Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

There are many ways to make a living in game dev, the obvious one is selling games, but becoming an asset publisher is also a valid path!
You can make either visual assets, or you can make all kinds of tools to help developers make their own games.

However while it's definitely a viable path, do keep in mind how it's basically just as crowded as Steam. Don't expect to just put up a random Low Poly pack and suddenly make $10,000, that likely won't happen.

The Asset Store doesn't have a robust discovery algorithm like Steam, so it requires a lot of marketing on your end which is quite difficult to do. Asset marketing doesn't really have wishlist or any of that Steam marketing meta.

You need something very special to get a ton of visibility, something that people desperately want, something that is instantly useful (tool) or something that hits a particular niche (visual); or you need a following to market the asset. That's how I was able to find success with my own Code Monkey Toolkit asset, it was because I spent the last 8 years building an audience. Without it I don't think it would have found success, even if it was as useful as it actually is just because of the lack of discoverability on the Asset Store.

On the Asset Store it is very important to find success right at launch. You need to sell enough copies to have your asset rise above the rest in order to be invited into future sales, and that's where you actually make money. If you don’t find success at launch you won’t get invited into those sales and your asset will basically be forgotten amongst the thousands of other assets that exist.

And just like with Steam you need to think of a marketable idea, you need something that developers actually need. They probably don't need yet another Low Poly Weapon pack, there's already thousands of those. Think of what unique visual assets or tools might developers need, and then find a way to reach those developers.

But despite being difficult it is a viable path that you should know about and maybe experiment with.

Perhaps you might become like Unity themselves where they first started as a Game studio building the game GooBall which didn’t really find much success, but in building the game they built their own engine and realized the engine itself was a genuinely useful tool, and that’s how Unity was born.

Thanks for reading! Best of luck in your game dev journey!