From August 2018 to present (Nov 2018), it is was a bold attempt and interesting journey for me to become a Unity Asset Store publisher. Within three months, I have learned so much such as promoting a product, dealing with customers, and also asking for reviews from customers.

First free asset
I was always the type of programmer who love to share my code with public, make it open source. And I believe it would be a huge accomplishment if there are 100+ stars in your project on Github. In August 2017, I made my first Unity asset VR Keyboard and published it to Unity Asset store for free. From that time, I noticed there were 100-200 downloads per month. I felt happy about it but in the meantime, I start receiving customers’ emails. Most of the emails were asking some basic programming questions but are not related to my asset. Some of them talked about their VR products and asked me my advice. I always helped them patiently but the emails are a bit overwhelming. Because I am not a full-time asset store publisher, and I realised the reason why people tend to put a relatively high price on Unity Asset Store. It’s not only about selling your asset but also providing customer services.

The $2 asset
So in August 2018, I decided to sell my asset with $2 price. I hope people would support me with this ‘a small coffee’ price. When I start charging, the downloads becomes a lot less. The whole months, I have got 16 downloads which means I earned $32. Unity took 30%, so I got $22 for that months.

The 2nd asset
In September, I planned to publish another asset. It took me 3 weeks and around 5 hours/day to make an advanced VR UI framework. The inspiration comes from different projects I have been working on for the past two years. I published my VR UIKit with $29.99.

The bigger picture
I was very bad at marketing at the start of my journey. The promotion pictures were just some screenshots and the product descriptions were basically technical README. In order to attract more customers and increase the sales, I did the following things:

  • I learned to make fascinating pictures and write product descriptions that sell.
  • I gave away free vouchers of my latest asset to customers who purchased my previous asset.
  • I promoted the assets on Twitter once a week.
  • I updated documentations frequently with announcement of upcoming features.
  • I joined the Unity asset store sales events as much as I can, such as Singles’ Day sale, Cyber Week sale, and etc.

In November 2018, Unity set a minimal $4.99 price tag for all the non-free asset. My VR Keyboard becomes $4.99. In the meantime, managing 2 assets on Unity Asset store made me receive more customers’ emails. The assets definitely connect me with people from different countries. I even received an email in Korean and I had to google translate it. It was also a pretty awkward experience to ask reviews from your customers. Because 70% customers who promised to write a review didn’t actually write it for you. From my perspective, reviews are important but I don’t want to spam my customers in order to let them write a review.

Though it took me around 1 hour/day to reply emails, I have got in touch with a bigger VR group. Those who are working on great projects and who are fighting for their dreams. I would love to see their products and maybe one day I will see my asset in one of the VR apps.

Showcase

(Updated in Feb 2019) The following is a list of some of the public apps using VR UIKit: