Professional developers from solo devs, through small indies to AAA studios, use pre-made assets for their projects. It’s a cost-effective and fast way to increase the quality of your game or speed up the developing process. I’ll show you 13 marketplaces where you can buy pre-made assets and tools for your game in this post.
If you want to learn about buying and selling video game assets, take a look at my Ultimate Guide to Game Asset Marketplaces.
Game Engine Stores
Unity Asset Store is a library of free and affordable assets that you can download directly into your Unity Project. You can find various assets here, ranging from textures, animations, and models to editor extensions and tools.
Unreal Marketplace is similar to the Unity Asset Store, but it’s for the Unreal Engine. The significant advantage of this store is that you have free access to the Quixel Megascans library.
Other Marketplaces
Quixel Megascans is the world’s largest and fastest-growing scan library. Unlike the other stores, this one uses a subscription model. For a monthly fee, you can download a limited number from their impressive collection of 3D assets, tileable surfaces, vegetation, imperfections, atlases, decals, and more, from urban to natural, with hundreds of new assets scanned weekly.
CGTrader: unlike the previous two, this website is all about 3D art. Not just for games. It’s a place where you can also find freelancer artists to work with a contract.
ArtStation Marketplace is a place for artists to connect and showcase their work with others. It also has a marketplace section to find various 2D and 3D art, tutorials, and brushes for different software.
Sketchfab Store focuses on 3D models for VFX, game development, VR/AR, architecture, and animation. Unique in the way that you can inspect every mesh and texture before buying with their web-based model viewer.
Craftpix offers high-quality premium and free 2D-game assets for an affordable price: icons, sprites, tilesets, GUI, characters, backgrounds, game kits.
Itch.io is a marketplace for independent digital creators with a focus on independent video games.
Adobe Substance 3D Assets is a material library that you can access with your Adobe Substance subscription. You can download a limited amount of material per month.
GameTextures.com is a physically-based, procedural-generated video game material library. It uses a subscription model that allows you to download 100 textures per month. This credit rolls over to the next month if you didn’t use it all.
Publisher Stores
Synty Store is the webshop of a famous publisher who creates cool 3d stylized art packs. It’s safe to say that they have an asset package for every need: pirates, fantasy, sci-fi, and a lot more.
Protofactor specialized in animal, creature, and humanoid characters. They have a wide range of assets and bundles. They also have a printable version of their characters, if that interests you.
KitBash provides modular, flexible kits for a considerable variance of environments in the same style.
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