Game Dev

Problem? Making more Money with Assets than Games

Here is an interesting post from a developer with a very curious "problem", they're making more money selling Assets than Games.

This is something that a lot of people might not realize is also a path you can follow: You can make money making games, or you can be a full time tools/assets developer.

There are several developers (and entire companies, like Odin and Synty Studios) making a living from selling assets on the various Asset Stores (Unity Asset Store, FAB, Turbosquid, Envato)

You can make visual asset packs, sound and music packs, you can sell animations, sell UI packs, complete game toolkits, or of course individual tools. Some of those, like the A* Pathfinding Project PRO, can make a ton of money, but I don't think there are any public numbers so not sure exactly how much.

Although just like with Steam itself, the Asset Store is also extremely crowded. If you make yet-another-generic-Platformer on Steam, you will likely sell 0 copies. And if you make yet-another-generic-Low-Poly pack on the Asset Store you will likely also sell 0 copies.

So the same lessons you learn about marketing Steam games (validate your idea, analyze if there is an audience for it, find out how to reach that audience), those same questions also apply to making Assets. Definitely DON'T assume you can just make an asset, upload it to the Asset Store and sit back to watch the money roll in, it doesn't work like that.

Fun Fact: Unity itself started like this. When the company was founded they were making a game, GooBall, which was a complete flop. However in building the game they had to build an engine from scratch and they realized perhaps it would be best to sell the Engine itself instead of selling games. The rest is history.

Affiliate

FREE Motion Warping Tool, $1 Bundle!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Kinemation, publisher with many interesting animation tools.

Get the FREE Motion Warping: Climb & Interact which is a motion tool for doing climbing and interact animations, great for any action adventure game.

Get it HERE and use coupon KINEMATION2025 at checkout to get it for FREE!

Got $1? Get a nice bundle with visuals and tools!

The RPG Farming Kit looks like a great starting point for a Stardew Valley-like. The Low Poly Cartoon House could make for a great Sims-like. Or the Tiny RTS set would be great for a Red Alert-like.

You can make quite a lot of games for just $1, get it HERE!

Tech

Top Tier Graphics are here! (for $$$!)

NVIDIA has recently unveiled the RTX 50 series and the biggest one of all, the 5090, is releasing soon with reviews already out.

The official numbers appear to show insane 2-3x performance improvements, some games going from 40fps to 200+! But upon looking at the fine print it seems a lot of those gains are driven by DLSS 4 where it's only rendering 1 out of every 3 frames and generating the other 2 with their machine learning models.

Some people just care about raw FPS, whereas others want to make sure the card is running full resolution natively. Personally if DLSS doesn't look like it has many artifacts then I don't mind it, and thankfully DLSS 4 seems to be a nice improvement, you can only see some artifacts if you really zoom in.

The consensus based on reviews seems to be about a 30% raw performance improvement compared to the 4090 which was already a beast. And it will be priced at $1,999 which is actually lower than what the 4090 has costed for this past year.

The new founder cooler design is also a bit strange, it does not blow air out the back of the case but rather upwards onto the CPU. I wonder if this will cause issues with CPU cooling since it will be receiving hot air as input.

The card also has a MASSIVE 575 wattage requirement! That's a massive amount of power!

Gaming

Find Hidden Gems!

Looking for your next favorite game? This website, Steam 250, has an excellent amount of data!

It's a website dedicated to improving game discoverability, it helps you sift through Steam's massive (and growing) library that includes lots of awesome games that might not find an audience.

Their algorithm is more based on player reviews and rankings as opposed to sales numbers (which is how Steam mainly sorts games)

You can sort by Genre, Tags, Price, Release Year, or just check out the Top 250 games on Steam. It's interesting to see how that list is almost completely fixed, very few games go up or down in the ranking. Stardew Valley at Number 1!

Looking at the Hidden Gems chart it also seems pretty good! Great for finding great games.

Fun

Super cool visual style!

Nowadays it's extremely important to stand out with your game as soon as possible. One way to do that is with an interesting visual style like this game has.

The flat sprites on a 3D world look great, as does the entire presentation on a book, and the game concept itself, a village builder where you place buildings and guide your units, it also quite interesting!

It seems like the developer has just started working on it, no Steam page yet, but it already looks quite impressive. I'm curious to see how this one will do.