Asset store publishers, how are your sells last month?

I do have my portfolio web page on artstation. But there is no need for setting up analytics for it.... Thank you for this tip yet again. I have just set it up. But i have little understanding of it. It appears you can only track one asset at the time?

 

Yeah, it's per asset. You can setup multiple assets in the same analytics account. You could probably use the same tracking Id for more than one asset but I wouldn't recommend it. Just think of each asset like a separate website. You can always export the analytics data and combine them yourself in Excel or something to get aggregate reporting.

 

July was a good month for me - made 43 sales, which is on the higher end. Did notice a bit of a drop towards the end though, and this month has been decidedly average, with 13 so far. Might be something to do with the new store I suppose, as most of my traffic before has been direct or organic on analytics, with the forum in 3rd.

 

Hadn't checked mine in awhile. The forum has dropped to third for me as well behind organic and referrals. My sales a slightly above average so far this month.

 

Ever since the site update, I'll have to say my sales have also gone down by a LOT. Even with new packages, it feels like people are having difficulty finding things. Between all packages, my sales have gone from the norm, 10-15 sales to about 3-4.... Is there a thread out there where Unity has a closer eye on?

I checked Google analytics and it does look a little strange too? Specially the drop in Jul. but decent now? I don't know how to read it well i guess.

 

Only 1 out of every 1000 customers can see the new Asset Store site.

Changes to the sale structure (weekly sale instead of daily sale) may have some effect if your asset(s) are included in the sales.

Otherwise, the historical trend is that sales usually slow down in August through September. Did you see the same slowdown last August? The good news is that historically sales usually pick up pretty well in October.

 

Now when you mentioned new sale structure... Is the form to submit assets to new sale same as for old 24 hour sales? This one: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfk2igksChzS0zSyu5xNCkX5q9R0BaYm6y3FZoRRpD3y-dSNg/viewform

Or are they changed it... I cant find anything about how to submit my assets on discount sales on forums.

 

I'm pretty sure I read recently that all assets are automatically added to the list now. It has always been a curated list. If the Asset Store curators pick your asset for a sale, they'll contact you directly.

 

just seems odd...

It was a little different for me, sales were pretty high during those months last year. I guess I'll wait till the end of September and see. Thank you for the info.

 

For what it's worth (again)... my sales were well above average at the beginning of the month and suddenly died. I haven't sold a single unit in nearly 4 days which is odd.

 

You only have one asset. It is asset of high value for what i see from reviews on it, but still. There is no endless supply of developers who would buy. Or is it? ...
That is good question actually. How many people use Unity and buy in asset store?

 

Excellent question and I don't know the answer, but after 4ish years sales are still pretty decent. There are lots and lots of developers.

 

That is very nice to hear

 

I've found this topic a little late, but I like to share my statistics for the past few months. I saw the first big drop in June (by ~40%). It went a little up for the July, but dropped again in September for about 55%. I'm not sure why my sales are dropping this fast, but based on the comments of other publishers, it might come to these reasons:

1. Some assets lost their main category inside the new look. Lots of categories has been changed/removed within the new look and this makes finding new assets very hard for the casual customer. For example, the "Completed Projects" category inside the "Templates" has been completely removed.

2. New special pages "New Assets - Editor's picks - Essentials" are attracting too much interest, leaving only a little for other assets/pages/categories.

3. The new Unity 2017. Since the introduction of 2017, lots of assets needs to be updated to be compatible with the new version. Since we have not moved towards the Unity 2017, I appreciate if you share your sale experience with the assets updated for Unity 2017.

 

My sales are pretty low (i'm not complaining, just saying). August was a bit better then July tough... I submitted 7 new characters, they are waiting review. Also, one of new characters will be free, so finally people will be able to test my characters before they decide to buy. Maybe that will help my sales eventually.

Many people said in this thread that only 1% of buyers have access to new store. Only us, publishers have access. So, my assumption that new store caused drop of sales was probably wrong after all... But, time will tell when new store get live for all. I hope developers are looking for possible problems changes might cause for many of us, and will fix them before new store go live.

 

Holy Sh*t bro~ I already decided change my poor assets for free.

 

Ya. Same thing happens to my 3D art packs. You can take a look on my signature.

Since Unity changed to new UI, I have a deep voice coming from my marketing sense told me that Unity Asset Store is now officially dead due to the inconvenience and buggy of new interface. But as @Tom_Veg said if the new website is only accessible by publishers then I think this is not an issue anymore.

Actually something happens very bizarre in my publishing journey since the beginning. I realized that my sales are always not as good as when applying an official Unity sales event like the Biggest Sales Ever previously and so on. Simply said, it was totally opposite the effects of applying an official sales, strange. In additional, I also realized when I increased my price, I got more sales. Oppositely, less sales, coincidence?

Currently my monthly sales figures are usually 1 or 2, sometimes has 3~5 sales if lucky but this is very rare now. Google, Twitter and Unity Affiliate analytics shows that actually got some traffics flowing in but do nothing. This lead me to think maybe I used an incorrect marketing strategy? Maybe my packaging is not fantastic enough? Maybe technology is evolving fast hence people are not interested on old (Not quite old actually) stuffs anymore? Maybe the market I'm targeting is already fulfilled? My biggest assumption is the world economy is going down hill these several years so people will spent more carefully. Not sure.

I'm not always update to the latest Unity version but when I feel there has a big gap I will immediately upgrade all with new packaging style design together. Current version of my art packages supported are until 2017.2.0 and will be upgraded to 2017.3.0 when I got extra free time due to I found out that 2017.2.0 version is quite buggy. Also I will try to turn my arts into a solution in future updates.

One thing I'm curious that actually can people from China able to easily download and buy stuffs on Asset Store? According to my observation on China people feedback and asking my China friends, it seems not easy. This is a huge market, tons of developers there. Just implement either Ali Pay or WeChat Pay to the Asset Store especially WeChat Pay. China is now absolutely cashless, they use WeChat Pay on mobile to scan and pay anything like parking, lunch, movie tickets, taking trains and so on. Imagine you could open up an Asset Store link and just buy that asset by scanning on QR code then you can download immediately already. Will this becomes more convenience? I bet the sales will goes up a lots which help all Unity Asset Store publishers out there. Hope someone working in Unity Technologies can see this message.

 

I wish there were some monthly, seasonal or annual reports in the form of a blog post, newsletter, etc... from Unity that would share some general marketing information like market reach, market spread, product views, view to sale ratio, category/sub-cat demand, best sellers with tier/range attribution, and so on...

This would give us the developers/artists a better understanding about the ecosystem we are working with. Without such statistics, we are shooting in the dark. But having access to these data helps us plan better for the future of our businesses.

One simple example is the China's market as @AkiraWong89 stated. I have absolutely no clue how Chinese customers can find my assets, as I have never invested in translating my assets (store metadata, documentations, keywords, ...) to their language, and that's because I don't know how much of an impact can it be towards my business.

I'm not sure. Maybe I'm asking for too much. But I'm pretty sure a lot of us can do better if we had access to such statistics.

 

I am personal on the new asset store and I do not like it one bit.
The new site is clearly not widescreen friendly.
When I click on the link to the old site i get redirected again to the new site.
Now i try to visit the asset store using the Unity asset tabs panel as it still links to the old asset site.
Due to all this I much less visit the asset site than before. Even more so now the daily sale and weekly sales are gone.

So if other customers feel the same way it could explain some of the loss of sales.

 

@AkiraWong89 the Beta of the new Asset Store is available for everyone, you can use it with a different browser even if you aren’t logged in.

Except for the time after the huge sale last summer my sales are pretty stable. Actually I had the best sales ever (except for 24H sales) in early November but as soon as they had announced the Black Friday sale my sales went down to zero for a week. Since the sales are over it looks like they are stable again.

 

Why don’t you revert to the old store? (you can do that in the menu)

 

Because like i wrote: ;-) . It redirects me back to the new one. :-(

 

My sales have picked up again, and are pretty steady now for about a month and a half.

 

If this won’t work



Why don’t you just delete all cookies from Unity then?

 

Im also interested in Chinese market. I even made their president:

Stylized caricature for legality reasons of course... So far, impact on the Chinese market i had since i released him in November? Zero sales... But, i did got one funny and somewhat disturbing mail from potential customer from China asking the following question (title of mail was: "You are really great courage"):
"I see you are selling the model resources of a lot of national leaders.
I saw Kim Jeong-eun, Hitler,Obama, Trump
I use these models to make a game, and won't the Korean agents come to kill me?"

So, i am clearly visible to China. But, they have some concerns we would never consider here. The worst part is, i think he was only half joking. There was no smiley at the end of sentence... It's a dangerous world to be artist or developer today

 

Absolutely correct. An annual report figures of Unity Asset Store is much appreciated. Approximately how much total sales per categories during this quarter or this year. So every publishers from different professional fields will have an insight what to do next.

According to my observation, I found out that they can surf the Asset Store and download packages, just not sure if they can make guaranteed successful payment. I'm Chinese too, just not growing up in China. I can speak Chinese (Main), Cantonese (Main), English (Sub), Japanese and Korean (A little). I can help you translate into Chinese (Traditional / Simplified) (Both also OK) if you want.

I can log in without a problem. Just somewhat don't like it. It contains some minor bugs.

Your assets are not bad. I found out that realistic PBR assets are more likely to sell well than other styles. My assets are focus on stylish and creativity which is the totally opposite concept of realistic. I think I will include several art styles on my packages in future. Not sure. What do you think?

I just go thru all of your works and all of them looks quite nice, just IMHO, it's expensive. Even an PBR environment asset pack sells only about $20~$60. You can try to combine all of them together into one large package and set the price into something like $150 should sell better, just a suggestion.

Actually... I'm thinking about the same thing as the China guy mentioned. We just better avoid "him" for preventing any potential troubles for just in case since we do not know what "he" will do next and "he" is just nearby us.

 

Thank you for advice. But, i think this is apples and oranges. PBR environment asset packs are something which many many developers need. They are so essential, even those with low budget will buy it. Low price is justified, cause volume of sales should compensate... In my case however, not many people need my stuff. They are very niche. Lower price would not help, on the contrary. If someone don't need stylized politician, he wont buy it even if it cost only 1$.

 

I have very unstable sales for my Modular Fantasy Town. Got some good result October/November for unknown reasons en low numbers for December/Junuary.

I'm not sure if my price is too high or just if the art-style is too "niche". I have plan for more stuff with same style just hope people will have some more interest for it XD

Also i don't do enough promoting i think...

 

Really? Actually I wanna try to make PBR version of all of my environment art package. I'm quite interested too to see how it will look like when a toon style rendered in PBR workflow. Maybe it will looks something like Super Mario 3D World Wii U? Not sure. Just my imagination.

True also. I have a suggestion for you since you are 3D character artist. You can try to make a customizable character solution like Mass Effect, The Sims, Skyrim and so on. Users / players are able to adjust details like cheek bones, eyes width, rotation, position, mouth shape, lentigo, mole, neck size, arm size, shoulder size, skin tone, hairstyle, hair colors and so on then save as Prefabs to use in game. I know this is a very big task but I think a lots of developers will need this.

The trailer is awesome especially when turned into night time. Better than mine which I didn't do any video at all. Actually I should. I think maybe because the year end sales is just ended so people had already bought what they need. At the same time since Asset Store is keep growing means more and more assets will be made hence more and more challenging in the future. We must think out of something nobody did before plus not a niche market, most importantly it really can brings value to developers.

In additional, I would like to ask actually how you achieve that night time self illumination windows, lamps etc. that having an outer glow effects? I know using deffered rendering pipeline can make this happen but it will totally disable anti-aliasing too which I feel not beautiful already. How to achieve outer glow while maintain anti-aliasing?

 

Big task completed=big reward... I just need to start doing something like that and live off scraps for 6 months or so until something like that is completed and published.

 

I don't have access to the scene right now, but i normally i use deffered rendering with one of the temporal anti aliasing solution, i think Unity has it inside the post effect stack. The glow is probably the bloom from the post process effects.

But you should be able to do the same in forward rendering (long time i didnt use it). The daytime is dynamic with precompute GI, but if i remember correctly, the nightime lights are baked.

I'm also using PBR, i do my textures with Substance Designer

 

sales and free downloads have been steadily declining since Feb 2018 (25% drop from Jan 18)
Sep 18 (50% drop from Jan 18, 60% down from Sep 17)
Oct 18 (60% drop from Jan 18, 70% down from Oct 17)
....you know it's bad when you can't even give data away
it feels like the "training initiative" is driving customers away by hundreds per month
not talking about a couple hundred...more like 600-700 customers lost per month
that's some very bad business whatever the cause may be

 

I don't sell any assets but I been here with Unity for 9 years. ( I personally have nearly slowed down to stopped for many reasons. ( I know many others have as well. I own many assets..through the years... and beta test many for users.. ( I'm more of a game developer)

This is input from a user who buys them:

So it can be many things.( Lately many known assets are not being supported) that is one main reason

2. it seems harder to find new assets or certain assets these days. They have everything all screwed up.

3. Many of the assets seem to be assets not supported. They seem to do this alot. Abandoned ) Unity leaves them there ,a causing anger among users. even some new ones this happens to after a few months of being out ( expensive ones) Which causes many to rethink about buying anymore....Many users I talk to anyways, have stress this has many them rethink, what they buy, and control impulse buys anymore..



4. we no longer have a sales like we used to, That I think helped many assets.. when sales happen, we find by accident. and found out, that the asset is good..we would of never knew about them at all if it wasn't for some sales, even if we buy later... That hurts I think many assets..


5. Unity needs to clear off the unsupported assets, and junk ones for the active assets, so they are easier to find.

6. as a UX.UI Designer for a living, there new and old website for the store is terrible... They could easily fix this..but refuse for some reason. Making it easier to find, assets are in there correct category. Some searches, of assets I know the names even too, come up as not found many times. SO I have to ask someone for the link...

7. The asset store has gotten worse with ALL of the above.. After talking to investors I used to deal with. and many other developers who actually make and release games, some not.. Many have cut back in the back 6 months and even more so in the last few months due to much of what I just said.

So I think some of it can be a combo of things I named. Plus what ever they did to your guys end as well as far as the new store... I hear some friends who do sell assets complain about it.

I hope some of that helps.

 

Thanks Recon, that's good input. And i definitely agree that severe breaking changes to Unity will invalidate many assets not the least of which are Unity's own demo assets, such as the great car demo vehicle physics pack they had back in Unity 2...it doesn't help that their training demo looks like complete arse...they actually call that jumping. I would not be adverse to giving them data for free to make a good demo if it would get things back on track

 

In addition to that, here's why I reduced my purchases to a minimum:

* there is too much false advertising supported by Unity, although Unity says it's not false advertising. I'm a customer, I know better what false advertising is for me and what isn't. A lot of store pages of assets show screenshots of things you can do in combination with other assets, tricking buyers into believing that the demo scenes would contain these while in reality you have to use a lot more expensive assets to get the displayed results. There is no indicator whether screenshots were created solely with the asset you buy or with others.

And Unity supports that. Example:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/terraincomposer-2-65563

Unity says it's not false advertising what is pictured and described there. Draw your own conclusion.

* and in addition to the false advertising Unity doesn't give you refunds. They say a refund must first be acknowledged by the publisher. When the false advertising publisher refuses a refund your money is lost.

And I'm not the only one with that bad experience.

 

I agree with your statements, but not about TC2. those can be made with TC2, I was a tester since early TC1. so I will disagree respectfully on TC being a false, advertising.. but many do state they can do this and that.....but remember to make good art, a developer can't make you a good artist , they can only give you the tools. anyways.. there are many of examples of false advertising though.. and agree with you on that statement. in general. has also caused many people to not buy assets, I agree . but the asset is abandon and for that reason should be taken down, which has to do with one of my statements above, Unity allows this causing Anger among users and makes them rethink about buying assets and they slow down.





PS: ( TC2 was used in DRONE. and other games. I also used it in many client work./cheers. Lets hope one day Unity can address these issues.

 

A lot "can be made". You can make an entire game of Battlefield. I'd like to know what's in the package. The description says "- Includes many examples and presets.". So why not picture those and only those. I assumed that at least those rocky mountains and textures are in there for a start. It wasn't at the time I bought it, It wasn't for months. I didn't touch TC2 anymore because the developer promised to make tutorials about how those "can be made". Afaik he never delivered. I moved to better tools in the meantime. A lot of money lost by what I see as betrayal.

Are these from the store page already in the asset:



If not, then a simple line "Created with other assets and TC2" would have sufficed. But no mention of that, not even after I complained. It's as easy as 1 single sentence in the picture. A mountain shape and a texture can be assumed to be in the asset.

And don't get me started on those DRONE guys. I'll never buy anything ever again from those DRONE guys. Read their forum threads, then you know why. They made me be careful and reduce my purchases to a minimum.

Edit: I just downloaded the asset including the demo packages as described in the asset's readme. This is what you get:

 

They're now working towards improving that. In the new asset submission options, they now require you to select whether your assets works in conjunction with any other asset, and if so you must specify which one.

 

What is TC2?

 

King of all scams is still Ultimate Survival.

 

Terrain Composer 2. Terrain Composer 1, was one of few terrain tools successful for years. the developer though, is making games, so TC2, now is pretty much abandon now. Which is an issue with the store. Some claim an asset shows other assets and they expect the same result... people don't realize, it still take some skill to make pretty art. also many assets do use other assets to showcase there scenes, I think that is something Rowlan is upset about. Many do say, this and that included... but I agree with him they should help out people more that aren't artist. .with more proper information...
I think what they should do, is have the asset dev show case ONLY what they made no one elses asset....Then allow a few screenshots...( This is possible ) with the use of this asset and that asset...( and have to say NOT INCLUDED) the asset was used to make this showcase... or what ever.