I suspect that FAB’s backend handling sales reporting is broken leading to underreporting of publisher sales.
If anybody has any information or ideas supporting or refuting this claim please share.
The story leading me to this conclusion goes like this.
I launched a product for the first time on June 26. It is a plugin called Blueprint Command Center.
The plugin took hundreds of hours to make and was technically very challenging. As far as I am aware it is unique and there are no similar products or capabilities in the engine.
I am very happy with how it turned out and I myself would not use Unreal anymore without it.
Since launch about 7 weeks ago the plugin has only 1 sale. See the screenshot. Based on the development time this means it has generated revenue equal to 10 cents per hour worked!
I thought the plugin was doing well since it shows up reasonably high on the FAB listings when ranking by relevance. See the screenshots.
Some example searches reveal: It is placed in the top 140 of 760 plugins published in the last 6 months by relevance.
If the plugin is doing so badly why isn’t it at the bottom?
I contacted FAB support to explain the situation. They initially replied with boilerplate saying they cannot help with improving sales.
Then after further explanation they understood the problem and they said that they checked the backend and confirmed that there was only 1 sale. They also said that they could not say how the relevance ranking works. So FAB support didn’t really help clarify the situation.
There seems to be many concerns raised regarding low sales on FAB. Could there also be a technical reason for this?
So what is the answer?
Is this a bad product?
Is it overpriced?
Is the marketing poor?
Is FAB’s relevance ranking misleading?
Or is FAB’s backend actually broken?
Or am I missing something here?
I’m not trying to dismiss the effort you put into it, but fab users tend to expect plug and play or very easy to use solutions. The screenshots look like spaghetti code and I instantly was like “nope, I’m not gonna mess with this
” when I saw them. Your first screenshot just looks like a spiderweb, maybe rework the UI of the tool to be much simpler and more intuitive if you want to continue investing in it. I didn’t even bother reading the description with how intense the screenshots were.
Good day.
It’s probably already a fact — even for the FAB team — that how assets are ranked is a mystery. And the low sales are also a fact.
But in your particular case, to be honest, I didn’t really understand the purpose of your plugin when I visited the page, despite having over 20 years of experience. Maybe it is super useful, but you don’t communicate that on the page at all. You probably need to work on the presentation, and things will likely go much better for you.
How much external marketing did you do with your community before releasing? You might be better off going back to all your testers and clients/coworkers to see their opinions on why they didn’t end up needing to buy your product that you made for them.
I’m not sure that I would pay money to see a more busy view of the dependency graph. I watched the silent explainer video and im still not very much further along in understanding how this will improve my work, or assist my TD’s.
-# edit: I mean, I can see that it would be cool to see everything that calls a specific var/method/etc… I just never personally had a TD come to me asking me to walk them through all the times a particular one is used, i guess.
Maybe it’s a AAA thing. If you are making that high-end level of tools for gigantic companies, I would say that it might be better to give an overview of the big problems this tool solves during your next GDC talk or something.
edit: I guess i’ve always wanted a tool that shows all the OOP hidey-holes (like: overloads/interfaces/extension-methods) … but again, I feel like 60 mins of reading manuals I can probably work out how to call that up in my IDE for free.
Thanks for the feedback. Clearly you did not like the thumbnail. Point Taken
The spaghetti or spiderweb is just reflecting how all the blueprints are interacting with each other.
This is kind of the point of the plugin to show instantly how complicated a project is.
The problem with blueprints in Unreal that it is trying to solve is that you don’t know how blueprints are interacting with other unless you look at each blueprint individually and read all the nodes.
This probably means that most projects are more complicated than you think but it is hidden.
The best analogy I can think of is a map of a subway system in a big city. Looks very confusing the first time you look at. But isn’t it much better to have the map then not have it?
This screenshot was from the Epic project Project Titan which has over 2000 blueprints which is why it looks so complicated. I choose this example to show an extreme case.
The plugin is actually plug and play but clearly this was not communicated well.
Do you have any thoughts on the relevance ranking on the FAB website?
Thanks for your feedback. Funny that you seem to think I am in AAA. I am running an indie studio and I have never worked in AAA!
I didn’t really do any marketing for it aside from the youtube video.
The dependency graph is of course a closely related tool but it is still quit different. The dependency graph is for asset dependencies while this for blueprints only and is much more granular and is considering individual nodes and variables etc.
It looks more busy than dependency graphs because blueprints in actual projects are quite complicated and the plugin is showing the complexity. This is kind of the point of the plugin since it is really hard to understand how complex a project is without using this plugin.
The idea for this plugin was not meant as something for AAA. The original idea came about when I was trying one of the well-known game templates. I wanted to understand the blueprint code in the game template but this was really hard since it had hundreds of blueprints that were interacting with each other and multiple inherited blueprints and blueprint interfaces. So I thought it would be a big time saver if I could press 1 button and see everything on 1 graph instead of having to go back and forth between tons of blueprints.
I think they would have if they could. Apparently they are still in a very early stage of development.
Or they just don’t report on how things are going.
We’ll see.
It’s not a bad product, but it is overpriced and has poor marketing. And yes, FABs ranking is broken.
The asset looks more like a nice addition to the Reference Viewer rather than a crucial tool for daily development. Even your example of “understanding the blueprint code in a game template” is a 1 time usage, not a daily usage.
Paying $50 for this is a lot, especially when Unreal provides Referencer Viewer for free.
Many plugins that are priced at $5 make much more money because a lot of people buy them for a 1 time usage, or out of curiosity, or just in case they someday need it, without actually ever using them.
I agree the reference viewer is the most similar tool to this but it is still very different from the reference viewer in my view. References at the asset level is only a minor feature of this tool while its the whole point of the reference viewer.
Understanding a game template might be a once off activity but searching blueprints and navigating blueprints are day to day uses. So there was definitely room for improvement in clarifying this.
I will certainly keep the price feedback in mind but first I need to fix the presentation.
Thanks to everyone posting here. It was clear the presentation needed improvement so I replaced all the screenshots and rewrote the description. The changes are now live.
Hey, the product seems useful and interesting but IMO you need a shorter and more attractive Demo Video. Try to resume as much as you can the absolute most attractive feature of your product in the in the beginning of the video, in the store thumbnail, in the first pic, in the beginning of the description and if possible in the product’s name. I would make the vid as short and dynamic as possible and make a second video (or more) showing the details or how to use it. Also avoid too much text and long phrases in the video.
But still, being useful and well presented still isn’t guarantee that it will sell, this is unfortunately part of the business. FAB ranking algorithms aren’t public and maybe that’s to avoid exploitation.
I know what you mean, sorry I used the word ‘compress’ when I meant ‘resume’… The way I see it, the less you write and the more you communicate with few words and icons the best. It’s something I struggle with too, it’s not easy specially after you just finished creating your asset and you know all the features you worked hard to put there and you want to communicate all that…
It is now about 10 weeks since I released the plugin and I am still getting mixed signals.
The relevance ranking suggests it is a success however the sales reports suggest it is not.
The plugin was part of the September flash sale. Before the sale the plugin was rank 116 of 799 plugins published in the last 6 months and after the sale it was rank 96.
The jump up in rank during the flash sale happened on 2 different days during the flash sale but only 1 sale was reported.
The plugin now has 1 sale in July, 1 sale in August, and 1 sale in September.
This make me wonder about the bug that was reported after FAB was released where sales reports could only count 1 sale per product per month and if it can still occur?
The other issue is that I made significant changes to the listing presentation based on the feedback from the forum post here about 3 weeks ago, but how do I know if the changes are an improvement or not?
I have 0 metrics that I can use to assess the change.
I don’t think the relevance is just units sold, they have many factors that go into it including visits, click through rate, probably time spent, keyword relevancy, grammar uses, description text, tags, rating counts, forum visits, etc. the store is constantly reshuffling assets, age could also be a factor which is why you are seeing it go up despite sales remaining consistent.
My advice to you would be to not worry too much about what relevance ranking is in the browse section, barely anyone uses that. 98% of fab users find assets through search, so ensuring you are ranking there is vastly more important.
This is optional but if I were you the first 3 things I would do is update the UI and screenshots, update the title to be searchable, and explain briefly in the description what it does.
The main limiter you will run into is while your plugin expands upon the reference viewer, for 90% of developers(including me) the reference viewer is perfectly fine for what we need. I only use the reference viewer when debugging stuff for the most part.
I don’t think the relevance is just units sold, they have many factors that go into it including visits, click through rate, probably time spent, keyword relevancy, grammar uses, description text, tags, rating counts, forum visits, etc. the store is constantly reshuffling assets, age could also be a factor which is why you are seeing it go up despite sales remaining consistent.
My advice to you would be to not worry too much about what relevance ranking is in the browse section, barely anyone uses that. 98% of fab users find assets through search, so ensuring you are ranking there is vastly more important.
This is optional but if I were you the first 3 things I would do is update the UI and screenshots, update the title to be searchable, and explain briefly in the description what it does.
The main limiter you will run into is while your plugin expands upon the reference viewer, for 90% of developers(including me) the reference viewer is perfectly fine for what we need. I only use the reference viewer when debugging stuff for the most part.
Edit: the screenshots do look better now, but at a glance it’s still difficult to understand what’s happening, my first thought was this was a new scripting system for something since it reminds me of PCG graphs with the colored nodes and things connecting together. I’d say it would probably be best to use photoshop to create a border around your screenshots and add tagline text that explains it. On mobile reading the text in the screenshots required zooming in and people tend to judge off glances. Something like “organization for blueprints made easy” would be much better for the first screenshot and do a similar tagline for the others. Also right now fab does not work well for branded titles so “blueprint command center” is not something people are searching for, “blueprint organization system” would likely be a better title.
I’d also recommend focusing less on features and more on how it’s used in games or projects. Showing how it works should be left for tutorials or documentation, I’ve had much more success showing how a product is used in a game or beneficial than showing its features(at least on the store page)
I agree that there could be many factors influencing relevance but many of the ones you mentioned are mostly constant and did not change during the sale. So this leaves only a few that might cause a sudden change in relevancy during a sale event like view counts, sales, or plugins entering or leaving the 6 month search window. In this case I also don’t think it is due to view counts because the big relevancy change only happened on 2 of the 4 days of the sale event and view counts should affect other products about equally unless they are being promoted or marketed which my plugin wasn’t.
Another pattern I’ve noticed is that exactly 7 days after a sale the relevancy drops a bit. This suggests the relevancy algorithm values recent sales less than 7 days old higher.
Do you really still think the plugin is a version of the reference viewer? If so that suggests I need to further improve the presentation. The uses cases and functionality are completely different but they share similar UI.
You suggested the title “blueprint organization system” doesn’t that contradict you thinking that this is just a reference viewer?
Have you tried the demo of the plugin? It is fully-featured and free.
I will probably not change the title but I will take your advice and be more careful with future product titles.
I agree that I can be better at showing how it used. This was also suggested by someone else and I hope to put together a longer video to achieve that.
Initially you described it as a suped up reference viewer tool so I just assumed it still was, looking at the screenshots today it still kinda conveys that just in a cleaner design. I didn’t really think anything else, I buy plugins or assets off of their screenshots and documentation, I usually don’t pay too much attention to description or downloadable demos especially when I am on my iPhone.
As for the patterns you noticed I can’t really speak on those as I don’t really pay attention to that kind of stuff with my plugins and assets. I just check if they show up near the top on search keywords i target or on the front page.
I think your thumbnail is probably fine, it looks professional which is important for CTR. I’d still recommend renaming it though as 99% of traffic comes from search and “command center” is likely never searched for blueprint tooling. You very likely are getting grouped on the bottom of people searching for console commands or props for military assets which is not targeting the right people. If you are attached to that brand name then you can put it after a hyphen like “blueprint (whatever it does) system - Blueprint Command Center”.
You will be selling to unreal power users who value productivity the most, so I would focus all wording and screenshots around appealing to them, new devs or people just looking for assets or code for their games likely will not buy this.
Another thing and I’m sure I will be receiving a ton of backlash for saying this, but your pricing is a huge turn off, 39.99 isn’t unreasonable but 200 dollars is absolutely absurd and looks like a envy tax more than anything. If you bring the two tiers to a close or exact price parity you will very likely see a large increase in sales, the professional should just be a small bump up between 5-20 dollars(max) not 170 dollars for nothing adding. A company making 100k+ a year won’t care if it’s an extra couple bucks but getting approval for 200 dollar purchase can be a headache and if it’s a solo dev they may consider your tool unnecessary to their development since it is more of a optional power user tool than anything else and not worth the money at that point, if I had to choose what to spend 200 dollars on I would spending hiring someone who can make a trailer, graphical assets, ad spend, or something that can bring me more money not a editor tool.
With regards to pricing here was my perspective when I launched this plugin taking into account this was my first product.
Relative to the development effort and potential value the personal price is a bit underpriced.
For developers who have like 100k to 500k funding the professional tier is overpriced but unfortunately I can’t change the tier definition.
For AA/AAA buyers the professional tier is either underpriced or fairly priced.
There are many sellers utilizing a 1:5 ratio so I used that as a basis.
If there were no personal/professional tiers I would have priced it at around 60 USD for everyone.
If there was a 100k to 500k funding tier I would price it at 60 USD for that tier.
Now my perspective is that I am uncertain whether the sales report data is accurate. Posts on this forum and my discussion with FAB support have so far not reassured me of the accuracy of the sales reports. So its kind of hard to make a decision on whether I need to change the price right now.
