Unity Asset Store Expands
Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity development platform for games and interactive 3D on the web, iOS, Android, consoles and beyond, today announced the continued expansion of its Asset Store. Announced at Unite 2010, the Unity Asset Store is a digital marketplace where developers can share and sell assets to each other to accelerate their workflows. It’s immediately accessible in the Unity editor under the Window > Asset Store menu so assets are at developers’ fingertips when they most need them.
Over the last two months, the Unity Asset Store catalogue has grown to more than 200 new items including a variety of assets such as free tutorials, open-source libraries, art packs and advanced script libraries. The majority of these assets have been produced by the Unity development community – who individually are bringing in revenues of thousands of dollars each month monetizing their assets. January’s top seller brought in more than $4,000.
Top selling assets include (in no particular order):
- Unisky by Six Times Nothing
- GUIKit001 by Blackish
- EZ GUI by AB Software
- Sprite Manager by AB Software
- Shader Fusion by Kurt Loeffler
“I was one of the first developers to release my products on the Asset Store, and it’s been a fantastic opportunity,” said Christophe Canon, Frogames Creator of ProtoPack 3D, the most popular prototyping package on the Unity Asset Store. “I’m currently a top grossing content provider in the Unity Asset Store. The sheer number of Unity users and assets available in the Asset Store are growing daily – two reasons that make me very optimistic for my business.”
The Unity Asset Store features free assets that range from sophisticated terrain road and river tools to complete packages with learning materials. A popular release, C# Game Examples by Mark Hergaarden, includes five simple, but essential game examples to learn from and modify. Developers can spend hours programming obstacles to animate, swing, thump, follow paths and generally move around or accomplish the same thing in a matter of minutes with one of the top-downloaded free items, iTween, which brings intuitive and easy-to-use tweening animation to Unity.
“We’re getting great feedback from developers and it’s exciting to see content creators monetizing their assets and making thousands of dollars every month,” said Caitlyn Meeks, Asset Store Content Manager. “Our Asset Store user base has grown to more than 10,000 users in less than three months, and it’s quickly becoming the #1 marketplace of choice for Unity developers.”
Meeks continued, “An exciting growth area of the Asset Store can be found in the Editor Extensions category. The Unity editor is surprisingly extensible with editor classes so that the actual development environment itself can be customised to a degree that one would think only possible with source-level modification, including vehicle wizards, procedural sky systems, UI toolbars and added functionality to the workspace.