Game Art Forge - Art Resources

#1 I'm a tad confused.
Your starting a site for your own game / media art assets or starting a site for other artists / coders to place their art for sale?

Without seeing anything posted for examples, it's impossible to for me to give an opinion about how you should use your site to generate money.

In my mind, the site name sounds synonymous with sourceforge which offers coders free source code attached to different licenses for use.

I do have a few question though,...
1) What will make your site different and enticing to visit for game / media content? Suppliers of art will want high profile, front of the line search engine results to get the maximum people into the site to browse and purchase.

2) If your supplying the art assets, how well are you prepared to convert the assets? for example: Sound files *.ogg file to *.mid or modeling files from Autodesk formats to something like Lightwave.

3) If your covering code assets across multiple game engines such as script languages or C, C++, C#, and Assembler, how well are you prepared to handle requests for Mac and PC inclusive for those code assets; what form of support will be available if any code asset needs modification or customer support for installation?

4) How well prepared are you to handle customer downloads of content they purchase today and again a year or so later?

Edit: It's a huge, competitively vicious, world in the game industry and people are going to have very high expectations that start on Opening Day and I'd like to know more about your plans other than how your going to make your money.

#2 Hi, Scott

Apologies for any confusion.

The site is a personal website, where I intend to post art resources that I have personally created, the site will be primarily art only, no music and no source code.

The site will also be 2D art assets only initially, with plans for 3d art assets at a later date.

1 ) To answer your first question, see above, the site will be by own art assets

2 ) For the 2d art assets I will provide, the user will recieve .pngs of the 2d artwork at various 'common' sizes, 512x512, 256x256, 128x128, etc and the original source .AI files will also be provided, so that the user can change and export as required.

3 ) No plans to support code.

4 ) I have a system plan in place that allows a download that stays available to the consumer for 24 hours after a payment is confirmed, this system costs me money but has not yet been implemented because I have not decided on the final delivery method, paid for content over ad-funded free content ?

Hope this answers some of your questions, and thanks for your feedback ! :)

#3 Thank you, for clarifying. I like the idea of 2D art assets even if thats the only form you offer.

I do not have a preference of payment types / plans. I personally do not care if the site is full of ad's so long as what I am purchasing is otherwise hassle free.

#4 Unless you got hundreds of assets, I don't think the ads is the way to go. Even if alot of people would visit your site, they would only stay there as long as there is something to look at, so if you have 30-40 assets they are quickly done with your site and have downloaded what they need.
Ofc, I haven't run any commercial website myself yet (I find it hard to believe that ads generate any revenue at all so I might just not be qualified to answer this ^^) but I would say go with the pay route or do a hybrid!
Website templates example often do this, where they have free content and some premium content which you pay for. You could even take it another step and show ads on the free content and let pages with premium content only be ad-free.

#5 Hi,

I've decided to trial option B

http://gameartforge.blogspot.co.uk/

So, I've uploaded a number of assets ( in .PNG and .Ai Formats ), which are available free via an Ad-sponsored link ( which only last 5 seconds maximum )

Hope you find the assets useful, and let me know if you have any specific requests, and I will add them to my list of 'things to do' ! :)

Regards


Hey, Scott

I always envisioned the site would be completely ad-free, keeping the interface clean, the only ad shown is the download link only.

Hey, Lucas

I hear what you are saying, but I'm hoping the art quality will be what keeps users coming back, I know the model you mention, but the infrastructure can be quite expansive, and I simply do not have the funds for something like that, indeed my option A which was server based was also going to be quite expensive to run, and as I'm working alone to create these assets, I'm not sure I could get a quick enough return to pay for that option, let alone make any profit. I'm still not expecting large profits from option B though, but at least the art is out there ! :)

#6 Better go click on some ads then!
Well the art is pretty good quality from what I can see :) Will share the site aswell.
Good luck with your new site! I hope it works out for you!

#7 Thanks, Lukas ;)

#8 http://gameartforge.blogspot.co.uk/

New Coloured Pencils Set Added.

Regards.