Hi i make this simple post because i m want to make more 3d asset to sell and i want to know what developpers can need in 3d asset in general, not specific asset but very typical thing who can't be tough but useful, tell me your opinion if you can. Thanks you (My 1st ideas was weapons and maybe because it s my favorite thing to models)
Nice question – I’m also a 3D asset creator, mainly environments, and I constantly ask devs the same thing.
From what I see, the assets that get used the most are not the “coolest” ones, but the boring, modular building blocks that let you actually build levels:
Environment kits: walls, floors, stairs, railings, fences, doors, windows, roofs.
Set dressing props in small / medium / large groups: crates, boxes, barrels, furniture, cables, debris – designed so they can be clustered into readable shapes instead of random noise.
Utility / gameplay objects: switches, gates, terminals, loot containers, signposts – anything devs can hook up to their scripts.
Weapons are fun, but that market is very crowded.
I will agree with the post above.
Environment elements are working for me. They're what I make mostly and they are starting to succeed in a major way on my shop.
But another note and it should be sort of obvious, but:
Look at what 3d games people are actually making - seriously, what is in those types of games that is frequently used? Obviously the itch players play a ton of horror games and the games on itch that trend are often playable in browser. I started off making a lot of general purpose environment nature packs, with outdoor trees, ferns, bushes, wildflowers, grasses, fallen branches, stones, little mushrooms, etc - and those did well for sure over time. So did street details, interior furniture, and other categories including massive success with big packs of seamless PBR textures and decals.
So that all worked fine, but I couldn't help noting that of the little freebie extras on my profile, the blood stains and sprays - kind of added as afterthought - were the most downloaded, and then when I posted a teaser for an upcoming horror pack I got a ton of views and a five star rating of it before there was anything at all posted there. There was literally just a teaser still and a text description of the planned content. But somebody was so excited they rated it before anything there at all was downloadable. And that has never happened to me before.
All to say, PSX tagged type assets are popular and horror even more so, and I think the PSX retro tag is mainly trending due to it being a proxy for 'efficiency' and low texture filesize, low polycount. Which are also a clear style to some degree sure but also assets tagged PSX will tend to be able to run well in web browsers on this platform. WebGL games demand extreme efficiency and strong optimization, because the effective max resource usage of a browser tab is, for now, 1gb. Including other non game stuff in the tab, including the download of the entire game and its active runtime memory use. Even recent mobile games now can push well above these constraints on newer phones with 4 or more GB memory use and similarly large install footprints. So there's a clear market for lean, efficient web friendly assets and for horror assets in particular, including horror environments.
matthornb.itch.io <- my itch shop/profile. Made many hundreds of $ in sales already across well over 200 transactions and have 17 five-star ratings from various buyers on various asset packs and the level of activity is rising fast, over a dozen purchases over Thanksgiving 2025 alone. So I clearly know what I am talking about at least a little, and am doing something right it seems.
My view is as follows: Offer a bunch of great products and price low, as in impulse buy territory, and have a few freebies in the mix to grab people at first and give them a reason to follow your profile. I have 135 followers there so far. Include in bundle sales massive discounts and include upcoming content in such bundles so buyers can keep returning once every month or two and each time find something new somewhere hopefully. Keep building new things and periodically expand existing packs. Treat it as a serious effort and keep it going and growing. It can't develop a following overnight. But given time if it's a following big enough it will make money even with tiny price points, just based on the sheer number of people present.
Bonus tip: I promote the shop like crazy and am proud of the work I did and thankful to the early adopters who gave the material a chance and rated and posted comments, questions, other feedback and helped get it moving. I am posting on social media, commenting on Youtube game dev videos, posting here in the community, and on forums I frequent. There is a risk of going too far and seeming spammy and it's important to provide valuable info and responses that are helpful, not just links spammed everywhere. But if you can do that it can be really effective. I also have some paid ad spend and found some banner ad networks off on the edge, not the obvious stuff like Google Ads, Microsoft Bing, or Meta, but pretty obscure spots on obscure banner ad networks that are I think undervalued due to sheer obscurity. Back in the day Project Wonderful was like that, you could routinely get clicks for as low as 1/5 of a cent in the right spots with relevant audiences with the right animated ad fitting the slot. I haven't found much quite that good since but there are spaces that can come fairly close. Even now. And with such careful targeting I have seen ad campaigns hit the point where every dollar poured in directly results in $1.50+ in sales consistently now (and rising) so that, if you can hit that sort of threshold, can absolutely cause explosive growth seemingly out of nowhere in mere months, just cycling the profits back into ad spend every month until suddenly it is resulting in levels of sale activity every month that used to take years.
Did that with eBay and Etsy in the past but those were unsustainable - kept raising pricing over and over but the pileup of orders and entusiasm rose so fast around the 250 review mark that I could not possibly keep up. So the shops failed due to their success. Here (with asset packs) I hope that will not occur simply due to the different nature of digital products not requiring personalized customization and shipping, packaging of every individual order. But we'll see how big it might get. If I am at some point making over $7k a year doing this any amount above that will be donated across various lifesaving causes. Trying to help people and hold global society together with string and duct tape essentially as long as possible in spots where almost everyone else has sort of given up and abdicated responsibility for the well being of the desperately poor. People sick and starving and lacking access to clean water.
I am weird like that - I believe the global financial system is due for a massive crash fairly soon and that a polycrisis (everything bubble) is nearly ready to pop. Could be wrong. We'll see. I am frustrated with my country's hyperindividualistic views and wish we in the USA could understand that everyone has value, and that everyone deserves consideration. We aren't even pretending to be America First now, we're Rich America First, and 99.9% of the people on the planet are screwed over by it so a few billionaires can control everything. And any moderate notion of redistribution that might partially counter that funnelling of everything to the top is dismissed as communism. I'm not advocating for communism, I'm advocating for a few small limitations on capitalism so that life is livable for most people, and there is a difference.
The system is going to correct and start declining at some point, and the losses can either be taken from those who already have almost nothing, causing them to die, or from those who can afford such losses. If the former path continues to be chosen I suspect the poor won't all go down peacefully but will cause massive disruption, bloodshed and protest in the process. Society holds together as tenable longer if those at the top sacrifice more to maintain stability. Maybe it even buys time enough to find breakthroughs, scientific solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
So I don't feel like investing in anything other than helping people. If I am going to lose money I might as well do so in a way that makes a difference. That's me though, it's how I see it and I am odd that way. I'm a doomer sort of due to environmental awareness and recognition of resource overshoot, rising contamination of what is left, but not a prepper, I don't think there is any point to prepping as anything you stockpile will inevitably make you a target for a bigger group of people who will steal it all. Better just to give everything away and liquidate it in time, and die quietly when the world ends instead of trying in vain to survive when there's realistically likely not any way to actually do that past a certain approaching point. Most humans probably won't make it through next 20 years and I understand that and accept it. I made peace with it, better let the people who are determined to survive be the ones who do.
It's not my aim to be one of the ones who survive, my dream is just to make some sort of significant difference in the world for others before I die. Maybe prolong the decline a bit and buy a few more minutes or seconds for society. If enough people recognize what is happening and do likewise and make sacrifices individually we might together even extend stability by months, even years.
That would be nice.
