The Unity Asset StoreC O M P L E T E

Publisher’s Manual

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual1

Table of CONTENTS

Introduction

Choosing a Title

Writing a Description

Optimizing Search

Visuals

Videos

Ratings

Localization

Pricing

Integrations & Multiple Offering

Versions & Upgrading

Support & Community

Metrics & Notifications

Respect the Asset Store

2

3

5

6

7

9

11

12

13

15

17

19

22

24

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual2

Introduction

This course of action was sparked by the fact that the majority of our developers use the Unity game engine, but not all of them actually discover us through our conventional download channels. The Asset Store, while being a somewhat closed environment, is actually a whole ecosystem of its own, playing a role of “the go-to marketplace” for Unity developers. It acts very similar to a standard web listings directory with all the regular goodies of user generated content, search capabilities, ratings & reviews and trends. With over 6,000,000 asset downloads per year (yes that’s 6 zeroes), it’s a great platform for distributing your works as a Unity developer, designer or artist. Still and yet, we often see assets which just aren’t making it big on the Asset Store, not because those assets are low quality, but because their listings aren’t being discovered, and that’s exactly what this eBook is set forth to solve.

This eBook doesn’t aim to walk you through the process of submitting an asset, but rather aspires to guide you through the process of optimizing your assets for discovery, visibility and popularity.

The practices we’ve employed have helped us triple our reach within 3 months and we are now excited to share them with the community. Most practices mentioned in this eBook are actually derived from basic marketing and SEO, but when combined together in a joint effort, can really do wonders to your success on the Unity Asset Store. It is important to note that insights and suggestions discussed herein are a result of ongoing experimentation when submitting our assets, and have not been validated or confirmed with the Unity Asset Store team.

Happy assetting!

The SOOMLA Team

For the past several months, we’ve been working on increasing the number of downloads for our plugins in the Unity Asset Store.

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual3

Choosing a Title“Thou shall choose thy title wisely”1The first thing you want to start with is choosing a title for your package. The title needs to be:

• Self explanatory Just a few words that say it all

• Completely visibleTry to be very stringent on the characters. If the title is too long, it will be cut off by the dreaded ellipsis (...) and will look incoherent.

• Search optimizedIncludes terms that developers are likely to search. Sometimes, you want to change your title to include the single killer feature of your asset, even if it’s not the only one, because that’s what people will be searching for. We experimented with changing our title from “SOOMLA Unity3D Store - virtual economies made easy” to “Store - In App Purchase”. This way the title wasn’t cut off in the search results, and was also easier to discover because people are more likely to search a term describing the problem or the solution, rather than a feature term.

PRO TIP: Use Chrome Dev Tools to

inspect your title in the Asset Store’s search results page, and play around with

the text until it becomes completely visible without

the ellipsis suffix.

VS

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual4

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual5

Writing a Description“Thou shall write an informative description”2The description of your asset should not be overlooked. For most developers evaluating several packages to choose from, the description (along with beautiful key images) is the make-or-break decision point. Your description should have the following:

• Start with a high level paragraph about the problem your asset solves.

• Provide links to your website, docs, forum, Github repo (if it’s open source) and any other resources. Make sure the links are “above the fold” in the description panel in order for the developer to understand that this asset is backed by real people and resources. The convention we’ve observed across several websites resembles this:Website | Docs | Videos | Forum

• Provide a short list of feature breakdown.

• State why this plugin is superior to others. This can also be done by linking a blog post. If you actually mention competing assets in the description, it may also help the target searches of your competitors, though from our experiments, this seems to have low effect.

• Add links to any other assets in the Asset Store that support your asset or can be integrated with it. This can help with cross promotion back to your plugin in the form of the recommendations shown at the bottom of the listings

PRO TIP: Google Analytics will

consider traffic coming from within the Unity

Editor as “direct” traffic. If you want to be able to

attribute this traffic to the Unity Asset Store, add the UTM tracking parameters

to any links you provide in the description to your

website’s pages:<a href=”http://

mycompany.com/forum?utm_source=my_

asset_name&utm_medium=unity_asset_

store”>Forum</a>

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual6

Optimizing Search“Thou shall target thy users with search term labels”3The Asset Store search is powered, like every search engine, by an index of searchable terms. While the title and description texts do affect search results and recommendations, you can in fact instrument the results by labeling the files in your package with Unity’s labeling system. Since labeling files one by one is tedious, the Asset Store Tools package includes a tool called the Mass Labeler to do this task in bulk. Here are the steps:

• Open the Mass Labeler from the “Asset Store Tools” menu

• Create your custom labels. These should be the actual search terms you want to target. There is no limit on how many terms you add. Note that the Mass Labeler omits whitespace.

• Select all (or some) of the files in your Assets folder and click “Apply to selection”

PRO TIP: We’ve observed that sometimes the Mass

Labeler doesn’t work as expected. Since the tags

for each file are saved in YAML format in its

corresponding meta file, the process can be automated outside of

the Unity Editor. Check out our Node.js script

that automatically labels an entire project with a

bulk of tags:https://gist.github.

com/gurdotan/f5c14ddb20b6814daf61

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual7

Visuals“Thou shall offer thy users appealing visuals”4The UAS submission guidelines require you to provide key images which will be placed in your asset’s listing page and in search results.

• Make sure your icon is recognizable and includes the brand trademark of your company or studio.

• If your asset is a plugin for supporting external platforms or services, make sure they appear in the asset’s icon and key images. An excellent example is a Facebook plugin for Unity with this icon:

• Provide 5-10 screenshots of your asset at the very least. Your key images need to be beautiful! Developers need to see what they’re investing their money in beforehand. The Asset Store’s refund process is a difficult one, making developers hesitant to put down the money, which is why you need to show them exactly what they’re getting when they buy your asset.

If you’re short on resources and time to implement all methods in this eBook, start with this one!

PRO TIP: To get a good idea of what

high quality key images look like, take a look at

Unity’s home-grown assets: https://www.assetstore.

unity3d.com/en/#!/publisher/1

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The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual9

Videos“Thou shall create video tutorials and trailers”5One of the best kept secrets of the Asset Store is that you can add a Youtube video to be shown in the carousel of screenshots in your asset’s page. There is no formal documentation on how to actually add such a video, and Google searches don’t yield anything useful, so lo’ and behold - this is how you add videos to your asset’s listings:

<!-- Hidden -->

<a href=”http://youtu.be/blebF5eYKw4”></a>

Creating an empty link (with no anchor text inside it) inside your description, will render the video preview into the screenshot carousel:

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If you want to add an actual link to a video from the asset’s description, you just need to include some anchor text:

<!-- Visible -->

<a href=”http://youtu.be/blebF5eYKw4”>Integration Video</a>

PRO TIP: To get a good idea of what

high quality key images look like, take a look at

Unity’s home-grown assets:

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Ratings“Thou shall reach for the stars!”6From our investigation, ratings are one of the top factors that promote your asset’s discoverability. Ratings play a role in two forms:

• Directory browsingWhen roaming in the Asset Store, you often use the hierarchy of assets on the top right. Whenever you click on a category or sub-category, the assets are first listed by popularity, which is determined mainly by number of ratings.

• Search resultsAssets with a higher number of ratings and a higher aggregate rating score will be promoted up in the search results.

Increasing your assets’ ratings will most definitely increase the traffic and eventually the number of purchases\downloads you get. The best way to get your asset rated in the Asset Store is by simply asking your users. Our learnings show that it’s easiest to ask for a review\rating once a customer has received support to his or her satisfaction.

Note: the asset store apparently has a smart scoring system which factors more parameters when determining asset popularity (i.e. price, last publish date, aggregate rating score). More often than not, you’ll see assets ordered by popularity while the ratings won’t be in perfect descending order.

PRO TIP: As confirmed with the

Asset Store team, if you don’t have at least 3 ratings,

your asset’s rating will show “Not enough ratings.”

In order to reach a bare minimum of visibility, work

hard for those first three.

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Localization“Thou shall reach out to indies in distant shores”7The Unity Asset Store allows you to localize your asset’s listing page by providing metadata (title and description) in several languages. Currently, besides English, the supported languages are Korean, Chinese and Japanese. The Asian markets are booming with game developers and not having your asset’s page localized means losing out on lots of potential customers. The easiest way to translate your metadata is by using freelance marketplaces such as:

• Fiverr - only $5 per translation gig

• oDesk - Wide variety of freelancers, short and long term work

• One Hour Translation - Fast and efficient, lots of languages

Since the text you’re going to have translated includes lots of technical mumbo jumbo, you want to either find a contractor that understands the technical terms, or alternatively, one of your customers, who is capable of reviewing the translation in exchange for a voucher.

Note that all translations to asian languages should target the “simplified” or “spoken” dialects of these languages. For example, Chinese has several dialects (Cantonese, Shanghainese, Traditional Mandarin to name a few), but you want to make sure that you get your translation done to “Simplified Chinese.”

PRO TIP: Keep a text file with your metadata in the different languages in your code’s

version control system (Git, SVN etc.). If you choose

to optimize the titles and descriptions according to

the tips in this eBook, you’ll need to keep everything

arranged in different languages and a VCS can

help.

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Pricing“Thou shall work hard for thy pennies”8Given that you haven’t reached a critical mass audience yet, or that your brand hasn’t been established yet as a Unity asset developer, you should put thought into the price you charge. Here are some common pricing strategies:

• FreeIf you want to establish yourself as a Unity expert this is the way to go. If you’re a studio looking for new projects this a great reference for your skills and brand. It’ll also be appreciated by the developer community.

• Charging moneyStart by investigating similar assets and same-category assets. What do they charge? Is their price legitimate for what you get? Do they have an established branch on the Asset Store that could justify their price? It could be a good idea to price your assets lower than competitors to get a head start. Also, consider dropping the price completely for limited weekends\holidays, or offering periodical discounts to boost sales and create a buzz.

• Go freemiumThe Asset Store allows you to publish two versions of the same asset - one paid and one free. The key is to extract a bare minimum from the paid package that will have just enough functionality for beginners. Once they start using it, it quickly becomes inevitable to purchase the paid asset.

• Loss LeaderBorrowed from the retail world, this term refers to the practice of creating an additional asset that appeals to a larger audience and giving it for cheaper (or for free). We want to get developers in the door and leverage the “Recommendations” section in the Asset Store which often suggests more assets from the same publisher.

PRO TIP: If sales are slow, announce

a holiday sweepstake and grant your developers a

voucher code that will allow them to get your asset for

free. This is also a good opportunity to ask for ratings and feedback.

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Another question you need to be asking yourself is how much effort you’re willing to put into supporting your asset\plugin. A common mistake is to think that publishing a Unity asset is a “fire-and-forget” task, but in reality customers will come knocking on your door when the errors start showing up in the Unity editor console. This is typical for code assets and editor extensions, where you should embed the support effort estimation in the price.

Make sure to compare your price point to the recommended pricing table in the Asset Store’s submission guidelines.

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Integrations & Multiple Offering“Thou shall connect with fellow publishers”9In marketing you’ll hear the term “piggybacking” a lot. This refers to the practice of riding others’ success to amplify your own growth. In the world of Unity assets, this can be achieved by integrating with existing assets and building your asset on top of them. What you will gain from this approach is:

• Increased visibilityDevelopers can find your asset via other, more ubiquitous ones.

• Increased diversityYour asset will show under only one category, but might branch out to other categories of the assets you’re integrated with.

• Brand InheritanceWhile your asset might be relatively new, integrating it with a well known asset gives your asset the immediate gain of credibility associated with an already-established brand.

• Cross PromotionYour asset is likely to show up in the “Recommendations” section in the listing page of the asset you integrate with. Of course, you can always engage in additional cross promotion opportunities beyond the asset store walls, such as reciprocal blog posts and email reachout with the other asset creators.

Creating multiple offerings on the asset store can be done by implementing freemium as discussed in the “Pricing” section. However, savvy developers will actually realize that the entire game development cycle is interspersed with opportunities for transforming their creations into sellable assets. Be it visuals, 3D models, sound effects or advanced scripting methods, all of these can be molded into self-contained assets and published on the Asset Store.

PRO TIP: One of the most prevalent

examples on the Asset Store for a pluggable

asset is PlayMaker, made by Hutong Games. The modular nature of this

plugin has spawned a whole sub-ecosystem of

assets and plugins based on it, all being leveraged

by PlayMaker’s popularity. Just search for Playmaker

in the Asset Store and see for yourself.

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A great example from the SOOMLA developer community is demonstrated by Unity artist and developer Alexander Arbuznikov. While creating a shoot-em-up game called Alien Bugs Defender, Alex built lots of 3D models which not only make for great graphics in his game, but are also sold on the Asset Store.

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Versions & Upgrading“Thou shall ease the pain on thy users”10If you’ll be releasing updates to your asset often, you want to mitigate any upgrading pains for your developers. Consider the following best practices:

• Support the earliest version of Unity you can possibly afford. Some developers don’t upgrade versions as fast as others. The minimum supported version is determined by the version of the Unity Editor which you use to upload your package (using the Asset Store tools). If you upload a package from Unity 5, all developers using 4.6 won’t be able to use it.

• Bump the version of each new release in a fashion that makes sense. Most software projects use the semantic versioning standard which mandates major, minor and patch versions for each release cycle.

• Do not bump the version when submitting only metadata changes of your package.

• When publishing a new version of your asset, include upgrade instructions in the version’s release notes in case something isn’t backward compatible. You’ll thank us when you save your developers’ coding time and your own support time. This is especially important for visual and audio assets. They likely won’t generate any console errors, but the visual\sound artifacts could appear without the developer’s knowledge of the change.

• Include a README file somewhere inside your assets or alternatively a PDF document with basic “getting started” instructions.

• When you bump a version, it also shows an “Update” button in the Unity Download Manager for existing customers to quickly notice and download:

PRO TIP: Create a Twitter account

for your studio and ask developers to follow you for updates. When new

versions of your assets are released, tweet your

followers.

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The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual19

Support & Community“Thou shall serve thy community with fervor”11We’ve witnessed that high quality support is the number one driver of credibility. Your software, like all software, will have bugs. In the ever-growing Unity ecosystem where developers range from experts to newbies, outstanding support is paramount for developer happiness, and it’s become a standard requirement in the world of Unity asset development.

As a Unity plugin developer, you are expected to be visible to the extent that developers using your asset can reach out to you in any form. Here are the best practices we’ve mustered up based on our experience:

• Build your own support forum and actively respond to questions there.

• Take part in discussions on Unity Answers, the Unity forum and the Unity sub-reddit

• Join the Asset Store publishers Google Group to get in touch with the Asset Store team and engage in discussion with other publishers.

• Use your forum and the Unity forum to announce updates, fixes and new features to your asset.

• In the publisher dashboard, under the “Info tab”, fill in the publisher URL, the support URL, and the support email:

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual20

This will render these links in the asset listing page

One of the best examples of excellent support that we’ve encountered is the one given by Rebound Games, on their own forum and on the Unity forum.

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual21

PRO TIP: Create a support thread in the Unity forums for your asset. This should serve as an initial place for people to find you, and is also good for SEO and publicity

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Metrics and Notifications12If you’re as good a marketer as you are a developer, you’re probably obsessed with measuring everything. Luckily, Unity allows us publishers to tap into the analytics of our assets. In the publisher dashboard, under the “Info” tab, lies the secret that enables you to connect your listing pages to Google Analytics.

All that’s required from you is to sign up for Google Analytics (free of charge) and create a new property. Copy the tracking ID from your property and paste it in, and hit “Save”. That’s it, you now have Google Analytics on all of your asset store listing pages.

This will show you analytics about the traffic that hits your assets. Tracking actual downloads and sales can only be done from the publisher dashboard.

NOTE: As confirmed with the Asset Store team, the downloads shown in the dashboard represent unique users per month. If a user downloads your asset twice in January, it only gets count once. If however that same user also downloads your asset in February, that’ll count as another download and will be shown under February’s downloads.

The Unity Asset Store Complete Publisher’s Manual23

PRO TIP: We recommend installing

the RSS feed reader Chrome extension and

adding the RSS feed URL to it. This way, you’ll get in-browser notifications

when people write reviews about your assets. Since

developers often write questions in the form of

support requests inside the reviews, it is paramount to keep up-to-date with your

assets’ activity and respond quickly.

Instead of manually checking your assets’ pages everyday for reviews, use the Asset Store activity feed (also in the “Info” tab) to get notified:

Add the URL to any RSS reader and you’ll get live push notifications on every activity in your account.

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Respect the Asset Store13 • Read the submission guidelines and abide to the rules. Here are a few

notes that stick out:Code assets must gracefully handle errors and generate informative warnings in the consoleEditor extensions should refrain from adding a new menu to the editor with your company\studio name. Instead, nest your contextual menus under a pre-existing one (Window, GameObject etc.).Carefully follow the instructions for providing key imagesCheck your English for correct spelling and grammar

• Avoid trashing the Asset Store with useless assets. None of the tips in this eBook pertaining to integrations, freemium, cross promotion or diversity should be abused to create low quality assets.

• Provide informative notes for the reviewer when submitting your asset.This will make the vetting process easier for the Asset Store team.

• Be patient with the approval process.Remember that the Unity Asset Store team needs to sift through hundreds of submissions each day.

• A note on providing your assets for free: the Unity Asset Store is eventually a business unit which is measured by the revenue it generates. If you intend to provide lots of free assets, you’re going against the stream. You should always provide some paid assets or at least a platform for creating paid assets on top of yours. In SOOMLA, we solve this by providing all of our assets as open source code on Github. The code is redistributable and thus can be used in other commercial packages built on top of our technology and business logic. As of today, there are already two paid assets using SOOMLA’s open source code and more coming soon.