PITCH BLACK: Darkness Anywhere has been live on Unreal Marketplace for a month. Here is my experience and sales data so far.
Making a Marketplace product can be a big investment, and I hope making more sales figures public will help developers decide if making assets is right for them.
Pitch Black started as a visual effect for my upcoming 4D puzzle game Tetrafecta. I need bottomless pits in my levels. When people get stuck in a puzzle game, they look everywhere for solutions, and I didn't want them to waste time looking in bottomless pits. So they needed to be obviously empty. They needed a drastic fade to black:
Unreal gives you many ways to add light to a scene, but not many ways to remove them. I tried volumetric materials, but they were too imprecise. I wanted to make the pits absolutely (0, 0, 0) black, under all circumstances, even from up close. If a pit is reliably black I don't have to care how it looks inside!
I figured the only stage where I could ensure this reliably was in post-process, so that's what i made: Actors which darken a specified area with post-process materials.
It was a unique solution (I hadn't seen mention of anything similar) and completely self-contained. So I thought it might be worth selling on Unreal Marketplace!
How much money are people making on Unreal Marketplace?
There is almost no public data! I found only figures from years ago before UE's popularity exploded. Here's what I do know:
Some sellers are making so many products over the course of years that it's presumably a full-time job that pays their bills. But I don't know their cost of living.
The number of reviews on a product is public information. A typical sales-to-reviews ratio on other marketplaces is 2%. So you could guess that Revenue = Price x Reviews x 50
Here are some guesses using the latter approach:
Hyper Survival Template (all three tiers combined): $1,432,700
Ultra Dynamic Sky: $1,094,000
Fluid Flux: $1,396,000
Electronic Nodes: $206,700
Of course, these estimates ignore discounts. And there's a of variation in sales-to-reviews between marketplaces, price points, and product categories. It's all very loosey-goosey. Epic takes a modest 12% cut.
I figured putting a product on Marketplace would help give me some insight. I reckoned it'd take me a week to put Pitch Black on Marketplace.
(it took three weeks lol)
What went well
Pitch Black was ready to use in under a week, like I expected. Marketplace registration has a bunch of little steps but wasn't too onerous.
There's a long list of requirements your product has to meet. It's well written. I was afraid there would be a lot of under-documented requirements, but that wasn't the case.
The review process is fast. The reviewer replied to each submission within 24 hours, with a detailed checklist of changes. They even got back to me same day on a weekend, twice.
The web interface for submitting and updating assets is also quite nice.
What was hard
The biggest headache by far was showcasing Pitch Black without using any third-party assets. This took a week. I had to create appealing scenes with my kindergarten modeling skills, using only assets that ship with Unreal. I wound up using a lot of cubes, cylinders, and of course, Manny. I also used a CC0 fir tree model by @the_mantissa (thank you!)
Composing the trailer and screenshots took one final week. I rolled out of bed one morning with a concept for the trailer music, which I spent half a day on. This took longer than finding and choosing some CC0 music, but probably paid off when I extended the trailer and needed to extend the music to match. It was easier (and better) to fit the music to the trailer when I had the project bones.
I'd only recorded one video before, years ago, and had never edited video before. So I needed to learn and find a good workflow. But learning OBS and OpenShot was a sunk cost since I needed to figure them out eventually anyway.
Getting approved
My first three submissions were rejected. The fourth one was approved. This process covered five days but involved only part-time work.
The changes requested were mostly reasonable, quick, and easy. Some were a headache.
The reviewer reported bad FPS on one of the showcase levels. I was getting 200 FPS locally. They would not tell me what FPS they were getting, expecting, or what hardware they were testing on. So fixing this was frustrating. The problem was probably having Lumen quality settings jacked up, but the scene renders so fast locally I can't actually tell.
The other dumb and annoying problem was working around a UE 5.3 bug. I disabled Nanite to try magically fixing the FPS issues. In 5.3, non-Nanite landscapes always produce an "ACTOR WITH PHYSICAL MATERIALS NEEDS TO BE REBUILT" error that does not go away. But Marketplace requires your levels to have no error messages.
My solution was to delete all the landscapes. Oh well.
PITCH BLACK's first month sales figures
Before Pitch Black my lifetime software sales revenue amounted to $3. Back in 1995 I sold a copy of of my Klik 'n' Play game to three of my friends for $1 each. Let's not talk about the cost of the floppy disks!
So it's an amazing feeling watching each sale come in. Yes, I can make something people want, and earn money doing it. I hope people are enjoying the product and finding it worthwhile, but I haven't heard back from any of its users yet.
That said, these sales figures will not add up to Pitch Black being a profitable investment of my time. I'm at ease with that. I was willing to pay for the experience.
That said, your assets may fare differently. Pitch Black is a niche product, built without any prior evidence market need beyond my own, and thus sales figures for other products may look quite different. I hope more creators will share their data so we can all understand what assets are worth making. More information will lead to better decisions by creators and better products for Unreal creators!
If you've enjoyed this write-up, I hope you'll follow me here as I document my experience making things in Unreal. People have also enjoyed my shader tutorials [1] [2] [3].