Making Characters for Stores / How Plausible ?

TAN

Yo mates. Before everything Merry Kurisimasu desuu







I have been working on a character set for Marketplace and was hoping to keeping that up for the future but after giving some tought maybe this is not such a great after all.

Let me explain:

Making high quality engine-ready characters with nice amount of detail takes at least 1 month of hard work ( at least in my experience using only ZBrush + Max). And let's say that placing that character on every available platform (UE4 Marketplace + Unity Asset Store, Turbosquid etc) .

I am not sure I could get back what I had worked for in the first place in terms of money so I decided to ask here if anyone using the same path or anyone had any success with only characters on stores.

I am aware that there are people selling many props/environments and making quite a well living with these but making a pack that includes many props takes much less time than a singe character ( at least a close friend of mine who puts work on some stores says so). That is why I wanted to ask.

So what do you say ?

RyanB

TAN wrote: »

I have been working on a character set for Marketplace and was hoping to keeping that up for the future but after giving some tought maybe this is not such a great after all.

Let me explain:

Making high quality engine-ready characters with nice amount of detail takes at least 1 month of hard work ( at least in my experience using only ZBrush + Max). And let's say that placing that character on every available platform (UE4 Marketplace + Unity Asset Store, Turbosquid etc) .

I am not sure I could get back what I had worked for in the first place in terms of money so I decided to ask here if anyone using the same path or anyone had any success with only characters on stores.

I am aware that there are people selling many props/environments and making quite a well living with these but making a pack that includes many props takes much less time than a singe character ( at least a close friend of mine who puts work on some stores says so). That is why I wanted to ask.

So what do you say ?

So, let's say you spend five weeks at 40 hours per week on a character. That's 200 hours of work. You will also need to spend a day or two creating videos, screenshots, etc. but we'll leave that out for now.

Now, you need to figure out your goal. My personal goal is always $40 per hour, yours might be different.

200 hours x $40/hr = $8,000. I give myself a year to make the target money.

If I set my unit price to $20, and I keep 70%, then I get $14 per sale (actually, it's more like 56% after I pay taxes).

$8,000 / $14 = 571 units per year, or 48 per month. Never going to happen unless I am in a sale every month, and that also never happens. Keep in mind that the top three PAGES of popular models on the unity store are FREE models.

A realistic goal is to sell five copies of each package every month. With that goal, we can figure out that 12 months x 5 copies x $14 per copy = $840. With my goal of $40 per hour, I should be spending 21 hours MAX on the entire creation process. Any extra time spent reduces my chance of reaching my goal.

The top grossing character models on unity are packages of models.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18165

That package has 30 creatures in it with approximately 30 animations each. I'll let you do the math and see how much time it would take to make it worth creating a similar package.

20 hours per package is the sweet spot for return on time invested for my goals. Set your own goal and figure out how long you should be spending on each package.

PyrZern

I have been giving some thoughts on this as well.

I think it might be more practical to do decent models package. Note, not top quality portfolio stuff. Just, good stuff. And very generic. Say, sci-fi policemen that can fit in many kind of futuristic games. Instead of specific Spartan-equivalent soldier model. And maybe let them know how to contact you for commission of very nice high quality stuff.

AlecMoody

Any serious game production isn't going to buy in something as important as characters unless they are to fill in background space so you audience is already limited to people without a budget. If you want to reach a larger audience and charge more for your time, you are better off producing very high quality versions of less critical assets like foliage or props.

TAN

@ RyanD

Wow thanks mate. You made me dodge a bullet there. Otherwise I would waste months trying to make a living I would never would. This calculation should be a sticky or something.

Now I can have a fresh start to new year

huffer

I was thinking about this too, starting selling on ue4 marketplace, but the prices are soo low! 30 usd complete modular environments for example - that's a whole game level for dirt cheap. You'd have to sell hundreds to make it worth it, and I cant see more than 10 games that might make use of it (plus who wants the same level as in another game anyway). Prospects are not so good imo.

Neox

think of it more of cheap ways to prototype, the majority will buy to have something tp