I couldn't believe it I did some quick math $650 per day time 365 days per year that's 237,000 you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and selling game assets I'm going to tell you how I did it and I'm going to show you how you can do it but before that let's have a look at what game assets are and how they're made and I'm going to show you how I learned the hard way which game assets sell good and which ones don't why they sell good and where you can sell them game assets could be many different things it could be 3D models it could be 2D images Sprites music sound effects or even pieces of code and editor extensions for Unity and Unreal Engine I know a little bit about many different things and I wouldn't say that I'm an expert in any one thing and you don't have to be an expert in anything either you can actually still make and sell game assets stay until later in the video where I'm going to show you which type of game assets have been most profitable the pros and cons of each type of assets and where you can sell them I often compare selling game assets to selling Spades during the Gold Rush a lot of people want to strike it big and you're not not going to strike at Big selling game assets but it's reliable it's less risky and it requires less determination and perseverance compared to making a game some people during the gold Ross did really get rich and found a lot of gold but most didn't and if you were selling Spades in a hardware store you had a steady supply of sales and you could probably make a comfortable living that way it's the same with games some games make it brutally big like Minecraft Candy Crush Hol nights or even crossy roads but the sad truth is that most games won't make it that big and many will go totally noticed and will not make any profit hm too bad and here is where you can come in because people are chasing that fortune and they want to save time and money and effort and maybe they don't even have the skills to create what they need for their games so if you provide them with game assets is more reliable income for you as they chased the big one let me tell you a story of the discoveries that I made while I was getting into selling game assets and I went from $0 to over $100,000 and some of the things that I discovered have been absolutely crucial to the success the first first type of game assets that I tried to sell was music I had made a bunch of tracks over many years and in May 2011 I put them up for sale and over six months I made 0 this poor result made me ignore the idea for quite a while and then I thought was it because it was music that I didn't sell much or was my music not good enough well in the development process the music is the last thing to get added to a game so all those project that started wouldn't even get to that stage maybe I should try something different so I decided to make an asset that people need earlier in their process what about Graphics surely that's needed early on so I know how to use Photoshop and I like space so I created Five space themed Sky boxes and a particle effects for some flame thrusters Thruster Flames that January back in 2012 I made $63 not a lot but better than zero I added some explosion sound effects and I sold one copy for $5 in February 2012 so maybe music and sound effects wasn't that successful but the space Sky boxes could be something in March 2012 I made $123 mostly from Sky boxes but now I'd sold the odd music pack too and during the rest of 2012 I made about $150 to $300 per month on average and then I thought it was time to create more space themed Sky boxes and instead of hand painting them I decided to create a tool inside of unity that randomly distributed images of nebulas stars planets and galaxies around in a sphere and then I used a camera to face in all six directions and automatically render the Sky Box images that saved me a lot of time and since I created that tool in unity before I rendered my sky boxes I thought why am I rendering skyboxes I could take this tool and make it into an editor extension and have other people create random skyboxes every time so their games would look different from all the other games so I decided to put the extra effort in and develop that as a documented editor extension for Unity with a UI that people could use to create their own randomly assembled Sky boxes I released space for Unity on the 19th of February 2013 and during 10 days I sold 175 copies of space for Unity and that month I made $ 6,524 I couldn't believe it I did some quick map $650 per day time 365 days per year that's $237,200 a year I'd made it I was successful that's going to be it and of course it wasn't it it doesn't scale that way I learned that when you release something it could be very successful but when a bulk people have found it and bought it it sort of es out and dies down it's very similar when you release a steam game but in March 2013 I still made $646 and in April I made $4,388 during the rest of that year my monthly income ranged from $1,994 to $756 I live in Sweden where taxes are high and things are expensive and in 2013 I made $488 201660 from selling game assets I had to register a company quick so I could start paying my taxes properly people often on the left think that the taxes are same for everyone but when you run a business you found out that it isn't as an employee in Sweden you pay 32% tax but the company has to pay 32% tax on top of that as well in employer fees and then it cost a lot of money to register and run a company in Sweden so out of the $ 48,8 201660 that year I got to keep $18,000 and hopefully your country won't rip you off as much in taxes as Sweden do and by the way you don't get all the stuff that people are telling you for the taxes because I have since then moved to Australia where you pay less taxes and the schools and Healthcare is better here so huh get a grip Sweden sort it out quickly so I couldn't quit my job but it was definitely a nice additional income but it also added Administration I had to run the company and do all the taxes for that and I had to develop and support the asset and with me creating an asset that now had code in it and documentation it needed to be kept up to date with the unity version and I also had to support any requests that were coming in and it started to put a lot of extra strain at that time there was a Unity asset called eni which was an alternative and improved version of a UI system for Unity based on the number of reviews and the price that that asset had compared to mine I figured out that he' made probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on the asset alone space for Unity was still selling but it was on a decline and I thought what is making eni so much more successful and then I realized every game needs a UI but only a few game needs space Sky boxes the problem with an asset like enoy is that it contains a lot of code and requires constant support everyone will use it and run into problems no matter how good at coding they are and you also need to stay up toate with the unitive versions which were upgraded about three or four times per year and I already knew from my space for Unity asset that I wanted to try to reduce and avoid the support and maintenance issues music don't require support and neither do sound effects but they hardly sold anything at all light bulb moment like every game needs a UI every game needs sound effects but I'd been selling smaller sound effect packs like 83 explosion sounds or 15 Thruster sounds what if I created one asset with thousands of sounds for any type of game I began to record and design sound effects with the money that I made from space for Unity I bought expensive audio recorders and microphones and I was out everywhere to record sounds I went out into nature I went to the airport train tracks scrapyards motoro shows inside Upstairs Downstairs closing doors opening doors shut and smashing fruit you name it I recorded it I even bought loads of fireworks and brought a friend out and shut it off and recorded all of it to make explosions cuz it doesn't have to be the same thing that you record that you turn it into I released my new asset Universal sound effects in April 2014 and it had an okay launch it wasn't amazing and I started to worry a little bit that all the money that I'd put into buying all the equipment and the recorders and spent all the time recording and editing all the sound effects that it wasn't going to be worth it but I decided to give it a little bit more time now nearly 10 years later Universal sound effects is still selling whereas space for Unity is only selling a copy or two a month Universal sound effects requires zero support and it doesn't need to be maintained with the unity upgrades as it contains only wave files and no source code from 2011 until now nearing the end of 2023 I have sold game assets in the unity asset store for $524,900 before taxes the assets have actually sold for $749,500 but Unity takes a 30% share I know what you're thinking you might think that the unity 30% share is high but let me tell you it is not don't worry about it I know because I also sell assets on my own website where I keep 95% but I make a 100 times more in the unity asset store than I do on my own websites and the reason why is that you can get so much more exposure in the unity asset store compared to your own website you are at the fingertips of developers all they need to do is go into the asset store type in sound effects in my case and I'm there so that's a big difference from selling on your website and I'm happy to pay them 30% because of all the traffic that that's been driving to me so don't get angry at Unity for this it's good so what type of game assets should you sell number one sell assets that you can create or that you have the ability to learn to create number two prioritize any type of game assets that require little or no support like audio or art assets number three prioritize game assets that can be used in any type of game genre so you don't limit your sales to one type of game number four prioritize to bundle multiple assets into one package because if you limit yourself to a theme you're going to sell less and if you sell more to a wider audience you increase the chance and this is very important you increase the chance of reaching the top seller list on the front page and that can make all the difference if you sell stuff that has a lot of stuff for different game genres you increase your chance to get on the top seller list and that could make or break the asset and number five if you get invited to a store sale jump on the train and go sell it at a discount I make 5 to 10 times more of any normal month if I'm included in a sale okay so where should you sell your assets I've sold Assets in the unity asset store on the onreal marketplace on enado and on my own website and for me the unity asset store has by far been the best the unreal Marketplace has also been very good but I'm not as proficient in the unreal game engine so I had difficulties maintaining the updates with the engine updates one benefit of the unreal Marketplace is that they only take 12% instead of 30% and they were graceful enough to actually go down from 30% to their 12% and they retroactively paid out which was a nice bonus when that happened I think it was like half year to a year into it that they did that so nice epic good gesture but the real differentiator for me was the amount of exposure I got in the unity asset store compared to the unreal Marketplace I think I've sold 50 times more in the unity asset store compared to the unreal Marketplace and keeps 70% of the sales and you sell a lot less there so I'm not going to say more about that I also sell my game master on my own website but again they make a lot less there than they do in any game engine store soon epic might be launching fab.com which merges unreal Marketplace quickel sketch Fab and art station into one new storefront I will be launching my assets there and you should strongly consider creating assets and selling them there too you might also want to consider CG Trader where you keep 70 to 80% of your sales I haven't tried it myself but it looks pretty good turbo squid has never really interested me that much because either you keep 40% of the sales or if you go exclusive you can make up to 60% but I would not recommend selling exclusive anywhere because the game asset store is where you're going to make a lot more money hit the like button if you learned something and subscribe if you want to learn more about game development or game assets and I'll see you in the next video
