Making Money With Game Assets: The MoCap Online Experience
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.
Selling game assets successfully requires understanding platform fees, audience expectations, and how to present technical content clearly.
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
Since this article was first written, MoCap Online has grown significantly. We now sell across more than 15 channels worldwide and have served over 10,000 customers. Our animation library has expanded to cover combat, locomotion, crowd behavior, office environments, sports, horror, and more — all captured with professional optical motion capture systems and cleaned by our in-house technical team.
Key developments since we started:
- Format expansion — We now deliver in FBX, BIP, Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, iClone, and DAZ formats.
- Unreal Marketplace presence — Our Unreal Engine packs remain among our best sellers. See our UE5 integration guide.
- Licensing clarity — We introduced a clear licensing structure with Standard, Commercial, and AI Usage tiers.
- 3D Preview — Customers can now preview every animation in 3D before purchasing.
The game asset marketplace is more competitive than ever, but the demand for high-quality motion capture animation continues to grow. If you are considering selling your own assets, the fundamentals still hold: deliver real value, price for multiple tiers, and be visible on as many channels as possible.
Browse the Animation Library
Explore the full MoCap Online animation library — professionally captured motion data available for direct purchase with commercial licensing.
- Browse All Animation Packs
- Download a Free Animation Pack — Test our quality before you buy
- Unreal Engine Animations
- Unity Animation Packs
- Game Character Animation: Motion Capture vs Keyframe
Related Articles
- What is Motion Capture? A Complete Guide for Game Developers
- Motion Capture Animation Packs: The Complete Buyer's Guide
- Free Motion Capture Animations: Best Sources for Game Developers
- Animation Library by MoCap Online
- How Much Does Motion Capture Cost?
Marketplace Listing Optimization and Customer Relationships That Drive Repeat Sales
Animation pack listings that convert well share a specific structure: a technical specification table above the fold, a format compatibility matrix, video preview content that demonstrates actual game integration rather than just the animation playing in isolation, and a clear license statement. The technical spec table — clip count, capture method, format support, skeleton compatibility, root motion coverage — answers the questions a buyer types into the store search bar. Buyers who search for "UE5 animation pack locomotion" are already pre-qualified; the listing's job is to confirm that the pack meets their technical requirements in the first five seconds of viewing. Listings that lead with marketing copy and bury the technical specifications require buyers to scroll to evaluate fit, and scroll-depth data consistently shows that buyers don't scroll before making the decision to look elsewhere.
Video preview strategy for animation packs that consistently performs above category average uses in-engine footage rather than DCC preview footage. Recording the animation in Unreal Engine or Unity — with a representative environment, lighting, and camera work — gives buyers a realistic expectation of what they are purchasing and signals production quality. DCC preview footage (a grey-box mannequin in a viewport) is appropriate as a secondary technical preview but should not be the primary listing video. Buyers are purchasing for their game, not for a DCC visualization. A 60-90 second primary video showing the character using the animations in an in-engine environment, followed by a 2-3 minute secondary video showing all clips in a labelled viewport preview, is the format that covers both the emotional purchase decision and the technical evaluation need.
Customer support quality drives review scores more than animation quality for established products with an existing review baseline. When a buyer has a technical integration problem — a retargeting issue, an FBX import error, an unexpected skeleton mismatch — their review score outcome is determined almost entirely by how quickly and specifically the support response addresses the issue. A technically correct but delayed response (48-72 hours) produces neutral reviews; a same-day response with a specific step-by-step fix produces positive reviews from buyers who had negative experiences during integration. Maintaining a knowledge base of the most common integration questions — organized by engine, by issue type, and by the specific MoCap Online product affected — enables fast, consistent support responses and reduces the time per ticket as the knowledge base grows. Buyers who receive good support for an integration problem become the most reliable source of positive reviews because their final experience was a problem that got solved, which produces more loyalty than a frictionless purchase.