Starting a Weekly Blog, and Thoughts on Asset Stores + Social Media

So lately I’ve ventured into the game asset market, and something that was readily noticeable even before I started figuring out what to submit was how important the social media thing is to getting noticed. This wasn’t really a surprise to me, because over the period of time since the internet came into existence people have increasingly used to communicate. Almost everyone I know uses Twitter, Facebook, or some other social media platform nearly daily, however, I’m something of an oddity in the group of people I grew up with in that until very recently I hadn’t been involved with anything of the sort. I never wanted a phone or any sort of mobile internet connected device, and to this day I still don’t actually own a mobile phone.

Now, I don’t want this to turn into some ramble about why I don’t have a phone, but I do feel that I should point out that I have never had one. Personally I think that the reason that I’ve never really gotten into the social media platforms is related to that fact. Getting back to the topic of how social media relates to the game asset market though. A few days ago I released Volume 1 of the Starbox Collection for Unity3D, however, I purposely didn’t make much noise about it on forums or other platforms just to see if it would even get noticed. The only thing I did to even let people know about it was a single tweet on twitter.

If you’ve released something before, you might be thinking that was a little silly, but I wanted to know if it would get noticed at all if I just didn’t say anything about it. Unsurprisingly, the answer was a resounding no. This wasn’t a surprise to me, however, I did still want to see if anyone would notice it and buy it. Even so, I feel like it can still be a successful package, because it does come with some rather nice looking skyboxes in my opinion.

I’m probably a bit early in posting this, however, because I did actually submit that package of assets to multiple places. The Unity3D asset store is so full of stuff that you’d be hard pressed to notice my assets even if I had gone on a rampage telling everyone about it, however, the primary other asset store I sent my package to is not very crowded at all. The Unreal Engine 4 marketplace, which is where I’ve also sent this package, is almost the exact opposite of the Unity3D asset store in that it is nearly empty. This appears to be due to the higher standards and clunkier process for content publishing for the UE4 marketplace.

The primary difference that I see making a noticeable impact on asset sales on the UE4 marketplace is the fact that Epic Games, the creator of Unreal Engine, actually does a bit of marketing for your assets when they come out. If they decide to let your assets onto their store then they will also be featured in a weekly blog post and twitch stream that show off new assets available on the market. I don’t know how many people actually watch for new releases every week, however, I know it’s certainly going to put the assets in front of a lot more people than just throwing it at the Unity3D store and hoping it gets seen.

Moving away from the asset store side of things though, and going back to what has become very clear to me over the last year or so, I’m trying to get active on places like Twitter and Google+. I’ve also started up my website, not that you don’t know that already (hint, you’re reading on it), although that was mainly because I wanted a central place to show off my stuff and direct people interested in what I do. My goal this year is to start releasing more projects instead of just banishing them into the depths of my storage drive, and to let people know about those projects.

A quick question for anyone reading this, do you consider yourself to be a well-known person? If you do, then why do you think that, and how did you become well-known? I’m asking primarily because I’m curious to know how other people got their start. Personally I’m known mostly for my work modding the game Garry’s Mod, however, lately people are starting to know me for my work with Unreal Engine 4.

As an attempt to get into the habit of using all this stuff I’ve made related to social media I’m going to try to post something on this blog at least every week. So if you wanted to see more stuff come out of me, then stay tuned for that. Maybe I’ll come up with some fancy name for it like Random Blog Wednesday or something.

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