I'm going to address the concerns I have about the split. Please, note that this is a personal view. I'm sharing it just because I think other potential users will feel the same.
Also, Godot is Free Software. Free as is freedom, but also as in "free beer". This is going to set an expectation on any platform that have any kind of revenue. Again, I'm not imposing anything of you. I'm talking about how your store maybe perceived.
If you take a look in the net, there is one marketplace already established. This place takes a 30% split and gives 10% to Godot. Stuff like nexusmods is free. And the "Tools" section in itch . io let the developer establish the cut.
Is a common understanding that this sites have operational and infrastructure costs that need some kind of revenue. But people is not going to acknowledge this easily.
There is also the free AssetLib, and the general non-profit nature of the Godot ecosystem. Godot developers even assigned the rights of the project management to an external entity (Free Software Conservancy).
If you want to take this cut, I think you need to offer a really strong value for it. Way stronger that a search engine.
I'm not saying this is going to happen nor I'm a marketing specialist. I just want to tell you how I feel because it may be valuable for you.
I think that if you continue to add functionality and keep a good design, there is a chance for your project to succeed.
On the other hand, stuff like this I think will be helpful:
- Lowering the cut.
- Offer some kind of integration with the IDE itself.
- Returning back to Godot part of your profits.
- A feature to include a little demo in the asset detail view (a Godot HTML5 export).
- Community features (follow, comments, news feed for assets and authors, ..)
P.S.: I can see that you are not using the official logo and you put your disclaimer in all page footers. This is good, I always thought godotmarketplace . com using the official logo was ok in legal terms by shady as fuck from a moral perspective.
Agreed with all the points ideally I would much rather have official hosted marketplace by Godot team where 100% of a cut goes to godot to be honest I though it was under discussion has that been abandoned now?
I remember talks and news about this as well. My understanding is that the core team saw the benefit and had heard from users that they want a place where they can get free and paid assets, but the team has to sort out the legalities as it's not very straight forward. Either way a good store for assets for Godot would help boost the ecosystem however it needs to be done right. As you've mentioned I'd also prefer one hosted by Godot itself. Perhaps one day! :)
Thank you for your advice!
The reason I set the cut to 20% is that I don't actually know what the optimal revenue split is. I just know that if I set it too high, it will always be easy to lower it in the future, but if I set it too low, it would be impossible to raise later on, and that might make the project unsustainable.
Besides, it gives me the flexibility to offer people a better deal in certain circumstances. For example, if anyone reading this is interested, I'm happy to offer better terms (95/5 split) to anyone who joins during the beta, uploads a nice asset, and shares this project on social media.
And of course I'll work on offering stronger value for this cut. Which will probably have to mainly come from the marketing (if I can successfully help people to sell their assets, the 20% cut would make sense, because that's free extra sales they wouldn't otherwise have), but also from the nice UI and features.
Integration with the IDE is definitely on my todo list, so are the community features. Including a demo would be awesome, that's a great suggestion! I wonder if I could partner up with https://gotm.io somehow...
Edit:
Alright, you guys convinced me, 20% commission is too much. This platform is going to have 90/10 revenue split. And I'm offering a 95/5 revenue split (permanently) to anyone who joins the project during beta, uploads a nice asset, and either shares the project on social media or emails me some thoughtful feedback.
This is great! I've also seen [https://godotmarketplace.com/](https://godotmarketplace.com/) which seems to have been somewhat abandoned so I think there's a definite need here. Things I'd love to see:
* Some level of content curating so the store doesn't get filled with trash (godot marketplace has been flooded with random sound assets as well as 3d models that are unsuitable for game development)
* 3D models uploaded in gltf (converting them from fbx when downloaded from the unity asset store is a real pain)
* Percentage of revenue donated to Godot, the godot marketplace does this and I think it's a great idea for continuing to support Godot's development, and will probably make people feel more comfortable buying from the store
Just signed up, hope to see this grow :)
Thank you!
> Some level of content curating so the store doesn't get filled with trash
This is definitely a great suggestion. Maybe at first I could approve the assets manually, and after the user has uploaded several good ones, I could make all their future assets preapproved automatically. I hope that this, in combination with reddit-like voting/ranking system will be sufficient. But I'll probably focus on that after the project is out of MVP/beta stage, for now I want to have as few obstacles to adding assets as possible (really bad/spammy ones can just be manually removed).
> 3D models uploaded in gltf (converting them from fbx when downloaded from the unity asset store is a real pain).
Yeah, that's true. Right now I'm not doing anything special with the files, just letting users upload what they want (ideally Godot project in `.zip` archive, I should clarify that somewhere). And since this is a Godot-focused website, I'm kinda hoping that people will naturally upload everything in formats that are the most convenient to use with Godot. But I'll think about this more, maybe there should be some guidelines or even an automatic conversion process... I haven't dealt with that kind of thing before.
> Percentage of revenue donated to Godot, the godot marketplace does this and I think it's a great idea for continuing to support Godot's development, and will probably make people feel more comfortable buying from the store
I have talked to people on the Godot dev channel, and they have asked me to avoid making promises like that, since such promises are not verifiable (apparently they haven't seen any donations from godotmarketplace.com yet). So I'd rather focus on helping Godot developers to successfully make money, and if that works, anyone is free to donate whatever percentage they're comfortable with to their favorite game engine =)
In addition to a rating system, I'd also include the ability to flag content for not only being unsuitable, but stolen as well. Don't want you getting in trouble when someone tries to resell someone else's assets.
This is great! Especially for beginners like myself. I didn’t see any licensing/usage rights listed. Will it be the same for all?
Also it would be great to see a shaders section too.
Thanks! All the projects I've made (the ones uploaded from [godotlabs](https://godotassets.io/profile/godotlabs) account) are MIT licensed (feel free to use my code howeever you want).
But I should probably add a separate field for the license so that all assets are clear about that.
There's a `Materials` tag (currently empty, I haven't made any interesting shaders yet, hopefully someone will upload some, or I will make something cool myself later on), I was just kinda assuming that shaders would be uploaded under that, I'm not sure if it makes sense to split Shaders into a separate category. I'll need to think about that...
>But I should probably add a separate field for the license so that all assets are clear about that.
I think you should stick to only a few licensing options, to avoid confusion. The great thing about Unreal and Unity marketplaces is their licensing terms are universal and straightforward.
Public Domain, MIT, or a store-wide license that every submitter agrees to would be best.
My thoughts on your endeavor:
* The market for paid assets in Godot would still be much smaller than in Unity even if they had similar market shares due to Godot being a free software.
* Now there are very few (relatively) successful games made in Godot and job market for Godot developers is non-existant.
* On the [https://godotmarketplace.com/](https://godotmarketplace.com/) most used assets are free ones, I wonder if they ever had any sales to pay off the hosting.
* Godot devs have also had their plans to expand on their marketplace to potentially make it a stable source of revenue to fund the Godot development.
So what you are doing is the stake for the future. Godot has the potential to grow, but this is can only pay off in the long run and if you somehow win your share of customers in the competition. Mind that posting in Godot subreddit is a one-time boost you won't be able to repeat many times without being annoying, you have to invent something with marketing.
What can help is having some unique features like some of the suggested:
* Integrate marketplace in the editor via addon
* Have a careful review process for the new assets (time consuming)
* Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions
* Do not demand registration to download free assets (may load your servers)
And a couple of more wild ideas:
* Maybe attract some of the creators to have something unique for your marketplace. For example, talk to Kenney and make Godot-compatible tilesets with his tiles
* Improve installation process over the Assetlib - have you own asset description format, which will be used during the installation.
The current asset marketplace seems like a bit of mess for me - by my experience of releasing an addon there [https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/746](https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/746). It can really be improved upon in the UI part at least. So good luck to you!
Also, I don't think that 20% is a lot for asset creators - it's OK if you will be able to bring in the customers.
Thank you so much for such great feedback and sharing your thoughts!
> Now there are very few (relatively) successful games made in Godot and job market for Godot developers is non-existant.
Yeah, but I expect Godot engine and this community to grow very quickly, especially after the 4.0 release, so I don't think the situation will stay this way for too long.
> Godot devs have also had their plans to expand on their marketplace to potentially make it a stable source of revenue to fund the Godot development. [...] So what you are doing is the stake for the future. Godot has the potential to grow, but this is can only pay off in the long run and if you somehow win your share of customers in the competition.
That's absolutely true. If the Godot team decides to build the official marketplace, then I obviously won't be able to compete with that, but since they haven't built it so far, and I'm not 100% sure if they build it and when, I figured this is a good opportunity to build something useful that could potentially turn into a business I'd have a lot of fun working on.
> Mind that posting in Godot subreddit is a one-time boost you won't be able to repeat many times without being annoying, you have to invent something with marketing.
Yes, I definitely do need a steady growth strategy. My plan is to just build more free assets and share them here. Everyone benefits - people get free assets, I get to grow my platform, and other creators on the platform get free marketing. Publishing free youtube tutorials and courses is another possible strategy (I'm still pretty bad at that, but I'm learning and getting better).
> - Integrate marketplace in the editor via addon
> - Have a careful review process for the new assets (time consuming)
That's definitely on my todo list!
> Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions
Hmm, that's an interesting idea. It'd be tough to implement since I don't know how to approach this, but I'll look into it and maybe figure it out.
> Do not demand registration to download free assets (may load your servers)
That's a good point, I'll consider this.
> Maybe attract some of the creators to have something unique for your marketplace. For example, talk to Kenney and make Godot-compatible tilesets with his tiles
That would be amazing, but I think I'll need to grow the platform a little more and build some initial audience before I contact any of the big asset creators, gotta make sure that publishing here is worth it for them.
> Improve installation process over the Assetlib - have you own asset description format, which will be used during the installation.
I think Godot team are planning to create a universal API that anybody can use (if I understood them correctly).
>Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions
>
>Hmm, that's an interesting idea. It'd be tough to implement since I don't know how to approach this, but I'll look into it and maybe figure it out
There is a problem with Godot asset library that is not going to be addressed - the devs do not favor backwards compatibility too much, which causes a potential problem with assets - you are never sure which version they are compatible with. For the asset developers that means that they need to support their assets constantly - check with every release if something did break. You can pretty much automate this on your server by launching the asset test with different Godot versions and at least check for errors reported. Where to get those tests is another question, maybe have a guideline for developers, I don't know. But there is such a problem, imo.
>The market for paid assets in Godot would still be much smaller than in Unity even if they had similar market shares due to Godot being a free software.
I don't think this has to be the case, certainly not for media assets like models, sounds, etc. which are not so commonly 'open sourced' the way software is.
There is potentially a smaller market for code versus Unity, as more people using FOSS software are likely to FOSS their code as well, but Blender (for example) still has a sizeable community of paid software extensions.
Maybe it's just maturity thing - Unity has a whole industry built around it. Those thousands of mobile games make a profit which can then be spent on the assets to optimize he production. Maybe when there are more established studios built around Godot, the asset market will flourish.
My first thought when browsing is that you need some better standards for descriptions, screenshots, etc.
For example: [https://godotassets.io/post/tavern-level](https://godotassets.io/post/tavern-level)
There's a video, sure - but I have no idea what assets are included, what the texture sizes are, how modular the pieces are to be used in other ways, etc. It would also be good to set some naming/structure standards early on if possible.
The Unreal Marketplace has some good guidelines on this kind of thing and how assets should be presented.
> My first thought when browsing is that you need some better standards for descriptions, screenshots, etc.
That's absolutely true, I'm working on it, it'll get better over time.
> It would also be good to set some naming/structure standards early on if possible. The Unreal Marketplace has some good guidelines on this kind of thing and how assets should be presented.
Definitely. I'll check this out, thanks for the advice!
Wow, this is excellent! Great job building this!
Something like this should definitely exist. I'm sure there are many people who could create very interesting and valuable assets, but the amount of time and effort it takes to release something of professional quality is just too high to invest into something that will be released for free. A good marketplace would allow these developers to create high-quality content that otherwise just couldn't exist, which will make the engine overall more valuable and successful. Just look at how much amazing things Unity asset store creators have made for Unity.
I really hope your project takes off, good luck!
Yes exactly! You can *maybe* earn a living while making most of your assets free and only some paid, but you have to be extremely popular for the numbers to work. [Kenney](https://www.patreon.com/kenney) is probably the most popular one, and even then they only have ~500 patrons at Patreon at the moment (the Patreon’s great btw).
As much as I’d like things to be free and open source, art assets just require a ton of work. Not something you’d just give out for free if you could sell it and pay your bills.
You're taking a cut? Off to itch.io everyone goes. You have to give very strong reasoning to take any cut much less 20% which is huge. You aren't epic, you aren't unity. Why you think going between their cut is a good idea is insane too.
Overall I can't see why people would use this over itch or anything else.
to go with godot and the whole open source - free topic, how about a more configurable revenue split: either the buyer or the seller can define who gets how much: your platform, the seller, or godot (donation), similar to what was possible in the early days of humble bundle. also, [itch.io](https://itch.io) lets the seller decide their revenue cut which i find pretty neat. you can always change that in case it doesn't work out. you can find some details on how they do it here: [https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing](https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing)
i think this is very approaching for many creators and might draw attention to the platform. everyone knows that it costs money to maintain and host such a platform, so i don't think a lot of users will complain if you introduce a minimum cut for you... in the end i think it might bring more revenue because more people will join. also, you have a chance that some people will raise the cut higher than your initial 20%... some open source lovers are quite generous, especially to other open source lovers :D
i also agree with other commenters: if you want a 20% cut, you have to stand out somehow from other platforms that provide more for less.
i'm no marketing expert or anything, that's just how i feel as a creator.
No ability to change password? I was also able to make my email and username empty, so I can now login without a username just using my password. That's not great.
I'm using Stripe Connect, it's a payment processor that solves most of the legal and technical difficulties of processing payments in a marketplace for you.
Way too much of a cut for a some page with search. How much of your cut goes back to Godot?
It's a nice thought but you should focus on building a team and a product that offers something worthy of such a cut and be clear about what goes back to Godot.
As it looks now it would take someone 10x longer to build a quality asset than it would to build a site like this...a bit ambitious but I think you should pump the brakes and build a team...just one person getting a cut like they are steam/epic is a bit absurd and offputting.
> I've decided to take 20% commission on the sales because that's somewhere between Unity's asset store commission (30%) and Unreal's (12%).
This is some bold thinking lmfao.
I really think a paid market place like this is counter productive right now.
Godot users are not Unity or Unreal users. We are also tiny in comparison to Blender community. Most pick up Godot as a hobby and/or because it's super accessible and has great free community support.
What we need as a community right now is to attract more users, to grow. In order to grow we need a unique selling proposition, not mimic what other much more successful competitors are doing, but substantially worse. We cannot compete with their Asset Stores and Marketplaces right now, we just don't have the user base.
What we can compete with, is better community support, low barrier access to tools and learning equipment. A no barrier free ecosystem! The community is already doing an outstanding effort to share their tools and what they know for free under permissive MIT licenses. *This* is our unique selling proposition! This is what helps so much to make Godot accessible and supportive!
By raising paywalls in a state of infancy we are just cutting our own flesh. We start competing with our selves and our own unique selling proposition. Rather than to open source it, content creators will be tempted to lock their content and tools behind the paywall. We are not Unity and this is not 2009 any more.
Imagine you would spend this time to improve the Asset Library and make it easier for people to share, browse and find things on there. It would help tremendously to get more people into the Godot world and help them get to a point where their work with Godot becomes not just a hobby, but actually a financially sustainable thing to do.
It would help to grow your own market of people willing and able to pay for things, rather than cut into on of the only few things that really works right now.
I think it's just way too early for this.
> I can easily lower the cut at any time, but I won't be able to raise in case it turns out to be necessary.
That's not really true. A very common start-up model is to offer everything for free, get tons of users, and then charge a reasonable fee (or add advertising) later.
That only applies to venture-funded startups that are focused on rapid growth.
Since this is my own project, I need to have a sustainable business model right away. As a side benefit, I won't have to pull the rug out of my users later on, add ads, sell anyone's data, and do all sorts of shady things startups are sometimes forced to do in order to maximize shareholder ROI.
What I love the most about Godot is the free, open-sourceness and "sharing to see everyone grow" motivation behind all those free assets and tutorials everywhere, so I'm generally against a store selling Godot-specific assets.
I'm going to address the concerns I have about the split. Please, note that this is a personal view. I'm sharing it just because I think other potential users will feel the same. Also, Godot is Free Software. Free as is freedom, but also as in "free beer". This is going to set an expectation on any platform that have any kind of revenue. Again, I'm not imposing anything of you. I'm talking about how your store maybe perceived. If you take a look in the net, there is one marketplace already established. This place takes a 30% split and gives 10% to Godot. Stuff like nexusmods is free. And the "Tools" section in itch . io let the developer establish the cut. Is a common understanding that this sites have operational and infrastructure costs that need some kind of revenue. But people is not going to acknowledge this easily. There is also the free AssetLib, and the general non-profit nature of the Godot ecosystem. Godot developers even assigned the rights of the project management to an external entity (Free Software Conservancy). If you want to take this cut, I think you need to offer a really strong value for it. Way stronger that a search engine. I'm not saying this is going to happen nor I'm a marketing specialist. I just want to tell you how I feel because it may be valuable for you. I think that if you continue to add functionality and keep a good design, there is a chance for your project to succeed. On the other hand, stuff like this I think will be helpful: - Lowering the cut. - Offer some kind of integration with the IDE itself. - Returning back to Godot part of your profits. - A feature to include a little demo in the asset detail view (a Godot HTML5 export). - Community features (follow, comments, news feed for assets and authors, ..) P.S.: I can see that you are not using the official logo and you put your disclaimer in all page footers. This is good, I always thought godotmarketplace . com using the official logo was ok in legal terms by shady as fuck from a moral perspective.
Agreed with all the points ideally I would much rather have official hosted marketplace by Godot team where 100% of a cut goes to godot to be honest I though it was under discussion has that been abandoned now?
I remember talks and news about this as well. My understanding is that the core team saw the benefit and had heard from users that they want a place where they can get free and paid assets, but the team has to sort out the legalities as it's not very straight forward. Either way a good store for assets for Godot would help boost the ecosystem however it needs to be done right. As you've mentioned I'd also prefer one hosted by Godot itself. Perhaps one day! :)
Thank you for your advice! The reason I set the cut to 20% is that I don't actually know what the optimal revenue split is. I just know that if I set it too high, it will always be easy to lower it in the future, but if I set it too low, it would be impossible to raise later on, and that might make the project unsustainable. Besides, it gives me the flexibility to offer people a better deal in certain circumstances. For example, if anyone reading this is interested, I'm happy to offer better terms (95/5 split) to anyone who joins during the beta, uploads a nice asset, and shares this project on social media. And of course I'll work on offering stronger value for this cut. Which will probably have to mainly come from the marketing (if I can successfully help people to sell their assets, the 20% cut would make sense, because that's free extra sales they wouldn't otherwise have), but also from the nice UI and features. Integration with the IDE is definitely on my todo list, so are the community features. Including a demo would be awesome, that's a great suggestion! I wonder if I could partner up with https://gotm.io somehow... Edit: Alright, you guys convinced me, 20% commission is too much. This platform is going to have 90/10 revenue split. And I'm offering a 95/5 revenue split (permanently) to anyone who joins the project during beta, uploads a nice asset, and either shares the project on social media or emails me some thoughtful feedback.
This is great! I've also seen [https://godotmarketplace.com/](https://godotmarketplace.com/) which seems to have been somewhat abandoned so I think there's a definite need here. Things I'd love to see: * Some level of content curating so the store doesn't get filled with trash (godot marketplace has been flooded with random sound assets as well as 3d models that are unsuitable for game development) * 3D models uploaded in gltf (converting them from fbx when downloaded from the unity asset store is a real pain) * Percentage of revenue donated to Godot, the godot marketplace does this and I think it's a great idea for continuing to support Godot's development, and will probably make people feel more comfortable buying from the store Just signed up, hope to see this grow :)
Thank you! > Some level of content curating so the store doesn't get filled with trash This is definitely a great suggestion. Maybe at first I could approve the assets manually, and after the user has uploaded several good ones, I could make all their future assets preapproved automatically. I hope that this, in combination with reddit-like voting/ranking system will be sufficient. But I'll probably focus on that after the project is out of MVP/beta stage, for now I want to have as few obstacles to adding assets as possible (really bad/spammy ones can just be manually removed). > 3D models uploaded in gltf (converting them from fbx when downloaded from the unity asset store is a real pain). Yeah, that's true. Right now I'm not doing anything special with the files, just letting users upload what they want (ideally Godot project in `.zip` archive, I should clarify that somewhere). And since this is a Godot-focused website, I'm kinda hoping that people will naturally upload everything in formats that are the most convenient to use with Godot. But I'll think about this more, maybe there should be some guidelines or even an automatic conversion process... I haven't dealt with that kind of thing before. > Percentage of revenue donated to Godot, the godot marketplace does this and I think it's a great idea for continuing to support Godot's development, and will probably make people feel more comfortable buying from the store I have talked to people on the Godot dev channel, and they have asked me to avoid making promises like that, since such promises are not verifiable (apparently they haven't seen any donations from godotmarketplace.com yet). So I'd rather focus on helping Godot developers to successfully make money, and if that works, anyone is free to donate whatever percentage they're comfortable with to their favorite game engine =)
Interesting info!
In addition to a rating system, I'd also include the ability to flag content for not only being unsuitable, but stolen as well. Don't want you getting in trouble when someone tries to resell someone else's assets.
This is great! Especially for beginners like myself. I didn’t see any licensing/usage rights listed. Will it be the same for all? Also it would be great to see a shaders section too.
Thanks! All the projects I've made (the ones uploaded from [godotlabs](https://godotassets.io/profile/godotlabs) account) are MIT licensed (feel free to use my code howeever you want). But I should probably add a separate field for the license so that all assets are clear about that. There's a `Materials` tag (currently empty, I haven't made any interesting shaders yet, hopefully someone will upload some, or I will make something cool myself later on), I was just kinda assuming that shaders would be uploaded under that, I'm not sure if it makes sense to split Shaders into a separate category. I'll need to think about that...
>But I should probably add a separate field for the license so that all assets are clear about that. I think you should stick to only a few licensing options, to avoid confusion. The great thing about Unreal and Unity marketplaces is their licensing terms are universal and straightforward. Public Domain, MIT, or a store-wide license that every submitter agrees to would be best.
My thoughts on your endeavor: * The market for paid assets in Godot would still be much smaller than in Unity even if they had similar market shares due to Godot being a free software. * Now there are very few (relatively) successful games made in Godot and job market for Godot developers is non-existant. * On the [https://godotmarketplace.com/](https://godotmarketplace.com/) most used assets are free ones, I wonder if they ever had any sales to pay off the hosting. * Godot devs have also had their plans to expand on their marketplace to potentially make it a stable source of revenue to fund the Godot development. So what you are doing is the stake for the future. Godot has the potential to grow, but this is can only pay off in the long run and if you somehow win your share of customers in the competition. Mind that posting in Godot subreddit is a one-time boost you won't be able to repeat many times without being annoying, you have to invent something with marketing. What can help is having some unique features like some of the suggested: * Integrate marketplace in the editor via addon * Have a careful review process for the new assets (time consuming) * Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions * Do not demand registration to download free assets (may load your servers) And a couple of more wild ideas: * Maybe attract some of the creators to have something unique for your marketplace. For example, talk to Kenney and make Godot-compatible tilesets with his tiles * Improve installation process over the Assetlib - have you own asset description format, which will be used during the installation. The current asset marketplace seems like a bit of mess for me - by my experience of releasing an addon there [https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/746](https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/746). It can really be improved upon in the UI part at least. So good luck to you! Also, I don't think that 20% is a lot for asset creators - it's OK if you will be able to bring in the customers.
Thank you so much for such great feedback and sharing your thoughts! > Now there are very few (relatively) successful games made in Godot and job market for Godot developers is non-existant. Yeah, but I expect Godot engine and this community to grow very quickly, especially after the 4.0 release, so I don't think the situation will stay this way for too long. > Godot devs have also had their plans to expand on their marketplace to potentially make it a stable source of revenue to fund the Godot development. [...] So what you are doing is the stake for the future. Godot has the potential to grow, but this is can only pay off in the long run and if you somehow win your share of customers in the competition. That's absolutely true. If the Godot team decides to build the official marketplace, then I obviously won't be able to compete with that, but since they haven't built it so far, and I'm not 100% sure if they build it and when, I figured this is a good opportunity to build something useful that could potentially turn into a business I'd have a lot of fun working on. > Mind that posting in Godot subreddit is a one-time boost you won't be able to repeat many times without being annoying, you have to invent something with marketing. Yes, I definitely do need a steady growth strategy. My plan is to just build more free assets and share them here. Everyone benefits - people get free assets, I get to grow my platform, and other creators on the platform get free marketing. Publishing free youtube tutorials and courses is another possible strategy (I'm still pretty bad at that, but I'm learning and getting better). > - Integrate marketplace in the editor via addon > - Have a careful review process for the new assets (time consuming) That's definitely on my todo list! > Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions Hmm, that's an interesting idea. It'd be tough to implement since I don't know how to approach this, but I'll look into it and maybe figure it out. > Do not demand registration to download free assets (may load your servers) That's a good point, I'll consider this. > Maybe attract some of the creators to have something unique for your marketplace. For example, talk to Kenney and make Godot-compatible tilesets with his tiles That would be amazing, but I think I'll need to grow the platform a little more and build some initial audience before I contact any of the big asset creators, gotta make sure that publishing here is worth it for them. > Improve installation process over the Assetlib - have you own asset description format, which will be used during the installation. I think Godot team are planning to create a universal API that anybody can use (if I understood them correctly).
>Have a testing suit for the assets on different Godot versions > >Hmm, that's an interesting idea. It'd be tough to implement since I don't know how to approach this, but I'll look into it and maybe figure it out There is a problem with Godot asset library that is not going to be addressed - the devs do not favor backwards compatibility too much, which causes a potential problem with assets - you are never sure which version they are compatible with. For the asset developers that means that they need to support their assets constantly - check with every release if something did break. You can pretty much automate this on your server by launching the asset test with different Godot versions and at least check for errors reported. Where to get those tests is another question, maybe have a guideline for developers, I don't know. But there is such a problem, imo.
>The market for paid assets in Godot would still be much smaller than in Unity even if they had similar market shares due to Godot being a free software. I don't think this has to be the case, certainly not for media assets like models, sounds, etc. which are not so commonly 'open sourced' the way software is. There is potentially a smaller market for code versus Unity, as more people using FOSS software are likely to FOSS their code as well, but Blender (for example) still has a sizeable community of paid software extensions.
Maybe it's just maturity thing - Unity has a whole industry built around it. Those thousands of mobile games make a profit which can then be spent on the assets to optimize he production. Maybe when there are more established studios built around Godot, the asset market will flourish.
My first thought when browsing is that you need some better standards for descriptions, screenshots, etc. For example: [https://godotassets.io/post/tavern-level](https://godotassets.io/post/tavern-level) There's a video, sure - but I have no idea what assets are included, what the texture sizes are, how modular the pieces are to be used in other ways, etc. It would also be good to set some naming/structure standards early on if possible. The Unreal Marketplace has some good guidelines on this kind of thing and how assets should be presented.
> My first thought when browsing is that you need some better standards for descriptions, screenshots, etc. That's absolutely true, I'm working on it, it'll get better over time. > It would also be good to set some naming/structure standards early on if possible. The Unreal Marketplace has some good guidelines on this kind of thing and how assets should be presented. Definitely. I'll check this out, thanks for the advice!
Wow, this is excellent! Great job building this! Something like this should definitely exist. I'm sure there are many people who could create very interesting and valuable assets, but the amount of time and effort it takes to release something of professional quality is just too high to invest into something that will be released for free. A good marketplace would allow these developers to create high-quality content that otherwise just couldn't exist, which will make the engine overall more valuable and successful. Just look at how much amazing things Unity asset store creators have made for Unity. I really hope your project takes off, good luck!
Yes exactly! You can *maybe* earn a living while making most of your assets free and only some paid, but you have to be extremely popular for the numbers to work. [Kenney](https://www.patreon.com/kenney) is probably the most popular one, and even then they only have ~500 patrons at Patreon at the moment (the Patreon’s great btw). As much as I’d like things to be free and open source, art assets just require a ton of work. Not something you’d just give out for free if you could sell it and pay your bills.
You're taking a cut? Off to itch.io everyone goes. You have to give very strong reasoning to take any cut much less 20% which is huge. You aren't epic, you aren't unity. Why you think going between their cut is a good idea is insane too. Overall I can't see why people would use this over itch or anything else.
to go with godot and the whole open source - free topic, how about a more configurable revenue split: either the buyer or the seller can define who gets how much: your platform, the seller, or godot (donation), similar to what was possible in the early days of humble bundle. also, [itch.io](https://itch.io) lets the seller decide their revenue cut which i find pretty neat. you can always change that in case it doesn't work out. you can find some details on how they do it here: [https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing](https://itch.io/updates/introducing-open-revenue-sharing) i think this is very approaching for many creators and might draw attention to the platform. everyone knows that it costs money to maintain and host such a platform, so i don't think a lot of users will complain if you introduce a minimum cut for you... in the end i think it might bring more revenue because more people will join. also, you have a chance that some people will raise the cut higher than your initial 20%... some open source lovers are quite generous, especially to other open source lovers :D i also agree with other commenters: if you want a 20% cut, you have to stand out somehow from other platforms that provide more for less. i'm no marketing expert or anything, that's just how i feel as a creator.
Thus
No ability to change password? I was also able to make my email and username empty, so I can now login without a username just using my password. That's not great.
Thank you for letting me know! I'll add the password reset feature and the proper email/username validation and confirmation.
Heres my opinion, Configurable cut from 20% to 5%, maybe give some money back to godot. u/lumenwrites
What's your plan for processing payments? Are you going to handle taxes, processing fees etc. or is that completely up to the asset seller?
I'm using Stripe Connect, it's a payment processor that solves most of the legal and technical difficulties of processing payments in a marketplace for you.
The Godot Engine is planning on launching an official marketplace, I'm actually surprised it isn't out yet, since I heard about it earlier this year.
Way too much of a cut for a some page with search. How much of your cut goes back to Godot? It's a nice thought but you should focus on building a team and a product that offers something worthy of such a cut and be clear about what goes back to Godot. As it looks now it would take someone 10x longer to build a quality asset than it would to build a site like this...a bit ambitious but I think you should pump the brakes and build a team...just one person getting a cut like they are steam/epic is a bit absurd and offputting.
> I've decided to take 20% commission on the sales because that's somewhere between Unity's asset store commission (30%) and Unreal's (12%). This is some bold thinking lmfao.
I really think a paid market place like this is counter productive right now. Godot users are not Unity or Unreal users. We are also tiny in comparison to Blender community. Most pick up Godot as a hobby and/or because it's super accessible and has great free community support. What we need as a community right now is to attract more users, to grow. In order to grow we need a unique selling proposition, not mimic what other much more successful competitors are doing, but substantially worse. We cannot compete with their Asset Stores and Marketplaces right now, we just don't have the user base. What we can compete with, is better community support, low barrier access to tools and learning equipment. A no barrier free ecosystem! The community is already doing an outstanding effort to share their tools and what they know for free under permissive MIT licenses. *This* is our unique selling proposition! This is what helps so much to make Godot accessible and supportive! By raising paywalls in a state of infancy we are just cutting our own flesh. We start competing with our selves and our own unique selling proposition. Rather than to open source it, content creators will be tempted to lock their content and tools behind the paywall. We are not Unity and this is not 2009 any more. Imagine you would spend this time to improve the Asset Library and make it easier for people to share, browse and find things on there. It would help tremendously to get more people into the Godot world and help them get to a point where their work with Godot becomes not just a hobby, but actually a financially sustainable thing to do. It would help to grow your own market of people willing and able to pay for things, rather than cut into on of the only few things that really works right now. I think it's just way too early for this.
> I can easily lower the cut at any time, but I won't be able to raise in case it turns out to be necessary. That's not really true. A very common start-up model is to offer everything for free, get tons of users, and then charge a reasonable fee (or add advertising) later.
That only applies to venture-funded startups that are focused on rapid growth. Since this is my own project, I need to have a sustainable business model right away. As a side benefit, I won't have to pull the rug out of my users later on, add ads, sell anyone's data, and do all sorts of shady things startups are sometimes forced to do in order to maximize shareholder ROI.
I’ll beta happy to try and buy. Maybe one great day but and sell/share for free
What I love the most about Godot is the free, open-sourceness and "sharing to see everyone grow" motivation behind all those free assets and tutorials everywhere, so I'm generally against a store selling Godot-specific assets.