden that out to general software development across all fields the benefit likely becomes a lot more diluted.
4 Likes
That’s an interesting point, so you feel that narrowing down the topic to Unity (or at least to game development since UE4 and CE also have stores) actually makes it more viable. I guess in the real world this is sort of true as well, and only the one stop shop places are outliers (walmart, target, etc.) though I will say that once there was a one stop shop place they tend to dominate. Not sure in software if this would hold true, since there is no such general store, but might be true.
I’m aware of a lot of libraries and tools as well, and before the asset store I was aware of many related to gamedev as well. Most were open source with a few paid if a reputation was established. That being said, there are tons more now, almost any niche you care to happen to need for your game you at least have an option if you care to either use it or at least look at it to learn from when you implement your own. This simply wasn’t the case before and I’m not so inclined to think the same thing wouldn’t happen to general development if a store like that gained traction.
Well, they have narrowed it down to be tool specific, since each of those has their own store. And it’s not just game dev, I remember shopping for .NET components on stores that just had catalogues of those, as well.
This is just a hunch, no research, but I suspect that the key is having a “large niche”. It has to have a large enough customer base to be worth the effort, but those people have to be clustered around some strong common factor so that you can sell them related/similar things.
In the old days of retail that existed as well. You had toy stores, hardware store, auto parts stores, clothing stores, etc. In physical retail though you had a finite amount of space you could show things in. There are online equivalents but the massive one stop shop got started earlier as well. From a paid product coding perspective Unity’s might be the largest, and for sure Unity is a niche that happens to center around a product.
Do other programming niches (audio, security, web, voice recognition, computer vision, etc.) not merit the same? It’s hard to know the actual numbers of customers in each of those spaces but some have to have large numbers.
I’m not knocking the open source stuff that is out there either, that’s always an option, but I have a hard time believing what happened with the asset store couldn’t be a benefit in other spaces as well. It’s not like they can’t exist side by side either, good open source projects still occur in Unity like VRTK or in the past like the beginnings of InControl, etc. However, I do believe the prospect of making a living can give more options and can spawn projects that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Would Rewired exist without being able to charge? NGUI? Augie or Michael can answer those questions and you always have the option of charging without a store, but it does make it easier if there is one that customers already gravitate towards despite giving up 30% for that store. I know a lot of people bash the store, and some people prefer to write everything themselves, which is fine, but having a store there doesn’t hurt the ability to be able to write everything yourself.
If visual studio had built in asset store for plugins, can easily imagine big success there (for popular plugins at least, and extra visibility for others too)…
Saves time from searching elsewhere and trying to figure out payment methods when buying inside company etc.
< Used to buy many plugins for flash all around the web, pretty sure would had purchased many from Flash editor directly if there was built in asset store… (gives you extra confidence that asset has been at least briefly checked, and maybe easier to get refunds if there is real issues etc)
I don’t think the asset store is irrelevant just because the revenue is low (they have hinted at this being the case anyway) - it’s probably working as an incentive for new users to check out Unity though. With a built-in store for all sorts of helpful things it’s much more attractive.
Lots of other software, not just game engines, has built-in stores now. It’s a useful marketing tool, and people demand conveniences. Allegorithmic integrated both the community and store Substances in their software. Microsoft even have an app store for their Team Services.