Hey, Everyone.
I’m Brad Hatcher, a cofounder of indiegamestock.com.
I will try my best to answer all of your questions!
Is there a market for that kind of stuff?
Absolutely! We have people from all over the globe buying and submitting assets.
If so, what could I charge for a fully animated character? (non exclusively, so anyone who pays for it may commercially use it)
Great question! If you submitted the zombie pirates one at a time, I would probably price them at $25 each to start. I would give them a few weeks at that price to see what kind of action they got. If they seem to sell just fine then we would leave the price as it is. If they are going like hotcakes we would probably bump it up in $5 increments to find the sweet spot. Going in the opposite direction, if they are not selling then we would lower the price in $5 increments or offer sales that try to highlight it.
If they were my assets and I was going to upload them, I would upload them one by one and then make a pack that contained all of them. I would probably put the pack at $50 - $75 and see how it does following the same guidelines above.
Everything for sale on the site is royalty free – that means that once a customer purchases your asset they can use it however they like. About the only limitation is trying to sell the asset again as if they created it, that’s a no-no.
Is it better to upload them at a specific site like www.indiegamestock.com, or is a blog like Chris Hildenbrand's (http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.de) the way to go ?
You could do both! We are non-exclusive at the moment, so you can submit them to our site AND elsewhere. Of course, we’d much rather have you only submitting to us because that gives customers more reason to use our site, but you’re the one in charge – it’s up to you! By the way, I love Hildenbrand’s site – it’s a fantastic learning resource with great graphics!
I had a look at indie-gamestock.com, does anyone know if that business is successful? I would have thought part of the point of building a game was to create the visuals... It's hands down my favourite part, at least.
We are still relatively new but we already have some fantastic graphics for sale. And we have artists that are making fairly consistent sales each month. Are they making a fortune? Not yet, but they are making a couple of hundred bucks a month without having to do much more than upload their art (after all the work of creating it of course!).
We handle all payment issues so you only have to setup your own paypal account and we handle everything else.
As for the second part of the question about why you would buy assets instead of creating your own, well, the easiest answer is that some people don’t have the artistic skills but still have that burning desire to make a video game.
Also, as everyone in the industry already knows, making a video game is freaking hard. And it can be expensive, so expensive! We created indiegamestock for developers who didn’t have a big budget, or even a budget at all. This way they can get video game assets at a very affordable price and put their focus on the other aspects of game design. We want everyone to have a shot at making the game they always wanted.
I hope that answers all of your questions! Feel free to ask anything else you want. I will keep checking this area.
Have a kick ass day
Brad Hatcher
brad@indiegamestock.com