I am thinking of submitting a blueprint project i’m working on for 5 or 10 dollars and was wondering if anyone who has something on the marketplace would be willing to share an approximation of how many people bought their assets.
Thanks!
Time is money. Generic things a lot of people buy, even AAA studios. $5.00 for a barrel with textures, LOD’s, etc… or you can pay a modeler $25.00 for the hour spent making it from scratch. So it just depends, as you don’t give a lot of information what the project is.
I don’t know if marketplace sellers are ‘allowed’ to divulge that information. I should find out.
Either way, “more than you expect, less than you’d like.”
If you think a “couple of thousand bucks” would be disappointing, then I should be disappointed by the sales of my minimap since I will probably still have to wait some months to reach one thousand bucks. But I’m not disappointed 
Having some extra $ or not having them. Why should I choose not having them? Also, don’t you think it’s a nice feeling to help people with something you sell so that they can make their game much faster than without your asset? Many people here even give away their work for free since they just like to help others. And seeing your work in many other games, isn’t that nice too?
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A couple of thousand dollars is nothing to scoff at. I’m sure there are packs on the Marketplace that have earned much more than that, but I doubt it’s the norm. I have no way of knowing that for sure, though, as no one’s really discussed it much. I’m not sure if its against the rules or not.
If it was something that was game/genre independent, sufficiently marketed / promoted, and it was something that everyone would want, and priced right… then you could make a substantial amount of money. For example, a Voice to Text/Command and Text to Speech plugin for the editor would be something I could see selling extremely well.
I’d say the obvious thing is that you’d want to diversify to maximise your potential earnings. You could make some assets compatible with both UE4 and other engines, offering them on their respective platforms. You could go down the Gumroad or similar route. Point being don’t put all your eggs in one basket and expect to turn a massive profit.
While I can’t give specific overall numbers from Epic’s side, people selling content on the Marketplace are free to share whatever they’re comfortable with. There aren’t any rules against content creators sharing that information, so if you’re comfortable with it, you’re welcome to do so.
There are a handful of people that have found enough success to quit their fulltime jobs to sell content on the Marketplace and elsewhere, but it’s still too early to see this being a widespread, common result. One of the aspects of the Marketplace that I emphasize is that while we are young (just turned 1yr!) and don’t have the sales volume that other places might, Epic Games has a reputation for quality and a broad reach as a media platform, and getting your content accepted on the Marketplace is not particularly easy because of our high quality bar and requirement that content creators continuously update their content and support their customers.
I encourage people to use the Marketplace not only as a way to sell products, but also as a means of publicizing their content and services. It can help drive attention toward the game you’re developing (like W3 Studios does), or potential business toward their company (like T-Pose and Bumping Pub), or availability for contract or full-time work (many people). I like working with people to help promote their ability and content as I can, and in the coming months with new publishing tools we’ll be giving sellers, we’ll have more time and ability to do more community showcases and promotions like we did last week with PurePolygons (Marketplace Spotlight: PurePolygons - Unreal Engine). And as always, we’re open to hearing ideas on how we can help promote people and their work.
I buy tons of things from the marketplace but if you are going to do it simply to get rich You probably shouldnt. People who do thinks for just money is usually the ones who fail the hardest.
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I’m glad you’re finding the Marketplace valuable! What we’ve been trying to do is build up its credibility and level of quality and support as a strong response against concerns of ‘cheapness.’ The Marketplace’s overall goal is to be a haven for the industry’s most talented professional content creators to sell their top-quality content to other developers, and to provide ongoing support for that content. It’s professional quality supported content for professional quality games, and each piece of content on the Marketplace represents tens to hundreds of hours of time savings for you, and it’s designed to be easy to work with for as many people as possible. In the end, it’s all about creating what you want and developing your game as efficiently as possible, and you have to choose the best ways to spend your time and money to get the result you want. If someone wants to get really hardcore, they could develop their own engine from scratch, but the likelihood of them ever shipping their game is lower than if they’d acknowledged that an engine like UE4 represents a colossal number of solved problems that’s been tested in battle.
Well for 5 or 10 dollars it puts the product into impulse territory where someone buying a 90 dollar asset would probably think hay I might as well pick this up while I’m at it (I’ve done it more than once). What come into play though is shelf life and the return rate over say a year and if the BP does something of value that saves time then the shelf life would be infinite.
More than anything though you would want to build brand recognition. It’s not unusual for me to buy something not based on what it is but who made it as I already know the support and quality is there and is worth adding to my kit even if I don’t have a use for it at the time.
After that you will have the roll the dice just like everyone else. 
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I love buying assets and do so all the time! Enjoying every sci fi environment i can get my hands on. Recently got the ammo pack too and it was really awesome for prototyping . The one thing i have not got into yet is sound, but there are some tempting packs there as well.
The Marketplace is very useful for me and my project. Like SaviorNT said, “Time is money”.
A better question is not “How many people typically buy marketplace items”, but what they are buying, what they are looking for!
That’s what I think.
Always innovating and introducing different asset types covering a wide range of different interests, features and ideas, will always attract more selling interest especially from a heterogeneous clientele. By offering a wide variety of asset types and choices that differently combined are able to provide a broad advantage for someone to be able to develop a complete and original game type, have more sales oportunities in a short time, not by selling a single item specific, but globally, “in selling a rich variety”. This is not the same as the John Alcatraz case, that only has the minimap. This is a special case. John Alcatraz want to achieve the perfection with your minimap!
With respect to offer a rich variety, the main problem is to managing the support of so many different items that need to meet a certain quality standard and an ever-growing clientele. But it is quite possible for someone who can develop something solid with good quality, userfriendly and simplicity, to prevent any inconvenience and get more feedback and minus bug-reports.
And it’s as said, The marketplace is no place to sell assets solely, is place to: “…publicizing their content and services.” YOU, your work, your talent and professionalism. To developing a career, becoming a well-known and respected actor in industry.
Had a recent conversation about marketplace data, and a lot of people wondering what the raw numbers look like and stuff and blah… I was reminded of this forum thread.
I made a chart for a blog post I’m writing about my experience with Generic Shooter on the marketplace, hopefully it’ll shed some light here.
Also, it has the interesting data point that changing my price point did not affect my average gross trend in a significant manner at all.
&stc=1
6/17/2015 to 6/30/2015: 416 units sold
7/1/2015 to 7/30/2015: 247 units sold
8/1/2015 to 8/30/2015: 96 units sold
9/1/2015 to 9/22/2015: 37 units sold
I am really curious about the falloff curve for other marketplace assets. So if you’re a marketplace asset seller and see this and are willing to be transparent about this, let’s talk.
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Thanks for sharing this .
Where did you get that data?
The reports I get from Epic every month only include the data for that whole month.
I asked for daily sales data. was very helpful and gave me a csv dump. I’ve been using daily data as an ongoing means to try different marketing/support tactics.
I’m having a hard time understanding your chart, . For reference, how many units did you sell in August (if you don’t mind me asking)?
Good topic, thanks for sharing.
me too?