I’ve been thinking about a project and I’d like to hear your opinion out.
I currently sell professional assets at a 3D Store with prices ranging from 6$ to 33$ and I had this idea to create a website of my own to share all of them for free. This way, I would be surviving on donations instead of sales and a lot of the development community would benefit from it. What do you think about it?
Would you like such a website? Would you actually use it? Would you financially support the website?
So yea… My personal input? I’m a beginner dev who is starting out completely fresh. I have no money to purchase assets and while I’m able to find assets to toy with, none of them are what i would call “professional.” At first, the idea of providing funding for those assets would be a no. However, for someone like me, I would appreciate assets to work with, even on a non-commercial basis, that were of the professional level. After getting good enough to actually develop things that are worth money and I started making money, I would gladly support the site and the creations. But as a noob, i don’t have the money to purchase $30 assets just to be able to create and learn so i wouldn’t be able to donate. I can say, however, that i would donate what I had randomly that wouldn’t “put me under.” I know that there are a lot of people out there that wouldn’t though, and that would be the worst of it.
I think it would be super useful for people like me that are just starting out and would really like high quality content to learn with. Imagine how stumped we are as it is, once we move to more professional assets we’re lacking certain knowledge for additional settings and variables that the assets work with. It’s like the old saying, “You can’t polish a ■■■■.” I don’t mean that in a rude way against creators that are doing the best they can, but i can post-process all i want to with some assets and it doesn’t help at all, whereas if i were working with more professional assets, the use of post-processing effects and lighting would make all the difference.
It’s a dangerous venture, to say the least. You wouldn’t want to wind up with your assets out there for free and relying only on donations, but at the same time it could really benefit some people and may turn out to be a huge benefit to yourself. Personally, when I’ve gotten good enough to supply things to people, I will be giving out lots of free content. I’ll have paid content as well, but I’ve noticed a very big lack of professional quality content for free with Unreal.
I am a beginner here, digging UE4 just from november. I do dpend time searching for free assets for my initial learning experiments. Right now, I am money restricted, but things are getting better. And, I know I love to give, if I feel respect and urge to do so. I have no idea how that would go money-vise for you, I don’t know how many (or little) are open do donations. But there is that other thing - I think, UE4 still lags behind Unity community in content quantity.