I am not a citizen of the United States or using the dollar as a currency, so I would like some opinions from you to set the price for my tool that I have in the Asset Store! Any help or opinion is welcome!
For that I need to have an idea of when someone finds an Asset expensive and when they don’t find an Asset expensive…
If you look at a $24 asset, what do you think? Do you have an idea that he has a higher quality or do you think he has a lesser quality?
Do you think $24 is too high a price?
How much would you pay, for an Asset, at most?
For reference purposes…
I have a tool that provides an alternative LOD mechanism (similar to the Unity LOD Group) and is capable of generating LODs (or just simplified) versions of your 3D meshes, and the user can set the parameters as desired. And I have another Minimap tool that has several features like Fog of War, Realtime Routes (like the routes of GPS in GTA V), Animated Icons, Horizontal Compass, Texts, Scans the scene in a 2D texture so you don’t have to render the scene inside the Minimap, is very optimized and is highly customizable. I intend to put the price of these two tools close to $24. Would you find it expensive?
Click here to see a LOD tool demo video, for a better understanding. Click here to see a Minimap tool demo video, for a better understanding.
I own several assets that cost over $75, but the reason I paid that much is because I use them for basically every project (FinalIK, Easy Save 3, Amplify Shader Editor), so if the LOD tool was good enough I would probably easily pay $25 for it. However, I don’t know if I’d buy a minimap asset in the first place unless it either had a demo version I could test first or at least see a video about how robust and extensible it is since I don’t know how many projects I could continue to use it.
Good question, I think you should think about whether your asset is targeted towards casual / hobbyist audience or more professional usage. My input is just from the buyer/user side, I don’t have experience selling assets.
For the hobbyist side price is obviously a big factor in purchasing an asset. There’s less emphasis on how much it would cost to implement it yourself since it’s usually used for hobby projects or “just for fun”. So it’s mostly on whether it does something the hobbyist wouldn’t be able to do themselves (take a look at game-kits like TopDownEngine, RPG Builder, etc - they are targeted towards users who probably wouldn’t be able to build similar features without the asset). That’s probably where things like minimap would be similar to?
For professional / business side, if the asset is good the value is priceless. Take top-tier assets such as Odin, Mesh Baker, Bakery, Final IK, etc and it would take hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to build worse versions of them. Odin has different licenses for different types of customers and people are willing to pay as it offers immense value.
Regarding your other questions:
From the US I would consider $24 to be cheap. Even when using minimum wage of $7.25/hr then $20-$30 asset would just be 3-4 hours. Most good assets will obviously take more than 3-4 hours to implement. Personally I wouldn’t think too much about purchasing a good asset for under $50. Main factors that expedite the decision would be good reviews and good documentation. Documentation because good documentation generally signals a well made asset - sometimes I will buy an asset just to look inside and learn from it.
$50~ and then to be able to look at an asset and learn how they did some optimization or implemented some features is good value to me. Most of the time, to do the research myself and experiment would take much more time and money.
Also I guess one thing to consider is the price of your asset if you participate in their semi-annual sales. $24 at the usual 40%-50% sale would be $12-$14.40
That’s pretty cheap in the US. I’d double it for the price of you supporting it with support requests, documentation, and update patches, which can take a lot of effort! Your time counts remember.
$24 is low end cost wise, all the good stuff usually starts at $70+. Especially for something like an automatic LOD system, that’s at least $50 easy. You also have to consider Unity’s cut, taxes and time required for support requests.
Can’t comment much on minimap, not sure how much demand there is for something like that, I’ve never had the need for it.
At least in my case, 24$ is already the range where I only buy if I’m 95% sure I’ll need it in my currently project. While <10$ is more casual.
The thing with code based assets is that a large number of asset store users are coders themselves and work on games at least additionally as a hobby. So they will often rather code it themselves.
For your LOD asset, you have to really polish the usability, because there is code for simplifying meshes available under free licenses on Github. For example am not sure whether manually setting LOD distances for every object as your video seems to show, is a very userfriendly approach. Imagine a world with 500 objects.
Some performance graphs would enhance that too btw. Wouldn’t be the first time there’s an asset that promises performance increment but then causes hiccups on weaker hardware due to CPU load spikes for example.
For the minimap asset it sounds a bit overloaded. People might get the feeling they pay too much if they can only use one or two features, unless they are early in development and build the whole game upon it.
Being expensive does not give you a feeling of quality on its own. There’s loads of expensive junk out there.
That being said, being too cheap definitely gives an impression of poor quality because, as @adventure fan says, maintenance and support cost money. You can’t afford to do much of either for $24 unless it’s likely to be a high volume seller.
One spanner in the works is how Unity’s Asset Store licensing works. It’s mostly per seat, so a $24 dollar extension asset isn’t just $24 unless you’re strictly a solo developer. If 20 people have access to my project repo then I need 20 licenses, not one, and now it’s a $480* asset.
I know you followed up with info about your current assets, but I’ll reiterate that this is not a one-size-fits-all thing. You need to be thinking about the value that a product brings to its audience.
If you’re targeting something for professional software developers and you’re making professional quality stuff yourself, then think about how much time you’re saving those people and about what you can achieve which they can’t (i.e. you’re focusing on the thing, for them it’s one priority competing with others).
If something will both save me time and improve the quality of my work I could well be willing to pay hundreds for it. In fact, I did exactly that yesterday.
24USD is roughly $35 Australian Dollarydoos where I am down under, which I would also equate to being on the cheaper side even as a hobbyist.
And as a hobbyist I’m mostly getting assets that are tools to do things that are well outside my current capabilities. Such as Odin Inspector and the Odin Validator (which admittedly was gifted to me my the devs), or shaders kits suited to art styles I like.
And even though I’m a hobbyist, I want something that does the job well more so do I want something at a reasonable price. I’m also fond of a reasonable level of support and longevity in the asset.
I feel like an LOD tool would a reasonable level of support to keep it alive and healthy. Do you think you can manage that with a cheaper price tag?
As a bit of a anecdotal thing, my regular person job is in a wholesale distributor. We find that, with great regularity, that prolific discounters retail businesses don’t last very long…
Is $24 expensive? Depends on the asset. Yes for a dozen low-poly, flat-shaded rocks. No to something like Odin Inspector.
I would always aim for the high side. It’s always easier to lower the price, or make a sale, than it is to increase the price (without a substantial update).
I’d say some assets in particular aim very high, so that most people would love to have it but don’t want to spend the money. Next sale, they’ll grab it for what would normally be the regular price.
