Selling on CGTrader from the newcomers point of view

Polybox: Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, POLYBOX is both a production studio and a high-end label for Virtual Reality, Games and Film content. Before establishing this multimedia studio, the team had more than 10 years of expertise in crafting moving-pictures, immersive experiences as well as developing and publishing award winning video games.

beffio: I’m Tom Lassota, the founder of beffio.com. As far as I can remember myself, I’ve always been passionate about graphic design and video games development. I stuck to video games like superglue ever since I got my first gaming console - Commodore 64 - when I was 6. This made me who I am now - a designer working at the intersection of design, art and technology.

At beffio we create quality products dedicated for games. We specialize in creating 3D packs which contain 3D models, animations, lighting effects and other tools that help people visualize and turn their game and app ideas into the final product. We work mostly with Unity3D, but also spend some time with other engines, such as the Unreal Engine.

At CGTrader we sell products such as The Lost Lands, which is a high quality modular stylized art package containing carefully crafted animated 3D models. It will help you to build environments, suitable for mobile, VR, desktop and consoles. City Adventure on the other hand is an intuitive build-it-yourself asset containing all elements necessary to create top quality modular town-related games. All that packed into one package, which comes with example scenes, plugins and prefabs. Space Journey, for example, contains everything one might need for creating space game - art, through animations, space effects and some really useful plugins. All of our products give you a lot of 3D content, but also Unity 3D packages, which contain useful scripts and tools.

What are the reasons that led you to join CGTrader community at exactly this point? How did you hear about the platform?

beffio: We sell our products on various platforms and are always on the lookout for quality stores, which provide good user experience and content. When we first saw CGTrader (thanks to the Google browser:), it immediately caught our attention with good branding, user experience and simplicity of exploring the models. Simply put, we just thought that this store was a nice fit for our products.

Polybox: We’ve been publishing our content on two main other platforms for the past two years now, we’ve been also looking on ways to make our content available for new communities. After being approached by many other websites to publish on their platforms, we decided to go with CG trader after finding it on Google, as the experience with this platform stood out from the rest. Website looked neat, the whole uploading and publishing process was quick and easy. We also love how content is presented on CGTrader, the whole user experience feels just so inviting.

What have been the main struggles so far? (As you are still a new member)

beffio: The hardest thing in every new store is to bring some of your products to the top of the best-selling list. Since there is quite a lot of competition, the crucial thing is to build company recognition.

Also, one of the most problematic things for a company, such as ourselves, is that a lot of people who publish here do not necessarily do this for a living and hence sell underpriced models. These models may seem almost professional at a first glance, but are often of much lower quality and not optimised for game development use. Of course, it always depends on what the buyer needs, but for those who are on the lookout for pro solutions, it makes it much harder to find the real deal. And in turn, it also makes it much harder for us to hit the top selling lists. We believe this affects all creators who aim more for quality than quantity.

Polybox: Having more visibility for our content on CGTrader has been quite challenging so far compared to other platforms. We’re still learning as this is a new market for us but we are pretty confident that our assets could reach a wider array of creators.

What are your expectations for your future on CGTrader?

beffio: We would love to be a part of the CGTrader community, recognized for providing highest quality products for video games creation.

Polybox: We just published “Polyquest Worlds Vol1” which is our first volume of a new breed of AAA low-poly assets, so we’re excited to see how our new contribution will be received by the CGtrader community.

What are, if any, things that you would like CGTrader to change to make any processes related more convenient?

beffio: One of the reasons why we decided to get involved with CGtrader was that we noticed your section with VR / Low-Poly models. I think creating a separate place for this kind of content was a great move! However, there are still a lot of opportunities to take advantage of, in order to help new artists and companies getting noticed.

Since we’re at VR and Low-Poly, one of the things that could easily improve this section is creating categories. It could simply be split into “Packs” and “Models”, exponentially improving the browsing experience for the users, who would be able to decide whether they were looking for a stand-alone model or a whole environmental pack. A good example of such a pack would be City Adventure - a city building pack with a lot of buildings, elements and even vehicles.

Another idea, which I think is worth considering, is adding the “Featured” section. A lot of video game and app stores use this solution to increase exposure of top-quality products from their listings. Also, it allows each day/week for a different product to be showcased. And what’s even better, these products don’t have to be based on the best-selling lists, but can be chosen from freshly uploaded content. This would give new quality products a chance to shine.

There are truly many opportunities, but let’s end with these 2: more categories related to games, mobile games, VR etc., and last - but by far not the least important - creating newsletter showcasing new products.

Polybox: In our days things move really fast both for us and our users, with that said we would like to see a faster and more responsive support from CGTrader as this is an essential element to a healthy and successful relationship between publishers and users.

What was your overall experience on the website so far?

beffio: I love the simplicity of the website. It’s easy to use and understand. As I have said before, it could do with some upgrade in the “sections” department, but overall you’ve got amazing foundations. I love the way you can explore products and how easy it is to manage your products and browse through sales.

Polybox: As already mentioned, we love the overall experience on the website. The only thing that we recommend is an improved compression mode for the uploaded screenshots as the current compression is pretty harsh, it tends to degrade the quality of the images quite a bit which can be a bit misleading for users.

Would you consider your works on CGTrader successful?

beffio: At the moment it’s hard to say. Our products are very successful on other platforms. We’re one of the most popular companies out there. However, right now we are still rather new to CGTrader and don’t have many page views. That’s why it’s hard to predict how things will proceed. We hope you guys will be continuously improving CGTrader to help us new sellers get noticed!

Polybox: It’s a bit early to come up with a verdict, only time will tell, but we are pretty confident that when you invest passionately in quality, when you spend time and effort in producing innovative and exceptional content, success will eventually catch up with you.

Thanks for honest opinions and suggestions, Polybox and beffio.

This is a great fresh perspective for us, but we also hope you have enjoyed the read and will now get involved in the discussion