Making Characters for Stores / How Plausible ?
polycounter lvl 12
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 ?
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 ?
Replies
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.
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.
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