Critique my service concept

Have you checked out http://www.turbosquid.com? What sets your service apart?

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Original post by bzroom Have you checked out http://www.turbosquid.com? What sets your service apart?

Just took a look at it and it seems like they focus mainly on 3D models and the like. The service I'm working on is a general game asset marketplace where you can sell/purchase nearly anything to do with game development. The idea is to let developers/designers have a more free-range style of market so it attracts the entire community rather than a smaller subset. That was sort of wordy on my end, but does that make sense?

How does the website make money? Like Ebay, will it make a small percentage of the seller's collections, will it have seller fees, some combination of both, etc.?

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Original post by jackolantern1 How does the website make money? Like Ebay, will it make a small percentage of the seller's collections, will it have seller fees, some combination of both, etc.?

Listing an asset will cost "x" and each sold asset will have a y% sales fee.

If you want to license your asset for a continuing royalty, how will your system account for that ongoing payment processing?

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Original post by Pete Michaud If you want to license your asset for a continuing royalty, how will your system account for that ongoing payment processing?

It would be the equivalent of making a monthly subscription payment to the seller. Think in terms of SaaS providers who charge monthly to use their applications, the same would go for licensed assets, the seller would have an option to do a variety of payment timelines (e.g. monthly/quarterly/yearly).

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Original post by Adalric Brandl You're a graphics programmer and have created some really nifty particle generators that you'd like to license out. You create an asset listing with details, fees, a few demo vids to show your code off. Another developer comes along and really likes your stuff and wants to use it in his game. He purchases a license and the seller is notified of the intent to purchase and the two parties conduct their transaction through the site. The seller gets paid and the buyer gets the asset.

That doesn't seem like the best example. I can see this possibly working for models, textures, sound effects and other art assets but a particle generator isn't generally something you can just plug into your game. Perhaps if it's designed as an extension to a popular piece of middleware - the Unreal engine for example - it could be easily used but there's no common standard for particle systems (or most other game systems) on the code side so there just isn't a market for a component based approach to code. How do you envision something like this example working in practice?

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Original post by mattnewport Quote: Original post by Adalric Brandl You're a graphics programmer and have created some really nifty particle generators that you'd like to license out. You create an asset listing with details, fees, a few demo vids to show your code off. Another developer comes along and really likes your stuff and wants to use it in his game. He purchases a license and the seller is notified of the intent to purchase and the two parties conduct their transaction through the site. The seller gets paid and the buyer gets the asset. That doesn't seem like the best example. I can see this possibly working for models, textures, sound effects and other art assets but a particle generator isn't generally something you can just plug into your game. Perhaps if it's designed as an extension to a popular piece of middleware - the Unreal engine for example - it could be easily used but there's no common standard for particle systems (or most other game systems) on the code side so there just isn't a market for a component based approach to code. How do you envision something like this example working in practice?

My example was a bit too simplistic as you saw. :)

It would most definitely be attached to a certain engine/platform rather than a standalone generator, unless of course the person is selling/licensing a standalone product that works with multiple engines.

I'm not a graphics programmer so I should have used an example with a bit more realistic output, like an artist licensing his sprite images. Thanks for pointing that out though; this is why I posted, because I want honest feedback/critiques.

EDIT: I've updated the example scenario to better reflect a more straightforward transaction.

Any other thoughts? So far I've just answered questions and haven't really gotten any "It sucks!" or "I must have this service!" replies... not that I need them to proceed, just wanted to gauge the community is all. :)

It sucks. ;)

-People start up these sites all the time. Ever heard of them? Probably not, because they never get anywhere.

-Specific markets have specific needs and their own sites where this type of business is already handled. Why would I leave a specialist community to go to a generalist site?

-Hobbyists don't have budgets to spend on this sort of content in the first place.

-Pre-made content very rarely suits the needs of anyone who cares about what they're doing. Most people care about what they're doing.

-Pre-made content marketplaces are already widely viewed as cheap and a waste of time with crappy content. This presents a huge marketing barrier right from the start.

-Skilled artists generally make far more money than a hobbyist is going to be willing to pay for even if they had the money. Even freelancers are going to get far more and better paying work directly contacting companies or working through existing firms.

-I don't see any value to this service to anyone but hobbyists, which doesn't bode well for all of the above reasons.

Perhaps if you dropped the "selling art assets" angle and focused purely on hooking up devs with artists (rent-an-artist.com?) then you might have a shot. Otherwise, I don't see it getting off the ground.

My concern about the idea is that I'm not sure if there's a big enough market for this service. You might be able to find some freelance artists or programmers willing to sell content, but I'm not sure who will be willing to buy.

For example, I'm trying to transition from a hobbyist dabbler to a professional indie footing, so I guess I'm roughly the sort of market you would be wanting to buy from you. However, I don't see myself being in the position where I would want to buy a grab bag of assets from an online marketplace.

If I'm a hobbyist, I'm making freeware so I neither have the budget nor the inclination to buy assets. I can make do with free stuff or making my own assets; they might be crappy, but if it's a hobby, who cares?

If I'm aiming to sell commercially then I'd like my game to look professional, and cobbling together a random selection of art assets isn't going to cut the mustard. It seems a false economy to me to pay a few hundred bucks for art that wouldn't mesh together; I'd be better off finding a single contract artist and paying him or her a few grand for a professional job (figures varying on artist and size of project, of course!) In that case, if I were to use your service it wouldn't be necessarily to purchase art but to find a decent artist to contact directly; that might be good for me and the artist, but since we'd be bypassing your service that's probably not what you want! [wink]

Dont listen to the naysayers.

If you have the time and the know-how, and you have convinced yourself that its a worthwhile project, then go ahead and do it.

A website doesnt have to be unique to be successful. In fact I'm pretty sure there are zero unique ideas for websites left.

Imagine if the Twitter inventor had come to gamedev to bounce his ideas off of us first. What feedback would he have gotten?
"It sucks"
"Its been done before"
"I wouldnt use that service"
"How will it make money?"

Just go ahead and build your site. The absolute worst that could happen is that you'll learn a bunch of stuff and gain some experience.

Tomorrow is my last day at my job for the man as I jump ship to try my hand at making a living going indie. The problem with your site is, if I have a $1,000 budget, what benefit do I get from spending it at your site? Sure I might find 10 different sprites, but how many of them have the same visual art style? What happens if one is missing spell animations but has everything else? It seems more logical to spend my budget on a contracted artist with a cohesive visual style filling all the requirements for my project.

As for 3D work, I suppose a texture is a texture and it doesn't really matter. But at that point, you're competing with big sites you've already mentioned.

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Original post by GroZZleR Tomorrow is my last day at my job for the man as I jump ship to try my hand at making a living going indie.

Cool, good luck! What games/platforms/etc. are you thinking of? [smile]

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Original post by Adalric Brandl Any other thoughts? So far I've just answered questions and haven't really gotten any "It sucks!" or "I must have this service!" replies... not that I need them to proceed, just wanted to gauge the community is all. :)

Disclaimer: I'm a game developer, but not indie.

I can sort of see it work for very generic assets; audio: sound effects like explosions, alarms or ambient background music, graphics: textures or fonts. But in reality, you never really need one model of a car, or one set of buttons. You need an entire level with specific requirements where everything has a consistent style. At that point you're better off hiring a modeler to create custom made assets. And building up a relationship with an artist creates more value than just the production of graphics or models.

Apparently you've changed the original example, but the word 'code' is still in the list: code is often already freely (in both meanings of the word) available through various game development communities. The plugins for the Ogre graphics engine for instance, or the libraries for XNA. And again, if you really need some code written, you'd ideally contact a dedicated progammer who could do some custom work for you.

I can perhaps see some potential for a website for freelancers specifically targeting the indie game industry, although I'm not sure that market is big enough.

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Original post by Adalric Brandl Quote: Original post by Pete Michaud If you want to license your asset for a continuing royalty, how will your system account for that ongoing payment processing? It would be the equivalent of making a monthly subscription payment to the seller. Think in terms of SaaS providers who charge monthly to use their applications, the same would go for licensed assets, the seller would have an option to do a variety of payment timelines (e.g. monthly/quarterly/yearly).

No, that won't work. You're talking about a subscription, but royalties are more complicated than that. Let's take a super simple scenario: I charge you 1% of profit per game unit sold for the user of my character sprite collection. How does your system know how many units are sold, or what the margin on the sold units was?

That would mean tying into the accounting system of whoever is selling the games, which is probably something like "wait, we need an accounting system?" but maybe you'll luck out and get paypal, which would give you gross, but never net.

Even if you could somehow get or fudge that data, that scenario doesn't cover everything. What about if the royalties are like 1% for the first 100 units sold, then .75% for 101 through 1,000, then .5% for 1,001 to 10,000, etc. What if it's more complicated than that? Will you just enabled manual invoicing?

Also, I want tochime in on the whole "don't do it" vs. "do it anyway" thing -- what you should do is research the market. Find out what sites exist or have existed, find out what's good and bad about them from a business model stand point, figure out if you can serve an unmet market need. If you can, then try it. If you can't, then I'd figure out a place that you can.

The problem with any kind of site like this, be it a Turbosquid-type site, an auction site like EBay, or others, is that attracting people is a catch-22. People don't want to feel like they are one or four people on the site, because they will feel like they are wasting their time. So they will leave, and the next person to consider joining may also feel like they are one of four people using the site. It seems like these sites have to have a large rush all at once when it opens to create enough content for sale on them to keep later visitors around.

Like jackolantern1 mentions, you have to create a market. The problem is there is currently a small market for content consumers of this type vs content creators. However that is increasing all the time, look at the virtual goods sold on Second Life, Sony Home and Xbox Live (1-2 dollars real world money for virtual items which to adorn their virtual avatars or play some sound fx etc..).

The way I can see this working is if you create a context to which you can sell these goods. You can market the service directly to game developers and that will probably do well, but the mass market you'll have to get an in with the popular games of your day (Second Life and Sony Home and any games which allow content importing).

It wouldn't be too hard to create tools to auto-convert between various applications to support content from existing games. If you get big enough you can even approach game developers and possibly have ur tech integrated in from the start.

Good Luck!

-ddn

I think the site could work if you marketed it correctly. Your highest end market would be professional indies, but if you could get the right kind of sellers, you could also attract hobbyists. I don't do much hobby game development these days, but when I did, I would have happily paid $5 for a set of several textures that matched exactly what I was looking for, or a set of fun sprites. It might be a good way for beginning artists to "get their foot in the door" and make a bit of money.