Overpriced assets?

Distribution UE Marketplace
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Part of the problem with setting a price on any marketplace like this one is transparency. A few others have touched on this factor in this thread but it should be mentioned that it is the root cause of the issue at hand. Transparency of the perceived market and what it holds. In a new marketplace, transparency is always a challenge because the market has yet to balance itself out based on only competition. (I should mention that most marketplaces like this one are not transparent. Even older marketplaces.)

When an asset developer places their package on the market they have to determine a price. To determine this price they determine the answers to their own questions. Some of those questions could be:

  1. How much are others charging for similar assets in this market?
  2. How many hours did I spend developing this package?
  3. How many people are actually buying assets in this market?

The third question that I listed is the most important question to be answered. Unfortunately, that information is not available; it is not transparent. Why you might ask… is that the most important question? The reason it’s the most important question deals with sales volume. If I know that a market is very popular, for instance the Steam market, I know that I can charge less for my assets and the overall sales will be worth the effort. I know that in a popular market my asset can sell several copies because it will reach a larger number of consumers. However, if an asset developer thinks the market is not very popular then the asset developer has to balance their prices with the prices set by other developers on the market. This is how a market balances itself out based on a competitive scale. A new market has less balance because there is less competition. A new market is also perceived as a low sales volume market and thus prices are higher.

Therein lies the issue with transparency being unavailable to developers on the market. As a developer myself, I have no means of which to identify how many customers are actually making purchases in this market. If that number is low then transparency will be a bad thing for consumers. Asset developers would be made aware that sales volumes in this market were low so they have to charge more to make up for the lack of volume. If that number of consumers is high then transparency is a good thing for consumers because asset developers would know they could charge less and still attain a profit worthy of the effort spent developing the assets.

Now, I am not taking sides here. I think that the market is new and eventually it will balance itself out. The quickest way a consumer can assist in balancing out that market is to make newer developers feel welcomed. I’m not saying that you have to buy their assets to make them feel welcomed. Simply things like complimenting their work on this forum is one way or just being nice and professional in your critique is another. A few others have said, “Vote with your wallet.” That there is a catch 22 because the market is not transparent. It can be effective or damaging to the time it takes for the market to balance out. If people don’t buy assets because the difference of a couple bucks then the asset developer may assume that their package didn’t sell because there are not enough consumers in this market. They leave and as a result there is one less asset developer and the market doesn’t get competition in order to balance itself out.

I only took a few courses in Business back in my college days so don’t ask me how to fix it but I felt I would just throw a few points out there for discussion.

I did think of one idea, sort of a bargain bin section set apart from the Main marketplace. Cheaper prices, lower cut to Epic, fewer assets required to post in it, nothing in that section of the market can cost over five dollars. Might help to bring in more asset developers and create additional competition in order to balance out the Main market. I don’t know, it’s just an idea.

NOTE TO OP: A game may only cost you 60 bucks but some company had to spend millions of dollars to make it. Sales volume makes it possible for you to get the game for far less then the millions it cost to make. Sales volume directly effects the price of marketed goods.

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Actually i’m not making up numbers, these are roughly based on my own marketplace sales and numbers from a friend who has a similar asset pack listed around the $150 mark.

But, even if they had been numbers pulled out of thin air they would be representative of consumer trends based on the majority user base for UE4 since it dropped it’s subscription fee.

114

His point still stands, Charleston, you have not done an A/B test on that. Not saying you should be expected to, you can’t, but trying instead to take that experience of “I made X and my mate made Y”, and generalise that out to a market full of a wide range of different product types with different amounts of content to which different sets of variables re scarcity, demand, etc apply, and some but not all of which directly compete, is absurd. The idea that “Lower your price and you will sell sufficiently more units to cover the difference AND MORE” is applicable broadly as a rule is absurd.

I’m thinking of doing a blog post with all my sales stats and whatnot. Haven’t yet, but in the meantime he’s some anecdotal evidence for whoever’s interested: I have items priced at $5, $20, $30 and $100 (for a while one at $40). The $100 one has made substantially more than any of the others. The $5 one, which is much more generally useful, hasn’t sold a bunch.

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This just in: thread is going in circles, round and round. In case you didn’t notice.

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The nature of the UE4 Marketplace means that it has to be generalized… You can’t get an aggregate data set from an A/B test on a marketplace which has digital assets comprised of varying levels of quality with so many different types of content.

Even an A/B/C/D/E/F/G test scenario would be meaningless.

If the marketplace were only selling 3D Meshes of a certain quality standard or only selling Texture packs of a certain quality standard then an A/B test would be relevant.

The marketplace procedures are still being developed and it has improved quite a bit since it’s launch so i’m sure this will be addressed but over-saturating the marketplace with over priced assets will become a larger and larger issue as it grows.

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coming from a hobbits point of view I thing the marketplace price is about right, if most of content was $10 more you would probably find most people would not bat a eyelid, I think anything under $30 and people wouldn’t rally care, I know anything over $50 I tend to thing about it, but it doesn’t mean I wont buy it.
what is will say is that I have read a lot of people seem to be comparing “industry rates”, I do think its a bit of a mute point, since you don’t need a licence to work, there is no regulations or codes you need to work to, and I dare say any enterprise bargaining agreement would be impossible, really the only industry rates is how much do you think you are worth and then you find out what your mate is on and compare. most of the stuff on the marketplace( if not all) is quite low in the skill level any person can go onto youtube and crate 90% of it, it is more the speed on witch you can do it and the quality level may different.

I do find it funny that people from Epic in this thread say they don’t want to dictate prices to people nor do they want a say in it, since it is there marketplace, if items are too expansive then people want buy and the marketplace will stagnate. if prices are to cheap then people want developed and the market place will stagnate, either way they don’t want people buying and selling UE4 assets somewhere ells, so of course they need prices to be fair.

anther question is how many people / developers take in to account the price of assets sold in the market place before the choses a engine to develop on, knowing that similar assets far found though out the net in other places.

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This is pretty much what I’m saying, and it invalidates your point about “Would you rather sell 500 units of an asset pack at $20 each or 20 units of an asset pack at $150 each”.

A much, much larger problem is the systemic devaluing of the work and time of game development professionals, the race to the bottom that we see in every marketplace where measures aren’t taken explicitly to avoid it. People are unwilling to pay what is required because they are taught that higher prices = exorbitant prices. The result of low prices across the board is the business is unsustainable for most folks.

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What’s Epic’s policy on sellers revealing their own sales numbers? I notice that most sellers don’t mention them.

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Not sure but I would think they are private about it. I do know that on some marketplaces it is against policy for sellers to reveal that information. Probably would be a good idea to verify that you are allowed to reveal sales data before doing so.

Regarding the price of assets in this market, I don’t really have a problem with the prices myself. Most of them seem about right to me.

121

I don’t care about price, I care about quality. There are only few quality packs on Marketplace and in those price are good. It doesn’t matter if asset cost $200 if it looks good. My worry that Marketplace will turn out to be just a copy of Unity Store is coming true. I can see more and more bad Unity ports and low poly stuff on Marketplace.

122

I feel your pain but also see logic in the cost because it took me over an hour to learn how to make a very very low quality vehicle and that’s with out staticmeshs, rigged, animation, wheels (lmao) that move and not knowing how to import a blender file sucks lol. But I would like to see devs put in either trials to where you can try out the assets before buying, demos where you can try maybe one of the assets or my favorite free until you actually make and produce a game. So for instance, you really like an asset so you download it and begin using right away, well in order to produce or “BUILD” the game to a complete state you must purchase the asset or it won’t build your game to be produced. IDK if that’s possible but sound like a great idea for people like me with no future in actually producing a game but want to see what I can do with it, so who knows in future maybe I learn enough to actually produce a working game that I can be paid for then I would buy the asset because I know I’m not just throwing money out of the window. Right now even with marketplace content you still have to know so much about what your doing before you can actually implement just any asset into a game and expect it to be like a final game product, no it doesn’t work like that. So why not just free until you go to build the playable game the assets that are not “FREE” say you must buy product before building the game with the assets features in them.

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Epic should really show purchase stats, similar to Google Play: Installs 100 - 500.

When you have similar items you’d want to know which one sells more.

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I wouldn’t say I don’t care about price. I’m paying my way through college so I do have to keep on a budget, and the subjective quality has to be >= asking price, not to mention the return it gives you. There could be a fantastic, professional stone statute static mesh, but I’m not going to pay $200 for it unless it is going to be pretty pivotal to my game.

Also yes, the unity porting is getting annoying. They don’t have the same oomf in the materials.

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Porting Unity assets to UE4 should be banned by epic. Unless the textures/materials are physically correct.
Most of those who port don’t spend a little time creating a proper material. They use the same old textures.

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Or at least figure out what it means to be pbr. The material may use pbr maps, but you can tell they were hastily generated.

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Porting from Unity to Epic requires additional texture work for sure as does vice versa. I don’t think the practice of porting should be banned but I do agree that Epic should ensure the collision, textures and lightmap UVs have been properly adjusted to work in the Unreal Engine. They could add in a check box that asks if the assets were ported from another game engine. This would make it easier for them to identify which assets need to be double checked for such a scenario.

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i think anyone who has serious game making plan and has already everything planned then most of assets are very good priced, final game may bring much more money than you spent on marketplace. Do not forget that Epic is pumping lot of free assets to everyone with UE4.

129

Two points
First of all I believe that assets, even if they’re re-used in many games, do not always lose value through re-use.
Some might, but others may even gain in value as they become accepted as a standard. UI is an example. Look at your average MMO skill icon, the questionmark for quests, map icons etc.
If used correctly, by that I think of correct placement into a unique level for instance, one single asset could be re-used hundreds of times and you won’t even notice it’s the same because it’s either just a part of the big picture or fakes the mind into believing that.
Think of trees, flowers, stones, junk on the ground etc. Things that make a setting feel complete but nobody ever really looks at if you design your levels correctly.
Of course you should always present the player with unique assets as well, to differentiate from other titles.

My second point is that assets do not define the average game (game meaning: creating a setting/environment that follows certain rules and allows the “player” to interact with these in a risk-free way).
You could create 1000 RTS games that all look different but have exactly the same mechanics and nobody will ever bother playing all of them. Not even a fraction. Why? Think of what games are and you’ll quickly find out.
The problem isn’t the price of assets - the problem is the lack of really innovative ideas and finding out (as a developer) what the core mechanic really is that is enjoyed by your audience.

A great recent example is Trine 3 - which was impacted a lot by the fact that they focused a new gameplay combined with a very expensive asset pipeline in comparison to earlier titles. The result: the core audience never cared about their new gameplay / asset quality and as a result the sales are poor. I’d even go so far as to bet that if they had just re-used all of their older assets (re-worked slightly maybe) but improved their core gameplay mechanics and created a new story it’d have sold a lot better.

So in closing I have to admit prices aren’t so low that average hobbyists will just go through the store and buy everything - but they should be able to sandbox enough to refine their gameplay, script and all that and decide what asset quality they need to finalize their game idea. And in that regard the prices of the assets on the store are perfectly fine. Especially if you look at the license (which I believe is totally for small hobbyist teams)

The only negative point I’d have to make is art asset consistency. Currently it’s not yet perfectly viable to just buy certain asset packs and expect them to harmonize well together. For that the number of available assets is still too low and the techniques / art styles used to create them differs too much.

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i agree, these are steep to buy just to make a game with

131

yeah but that is still crazy, if i buy one and it’s ****, i will be filing a complaint to consumer affaris about this!!!, i think it’s stupid you let them charge so much!!!