Motion Capture Online released their first pack on the Unity Asset Store in October 2012. We made just over $300 that year. Today, we sell animation packs on over 15 online channels and to over 10,000 customers from around the world.
MAKING MONEY ON GAME ASSET MARKETPLACES - The MoCap Online Experience
As game asset marketplaces continue to grow they are becoming a more viable option for developers and 3D artists to make a living by making their own assets for other developers and artists. Although it's not yet sustainable for our company to exclusively sell through these channels, the growth trends paint a picture of a growing market that we absolutely want to be a part of! It has driven us to shift our focus to "products/game assets" over "custom production services".
In this blog we want to talk about our experience selling assets through these stores, show some stats and trends we have seen, and share some lessons that we have learned along the way.
FROM SERVICE TO ASSETS: Why we made the switch
We were doing a lot of custom service work for mid to large game companies. As a result, we experienced many of the difficulties associated with being a service provider in a time of increased globalization and economic pressures. We would focus on one project at a time, exchanging knowledge to understand their project and submit a bid, maybe requiring weeks of tests, sometimes just to lose to the lowest bidder. It was frustrating.
During this time we saw a big growth in smaller studios and independent developers looking for 3D animations. We noted how advancements in software allowed people to take our animations and more easily apply them to their own characters. Most importantly, game engines went to a freemium model which created a huge boom in new developers.
We were trying to get a few large developers as customers and turning away the millions of independents who could now use our motion data in these newly available platforms.
Unity was the first store to catch our attention with an article circulating about someone making 6-figures per month through their store. That is when we started seeing the asset stores as potentially being a viable source of predictable income.
PRODUCTS & PRICE POINTS
Over the last four years we have received a fair amount of feedback on our higher price points of over $100. Our philosophy has always been to deliver a product that a pro would truly appreciate. Each Pro pack requires 1,000's of man hours in planning, capturing, tracking, solving, retargeting, and editing... with that real value it is very hard to convince our team to crash our prices. However, we did hear our customers and we did want to keep the customers who have no need for 700 rifle animations so we decided to take our pro packs and split them into smaller packs at lower price points. We came up with the basic pack and the starter pack. Basic packs were intended to be a great value for a very basic set of animations at around a $30 - $50 price point. Starter packs are great for testing and prototyping and include about 10 animations for less than $10. Finally our Pro packs are extensive animation sets that allow you to have a deep animation tree controlling your 3d characters.
When we decided to do this, our biggest fear was that customers would no longer buy our pro packs and that our income would be less. Fortunately this has not been the case and our overall sales of complete Pro packs has actually increased since the day we started offering our smaller sets. It seems that offering smaller basic versions as well as larger and more inclusive assets, has had zero or very little effect on the sales of the larger packs. This trend continued when we released our starter packs many months later, with little effect on the average sales of the pro or basic packs.
The way the numbers breakdown, 2/3 of our sales are in starter packs so that equates to a whole bunch of small transactions. We make about 90% of our income on pro packs. We sell the least amount of basic packs but they tend to be our best sellers during specials and sales.
Because of this we believe our customers vary greatly in what they are using our animations for and the prices they are willing to pay for them.
SELLING OUR PACKS: Where and how do we make money?
We sell the most packs on the unreal Marketplace. The next most successful is our website, and finally Unity. Unity is an interesting Marketplace for us because we sell a good amount of our basic packs but we rarely get feedback or comments from the community. Unity still accounts for about 30% of our sales but are probably some of our least understood sales in terms of how developers are actually using our animations. The final section of our sales comes through third party asset stores. We've listed our stuff on over 30 different stores across the web and make very little money from doing so. However, we do think it's important to be visible on many channels so we can get more feedback and make our assets as useful as possible to many different creatives developers and designers. I admit I'm still nervous to offer our pro level packs on some of these third-party sites, but we need to take some calculated risks. It certainly helps people find their way back to our website.
THE NUMBERS AND GROWTH
The numbers above reflect how long our packs have been available for sale as well as how popular the packs are with game developers. Our overall pack downloads have more than doubled every year.
LESSONS LEARNED
- Near constant updates. Since our customers want the most useful game assets available and because everybody wants to use our animations for something different, we are receiving excellent suggestions that we want to include in our packs. We upgrade our packs a lot.
- There are some asset stores that try to completely walk all over their contributors. If they want more than 30% they should be able to prove they can make you money to be worth it. If not you're just letting other people use your hard work to make money. Some of them can but we always do extensive homework to developed trust in working with our asset stores.
- It’s much harder to get feedback than you think but it's easy to get people to continually drop suggestions and report bugs. Be ready to handle them.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
We are looking for funding to speed up development. We could shoot every day but all the solving, editing, and getting our product out on the stores is taking a huge amount of time and slowing down our ability to deliver new animations to our loyal customers. We can partner with an investor or we can sell more but we need to build our team..
Custom shoots - We know everyone likes the low cost of our pre built packs but almost everyone needs some custom moves for their games. We are coming up with a way to lower the cost by sharing shoot days & Mocap actors with multiple developers. To do this we will have to standardize the way we deliver these custom moves to be efficient as possible. This might not work for everyone but if you need
Controllers - We are currently working on controllers for UE4 for Mobility, Rifle, and Zombie. We want to have them for Unity and Crytek too.
Heavy Sword pack