I think the sales report is accurate, everyone runs the same code just with account specific variables.
As for the pricing, I’d say 40/60 would be reasonable pricing and I don’t think anyone would be upset by that. The vast majority of buyers will be small indie devs, college students, and hobbyists not major studios with multi million dollar budgets, these major studios may use quixel or they will just hire a outsourcing company like virtuos to make them what they need on contract if they don’t want to have the internal staff make it.
As for the point about pricing based on labor and time spent, that’s not how products are priced. Digital products are priced much much lower than labor costs because the expectation is you sell in volume. If you price to make your money back in 1-5 sales then you likely won’t make your money back. This is a hard truth a lot of indie developers don’t want to hear, pricing isn’t arbitrary it’s up to the market what you charge not you.
I don’t know about others, but for me, I usually set the price of an asset at roughly one hundredth of the labor cost. Because if you expect to recover your expenses from hobbyists and students with just 5–10 sales, then marketplaces like this definitely aren’t the right place for that.
Most people here buy assets mainly for test projects or just to take a look, maybe to use them someday.
So, in my opinion, overpricing the base cost isn’t the smartest move. Besides, the buyers here aren’t really the kind who can afford to pay a lot.
P.S. This definitely doesn’t guarantee high sales, but at least it makes the assets more accessible to a wider range of buyers.
I have noticed that they have changed how the relevance ranking updates. Before changes to relevance would happen on the same day as a sale and you could even find out you had a sale before getting a sales report which comes the next day. Now there is a delay before relevance ranking is updated from a sale and the relevance change happens after receiving the sales report.
I participated in the recent sales event and had multiple sales and all the jumps in relevance during the sale corresponded to a reported sale. So I guess that’s an improvement in both the plugin’s sales but also that the relevance ranking seemed to work as I expected this time.