I created a post-process shader for the unreal engine, which took over 2 months to build. Now I am confused about the pricing because if I set the price too low then I will need to sell too much otherwise it will end up in a loss.
if I set the price too high and sell a few, then it will still be in loss.
I am thinking about the 250 USD for the product based on time. I just want to avoid the loss.
Speaking as someone who buys quite a lot of marketplace stuff, low is better than high.
It’s not related to how long you spent on it, it’s related to what the finished product is worth. It also has to be in proportion to other similar articles.
I would say, with PP, unless it’s absolutely earth-shattering, you couldn’t go above 50 bucks.
If you price it at 250, you’re probably closing yourself off from just about everything.
You already lost all the time you spent.
Pricing is super hard. Things that are very easy to see the use of, may actually sell better at $9 (sell by the thousands) than at $99 (sell a couple.)
Meanwhile, things that are task specific and only used in a few cases, need to charge a lot per sale, but not so much that people won’t use them at all.
You’ll want to figure out who the target customer is. Where does the money come from? Why do they need your shader? What’s their alternative? Can a quick hack they do on their own get them 90% of the way there, and is that good enough?
An asset in the $5 - $25 range can often be bought “just because” whereas an asset in the hundreds of dollars generally needs a pretty specific need to actually pay for, so you’ll have to weigh that.
Now, if you developed this specifically to make a profit, what did your initial study say? You must have looked at all the things you could have developed, and decided that a post-processing shader was the right choice to fill some niche. What was that data you used?
I work as a freelancer and I worked on a toon shader for a client project that had limited features and it was lacking a lot of things. So I made a new one from scratch just because I was curious and want to test the limits of what can I do for toon shading in UE5. and in the middle of development, I decided to sell it on the marketplace.
If this is a learning experience, selling it for $9 and getting a lot of feedback and users under your belt might be the better choice?
Or sell it for $29 and put it into the sale for $9 occasionally?
I bet the learning, and the feedback, would be worth more than a possible $250 sale – because chances are, nobody will pay $250 for a single post processing shader.
There are many very good multi purpose PP shaders on the market for < 50. It has to fall in line with what’s already on there.
EPIC needs to release sales statistics per product or at least anonymous per category. We’d have to make a lot of assumptions otherwise.
*perhaps average marketplace visitor statistics as well because the marketplace is flooding with new devs and products of random quality and pricing. Barely useful rn.
There’s this thread on the Creators Hub (sellers only):
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/information-on-marketplace-metrics/210727/49
Thanks, going to bookmark this it seems I have no access to the page.