Hi everyone,

From time to time I come across an asset pack where the designer had embedded a little HTML embed for the user - you know, just to see all the animations in action and the assets themselves - and it got me wondering on how effective really is this strategy? Some asset pack designers (including myself!) will strive to create the most inviting and attractive pages possible, and this is something I have tried to experiment in for about a year, so I can share what I’ve learnt with the community.

It struck me that surely this HTML embed demo strategy might actually both be quite easy and effective, and so I performed a small experiment to crudely gauge how good this strategy is - and I will discuss it in this post.

What actually is the strategy?

Just to clarify what I mean by a “HTML embed demo”, this simply means when you make an interactable showcase of your asset pack and embed it into your page for people to play around with and get a better feel of your asset pack. I did it through a mini godot project.

The experiment?

I made a simple asset pack - a pixelart gun pack - with a HTML demo and released it on the 6th of July, 22 days ago (as of the date this post was written on). It is important to note that this experiment has uncontrollable external factors, like bot downloads, repeat visitors, or web scrapers that may skew results, hopefully this “experiment” will still prove the effectiveness of HTML embed demos to you all.

The results?

For asset packs on my account, on average 21.11% of people visiting any of my asset packs download it. Narrowing that down to pages that I deem to have a similar page design to my experiment pack (to ensure the view-download ratio boost is really because of the HTML demo and not just style), 28.91% of people visiting the packs download it. On my experiment pack, data was unfortunately skewed by bots (as is common on new asset packs), but by comparing the number of people who played the HTML embed demo to the number of people who downloaded the pack (which I can be fairly sure isn’t as influenced by bots), I conclude that 69.23% of people who played the HTML demo ended up downloading the pack, a significant increase. As bot visits decrease and genuine traffic increase, data will become more reliable, and I will share updated findings. As riddled with “buts” and “unfortunately”s this data is, I hope that a significant trend can still be observed. My account has around a thousand total downloads, so I hope that the data here is somewhat accurate. If any of the many, many, much more experienced designers on itch.io are willing to share their experiences with these kind of strategies, we would love to know.

My Conclusion?

I think I can conclude that the introduction of a HTML demo to an asset pack will significantly boost it’s success. I think that for the time it took me to whip together a quick demo, the extra downloads were worth it. I think that the fact that some people who would’ve ordinarily skipped past my pack instead downloaded it or put it into a collection thanks to my demo made it worth it. I shall leave the data for you to judge and use if you want, and I will keep the community updated both with this experiment and any others I do in my quest to discover what makes pages look attractive. If you have any thoughts or if you are an experienced developer willing to share some of your wisdom, please let me know! Thanks for reading. If I’m waffling or spewing nonsense, please let me know.

I did not realize you could do that, this is genuinely a really good tip that is helpful for both sellers and buyers

Update : The experiment pack now has 58.43% of people playing the HTML demo installing it after 42 days on the market, with 9 collections (surprisingly few). I hope to achieve much more reliable data by the 60 or 90 day mark (following the unreliable release data), but this still hopefully shows that using HTML demos can significantly boost an asset pack’s performance.

Just thought I’d give you all a final update. After nearly 4 months, the experiment asset pack has 84.62% of people who play the demo installing it. I think this is strong proof that incorporation of a HTML demo into an asset pack page for users to get a feel of your asset pack is highly rewarding and greatly improves the quality of your page - and I definitely recommend it! Thank you

One thing I’d separate in the results: are those downloads linked to the same people who played the demo, or are you dividing total downloads by total plays? If it’s the second, someone could download without playing, so 84.62% wouldn’t be a player-to-download conversion rate.

People who choose to launch a demo may already be more interested, too. A useful next comparison would be the same pack with and without the embed, keeping the price and page copy unchanged. I’d still value being able to inspect the animations; I’d just keep that benefit separate from what the numbers prove.

Interesting experiment! An interactive HTML demo can definitely make an asset pack more appealing because users get to experience the animations and features before downloading. The numbers are promising, although more traffic and a longer testing period would make the comparison more reliable.