New Website Idea

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Okay me and a few others have decided to go ahead and start a nice website to make some money that will better secure us financially during our game development of Out Reach. Crowd funding is great but not something I want to fully rely on.

So here is our Idea and what we need.

A site that acts as a portal for learning, buying, selling, and so on.

We can make assets that can be sold or given for free as a prototype asset. these assets will range from game sounds and music to fully scripted mini game examples for several game engines. We will host several tutorial videos for learning from coding, 2D art, to 3D animation.

Things to offer on this website:

Tutorials
Game Samples
2D Art
3D Art
Web Templates
Programming Scripts
Music and Sound
FX Art
Web Hosting
Server Hosting
and more…

All the above listed can be bought out at a higher cost for custom usage. All assets will be granted commercial licensing for use in Indies, Professional studios, and personal projects. Some assets may be free to use as prototyping.

We want to be a central hub for all things web and games. Be it 8 bit games to next gen games. Assets for Game Maker clear to Unreal Engine 4. We want to cover a vast area of the game development market at reasonable prices. We will even take on custom assets for those who needs something unique to their project.

Members you pay a small $5 one time fee can become sellers as well, selling up to 30 items at a time. While those you pay a one time membership fee of $15 can sell unlimited items. We will take a 7% cut to cover site costs and keep the site running.

We will have this broke up into Bronze and Silver Memberships. While Gold can be obtained free buy selling a certain amount of assets lifetime with a 4+ star rating. Gold allows you to sell all your assets with no royalties. Plus you get a few of your assets featured every once in awhile. Gold can be obtained by Bronze users as well just may take a bit longer.

A community forum will also be set up for general discussion of new assets, requested assets, and asset support.

This site will be built for game designer, developers, but will also cover web designers and developers also. Even general artist and composers can benefit from this site.

This site will take some work and because of that I reach out to the community for those skillful enough to assist with the creation of this site and those who assist will be given Gold Membership right away and or become apart of the development team running the show.

Who we need right now:

Asset creators, those willing to fill the store will assets. (You will get to sell these assets, or give them away free, you decide. You also get Gold Membership. Some may become employed in the future if the site takes off.)

Web Designers and Developers. (You will be the core team for making this site function and operate properly. You get to be employees to the site.)

PR for running the community base, support, and social media exposure. (Earn monthly commissions on performance, bigger the consumer base and reputation, the bigger the pay)

Currently we have a few people all geared up to go with this and after researching this could be quite large if we do it right and offer great communication from consumer to seller.

So if you wish to be apart of this project and help us get a prototype of this site going please respond by sending me a resume or proper portfolio of experience.

Were currently only wanting a core unit of roughly 20 people at the moment with free time to spend on this.

We hope this can benefit many areas of design and development, even outside of the gaming world.

Email:
Skype:
PM or reply here.

2

I think if you charge people to upload content from day one, you won’t get enough content to drive demand organically. I think the website is going to have to be free to use for a period of time before you can start charging people. If someone doesn’t already have a vested interest in your team’s personal success (i.e. anyone who isn’t your friend and doesn’t follow this thread), they’ll look at it purely from a “how can I benefit from this website” point of view. If you have 100 users on your website, chances are my $5 sword model won’t make much money - not enough to truly care about making a login account and giving you my credit card information and paying 5 bucks. From the other side of the coin - if people aren’t uploading lots of assets (due to the website being brand new and you charging content creators), your buyers won’t sign up because there isn’t a specific item they “JUST HAVE TO HAVE” for their game idea.

I think charging people for anything up front (buying, selling, advertising, or whatever) will significantly hurt your membership numbers as you try to get off the ground, which at that time is more critical than making sure trash doesn’t get submitted for sale (because as an admin, you can spend 15 minutes each day deleting that content or doing whatever you want with it). You’re already taking 7% off each sale, so maybe just leave it at that. Promote the value of shared success and community so your community feels supported while it grows.

I also don’t think you’ll be able to roll out support for all of the game engines you want without help from a lot more than 20 people. It’s going to take hundreds (if not thousands) of users creating stuff to reach the financial success you’re attempting. A better idea might be to focus entirely on recruitment - do some searching on (and all the dozens of similar sites) and find their top contributors. Ask them to post their stuff for sale on your site and offer free advertising for the best content.

Think about the comparison - lets say you bring on a really good artist and he makes 15 high quality items for you, but I bring on a really good recruiter and he recruits 5 well known artists from places like . Now all of a sudden I have 500 assets to put on the store vs. that one artist who made 15.

I think your focus should be more on recruiting proven content sellers and ensuring your website’s backend and sales framework can handle your growth through 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000 users.

3

The people who join me to make this site and get the assets going are not charged. if you read the whole thing you would have noticed where i said those who come on board to make this get Gold access and some will be employed for the site if it takes off. Only people coming in after the sites release will have to pay to have their assets for sale. Sorry for any miss communication on that.

Essentially that is why i said we need roughly 20 people tops so that we have enough assets prepared.

4

You would need more than what you have there, as far as people to work on a service like that. I also have to wonder what the need is, since for instance Unity has an asset store, and UE4 will have an asset store. And there’s other places to get assets as well.

5

Not many offer all that at one location. They also take higher percentages of your money for sold assets. I am offering little to no percentage cuts on sold assets. We also are offering discounted hosting for web and games.

Find me such a site all wrapped in one. On top of that we will offer education in forums of tutorials like what you would get on Digital Tutors. We are also offering assets for several based game engines. Not just a particular one.

Our goal would be…“One site gets you from start to finish on any type game for a fraction of the costs”. If you need extra cash then throw up an asset yourself to sell to keep buying more asset if need be.

This will take some time to get going but I am thinking it would do well. I will continue to take suggestions and opinions to better the idea, but still much rather get more people to assist and become a part of it.

Thanks for the comments thus far.

6

The idea sounds great, but I’m not sure if you can really pull it off. However, if you do get the site up and running with all those services you promised, I’m happily going to pay 15$ to use it and sell some stuff. I would like to see it happen.

7

Assets for UE4 should be exclusive on EPIC’s store otherwise the asset store itself wont work.

What Epic can do is provide a web API for their asset store so artists n devs can use their items anywhere.

8

Are you sure you could afford all of those features? As far as maintenance cost goes

And honestly I don’t see a need for all of it to be in one place, there’s the forums for getting tutorials and answers, and since the asset stores are separate for the different engines I don’t have a problem trying to find stuff that works with Unity or UE4.

9

I wasn’t confused at all by what you said and

unfortunately I did.

Those 20 members you bring on who get free gold access (yay I get a $15 coupon for what will surely be months of work?) won’t be nearly enough of a subscriber base to do anything at all. You need several hundred unique users to even consider this “getting off the ground”. To THOSE first 1000 people, you should not charge them. The more you talk about it, the more I see this as you simply trying to find a different way to get paid rather than a different way to support the games industry.

I also agree with what everyone else is saying - people aren’t going to “dabble” in Cryengine then switch to Unreal engine then try out Unity engine when they’re serious enough to buy stuff (for real money) from your store. Learning a new engine is a pain in the ***, and if you’re building an actual game, porting that game source to another engine is equally painful. So then, why if I’m using Unreal Engine, would I care at all about Unity Asset store? The answer is that I don’t. So why would I want to visit a website that’s main hook was that it supported Unity and Unreal (and presumably all the other engines)? Unity’s Asset Store is a very impressive version of a storefront (and I’m sure costs Unity significant money to keep running smoothly) - how can you think you’ll draw people away from a superior storefront that’s integrated into the engine itself when your main appeal is going to be “but we have useful tools for these engines you DON’T use too!”.

We haven’t even touched on the fact that you’re asking people to put their credit card information in and you’re setting up a storefront. Have you ever done that before? Who will provide the security for your website to ensure credit card information or login information isn’t stolen? Which credit card companies will you verify with to insure yourself against fraud? Have you thought about the cost or logistics of that at all? Playing with other people’s money and their financial information is like playing with fire.

IndieDB/ModDB are good examples of successful communities and would be considered goals in terms of traffic. It took them at least 5 years to build a decent community and another 3-4 years to grow that into what it is today. It also consumed their lives - they weren’t making games on the side because they didn’t have time.

I think you should probably find other ways to print your money because this venture is risky, lengthy, and detracts from your main desire (to make games I’m guessing). Also, it doesn’t sound like you have any experience at all in managing payment platforms or high traffic, sales-driven websites (but I’m sure you’ll want most of that royalty because it was your idea).

Lastly, this is clearly a recruiting thread disguised as an “evaluate my idea” thread. It should be moved to the help wanted section.

10

I have to disagree. It does not take 20 people too long to get some assets out. Remember were not going to have 100’s of users on opening day of the site launch. I have worked with many web solutions and applications and a majority of the site is mostly coded and needs minor tweaks to work the way we want. The hard parts are getting a nice library of assets and design the site. Also that $15 Gold access you talk so mildly of can give you a key that can unlock serious earning potential.

Also so years of experience people like variety. If they want to use Unity asset store or the Unreal marketplace than so be it. I am not forcing this site onto anyone, it was just a great idea and has serious potential. If you do not want apart of it then I ask you to please leave the thread alone. I have gathered your input and will use it as motivation to see this idea comes to light. I also feel you have at this point made it clear you dislike the idea. So I see no further reason lingering here to only derail the thread with more negative comments.

I have done collective research on mega stores such as Envato and went through picking out the features and pitches they offer to utilize in this overall design. There is no Envato for game designer, or developers. We want to be the first. Take it or leave it, either way you will not slow me down. Too determined for that.

11

We had discussed this back in the UDK IRC a long time ago, and in theory it makes sense, but without support or promotion from EPIC it is really hard to get people to use it. In example most of the tutorials on UDKC were transposed by Sir Polaris and others who worked on it, and not many things were posted directly to it. I could be wrong, but this is what I recall.

To add to this though this could be an interesting addition to the wiki that is already established with linkage to the specified “service” but outside any hosting type features I think EPIC is attempting to cover the other elements with the marketplace down the road.

12

This site is beyond just UE though. We plan to cover many other engines. Over the years I have worked on many fun project using many engines. I now have my own small network of 800+ game devs and designers spanning around the globe using different applications. So I have a base in which to work with. I have almost 820 Skype contacts to date and took me roughly 6 years to obtain that resource.

Almost 820 game designers and developers that are in need of such a site to bring everything together. That is not a bad start at all in my opinion.

My Skype is a solid resource pool for when I need help or they need help. They would even contribute assets to get the site going if needed, but this community was fairly new so posted the idea here first.

13

summed it up pretty well. With the coming changes to the Marketplace allowing users to upload their own content, this website would be irrelevant.

14

Depends on what you need. It would be for UE stuff only, my site is more than that. Also I bet UE marketplace will be taking their cuts per sale. Normally large companies take up to 30% cuts.

15

Yep. We had the same idea too started with one engine and expanding to others. We had a name for it too even. NextGindie. Its a play on Next Gen Indie. But it basically ended up being what ModDB/IndieDB already is with some extra elements such has free hosting and access to project management.

16

I dont believe they will, since they only want 5% cut on revenue made with games. Why would they want 30% cut on $10.
Assuming things…

17

You said our new site, now it’s my site. Seriously put an age restriction!

18

Well assets are guaranteed products. While games may never get made nor sold. So in a business world you take bigger cuts on things that sell faster and or more likely to sell.

19

Thanks for correcting me on that. But not sure what the little age restriction was meant for.

20

But as summarized, how will you convince people that it is safe to hand you their credit card information and that it will be secure? That would be a given with Epics Marketplace. Same for exposure, there will be more traffic there given the large community surrounding the UE4. As has been explained above, sites like these take a long time to build a commendable reputation. You’re talking about something that will require so much effort, you won’t have time to even make games. This isn’t exactly a weekend endeavor.