[SURVEY] for a new business startup to benefit the game dev community
Hi,
I wanted to research this concept
The idea of it is to allow you to sell and buy your game assets or resources, and manage it via a professional world class portal, an one stop shops with all game development assets, including graphics, fonts, code, tutorials, branding, web templates, marketing material, you name it. Content created by game devs. for game devs.
Also to allow you to make some money back on projects which are stopped, but there have been loads of assets developed. The focus on professional commercial level and not free products - yes this will be a business, or that is the intent.
If you would be so kind as to help us by answering this short 19 question survey, we would be really thankful!
Here is the SURVEY
I wanted to research this concept
The idea of it is to allow you to sell and buy your game assets or resources, and manage it via a professional world class portal, an one stop shops with all game development assets, including graphics, fonts, code, tutorials, branding, web templates, marketing material, you name it. Content created by game devs. for game devs.
Also to allow you to make some money back on projects which are stopped, but there have been loads of assets developed. The focus on professional commercial level and not free products - yes this will be a business, or that is the intent.
If you would be so kind as to help us by answering this short 19 question survey, we would be really thankful!
Here is the SURVEY
Comments
1. This is an imagined problem. You're trying to solve a problem that you feel you have, there are other ways to get graphics for your game (they were mentioned here), buying graphics online is not the best way to go about it. The real issue you have is that you're not experienced enough with game development to have developed a style or reputation that you can trade on to entice team members to join you. Building a website will not fix the actual problem you're experiencing.
2. The margins are terrible. Building and selling asset packs is not profitable work unless you're making extremely general packs that loads of people can buy for cheap and you hope you can make profit on volumes. Those volumes do not exist - game developers self-select themselves out of your target market as they get better at building games and can afford to pay for custom art (which is the high-margin side of the equation).
3. Aiming for the people with the least money. We're not talking Bottom of the Pyramid here, this isn't something that scales and allows people to spend tiny amounts on essential things and defray other costs. Your market is a small set of people without large budgets. Do not try to sell services to yourself.
4. This is a red ocean. One quick google search turned up a bunch of stores that you're not only going to have to compete with for customers, but for producers too. There are stores that have captive markets, like Unity's Asset Store, that you'll never be able to compete with. There are free repositories that will undercut you on price constantly. You're also running into a chicken and egg visibility problem - without good graphics packs you're not going to get customers, without customer numbers you're not going to get good creators keen to put their content on your site. You're going to have to break that deadlock if you're to succeed and unfortunately the common method, creating content to sell yourself as a bootstrapping mechanism over time, isn't really an option as far as I can see (otherwise you wouldn't need game art this badly).
5. No unique angle. Yes, there are problems in the asset-selling business that you might be able to innovate against. But I'm not seeing you addressing those and your questionnaire won't help you find them. The successful asset-sellers have either survived for years and years, like Turbosquid, or they're locked on to a never-ending stream of low-budget game developers like Unity's Asset Store. When people are competing by securing territory, you have to have a real game-changer idea to bust that market open. You're only going to get those ideas through using and understanding what the existing solutions are until you're an expert in those and then you get lucky and have a bolt of inspiration one day, maybe.
This is the "building an engine before you know what the game needs" of game asset creation. I don't think it's a good idea and the failure-rates are incredibly high for large required investments. Maybe you're a genius at this stuff and you're super-convinced about this, I'm not.
Maybe my Google history mojo is hax or something, but if I had to dedicate a few days to finding good art assets I could use, I'm sure I could find even better sources. The main thing about looking for graphics is to know what you're looking for instead of just idly searching.
There's also tonnes of artists on MGSA offering their services to create exactly what you want. Since money is involved here why can't you hire a local artist?
We are modelling the envato business model, for the games industry...
and other competing sites focus so much on graphics only, where there is so much more required for cradle-to-grave production and running of a business online...
Yes, margins is a concern and competition in terms of marketing...this also is why we need to run surveys.
But so far honestly, the survey has shown a good interest for this, so having your objective stats on it will make sure it is not skewed to people whom you say "not experienced enough with game development"
It is not just a case of me trying to fix my own problem, even if it is there according to my previous posts....have you considered those post where leading post to this one?
"to have developed a style or reputation that you can trade on to entice team members to join you" this is a barrier to entry, and one more reason to do this...it is like saying only the elite is allowed to go on the beach.
If you don't have experience, then you need money to be able to pay people. Yeah, I see how the instant reaction there is "well, how do I pay less money", but that doesn't cover the non-tangible "what do you do with art" and "how do you communicate about art" skills that need to be built up.
Look, you're clearly convinced that this is a good idea. I'm simply not and telling you why. I'm sorry if that's frustrating you, but I'm seeing you make a couple of assumptive errors (like not realising that your survey is self-selecting for affirmatives and the sample pool is waaaaay too tiny to be indicative - even if you're posting on GMC too) and maybe a little bit of pushback can help and you build a better business.
My hope is to benefit people, as I believe business has the power to do so, and I know this model is hinging on having a supportive community since it will be for the people, and it needs volume to have enough economy of scale. I would like to believe there is a need and a community whom can benefit from this, and I think the industry is at a turning point with some many new comers...we want to be part of that.
The intent is never to "pay less for assets", but to enable individuals and small studios to have access to a larger marketplace. If this business mission was to depreciate the value of assets it will devalue the economics of it and also will not result in the ultimate goals: of allowing more people to make more games, faster and better and with less risk.
I'm at the place in my life where making games, or trying to start a business makes no sense! Yes it would be so easy for me just to go find a day job at an eng. firm and go back to that nice comfortable salary, but I have realised this is not what is currently going on in my heart. I want to be part of this industry and can serve it better, starting a business in it to benefit more people than myself. I have always been keen to build a company and actually have so successfully in the property business.. It goes against most peoples better judgement not to go the easy path of finding a career in this system, which I was part of for many years. Kudos to you whom against all odds did not follow this route and at a young age already managed to build a company!
It takes a very rare type of mindset to achieve this against all odds.
If there are major pitfalls, or cool ideas you have to help me make this concept successful faster then I'd be grateful for you to share them?
There are a couple of other issues: You haven't identified any major point of uniqueness that will make competition irrelevant. And, as much as I sound like a douchebag for saying this, you haven't demonstrated superior taste in selecting either art or games.
I wouldn't bother copying Evanto either - it took me ages to figure out what they actually did on their site. Then when I finally found somewhere with actual content, I wasn't impressed. That sort of top-level marketing fluff-speak maze feels like their business model is more about courting investors than it is about delivering actual content.
What is your sample size, currently? And do you have information on drop-off rates for your survey?
Also they have activeden which made many sales of 5years for flash game graphics, but they are not at all targeting the gaming market well as such. If you look at graphicsriver of theirs people started to submit better or different game graphics packs there as well, so not even their regular users know what to put where, but it least it seems like more people are doing so.
If you look on FGL.com there is a survey for HTML5 and mobile devs, in which they also ask their devs if they would be interested in game assets as a value added service... when it comes to business many times it is not best to try and make something so novel that nobody understands it or have not seen it, because 100% share of a small market is well small. It is easier to carve out a niche from a larger market and learn from others. So yeah it is absolutely not a new idea, only thing that would be new is the people and hopefully yoyogames gives us their blessing to target it to their community.
I understand this makes no sense to must SA devs, whom are largely focused on unity, since you already got a great store. And 3D models make for good products, since its value focused and not volume...
Anycase seems like this fighting on the topic scared people away from commenting or answering the poll...I'd like to show you some stats if it there are at least some results, since I cleared it. AND I'd like to move on from make personal points, and keep it more objective the comments if you don't mind.
Plus if your survey's main source of users was this forum and you were going to base business decisions on such a tiny sample of a much, much larger market... Well, that's a problem.
P.S. Talking about individual skills and experience are totally valid when discussing the founding of a business - entrepreneurs get evaluated all the time - it's not an indictment of you on any personal criteria.
Like, some of the programming packages make sense, because they're fixing holes in workflow, helping you to spend more time solving problems that need fresh solutions (your game's mechanics, your aesthetic direction, etc.) and less time trying to solve problems that have already been solved before that still need to be implemented for many games (managing UI, managing databases and social stuff, networking, managing collisions, lots of other stuff I don't even know because I thankfully don't have to do it).
And hiring artists (freelance or otherwise) to work on something makes sense, because if they're given clear, innovative art direction, you've got a chance of making some art that's fresh, new, still indie-scoped, but something that you can really use to market your game.
But grabbing art off of an asset store doesn't make much sense to me at all. I feel as if art direction is decided on per game, just as game design is decided on per game. It sounds like something really terrible to purchase different bits of art when they've been created isolated from one another, don't have a cohesive art style, weren't designed to work together, and have absolutely no idea what the game's camera angle and distance, mechanic, or anything else is. They will, by nature, by being generic, be at best uninspired, and at worst be unoptimized, Frankensteined mush. Art isn't one-size-fits-all, and it's a bit off-putting when people treat it that way.
I'd be interested in a platform that connects potential freelance artists (i.e. me) to potential employers, but that... pretty much happens around here anyway, in terms of local employment.
[edit] I'm probably biased about this, as an artist who has always been hired to work on specific games, rather than someone who's ever made "generic art".