Unfortunately, I’m a plug-in creator in Greater China (including Hong Kong and Macau), there are tens of thousands users of the product all over the world, I had written in the product pages that please do not buy the products, for they will be removed on March 31, 2026, I feel so sorry that I can’t maintain the products anymore. The customers might have to buy a new copy from an alternative store to get continuous upgrade. The total sales are $10,050.00 last year. From April 1, 2026, I might lose 90% of the income from Unity Global Asset Store, even more.
I feel for you. while I not entirely aware of said
is there any way you can put your assets on your own website and people buy them from there? I buy some stuff from Rizhao City, Shandong Province (non unity related) and they dont have any warnings about a change or such
Yes, I can put my assets on my own website and people buy them from there, but the earlier customers will lose tech support (such as free upgrade to new version), and the new sales will drop to 10% or even less, for people can’t find my assets from Unity Asset Store.
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its time to make our own open source asset store for unity or smt XD
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Publishers won’t be punished in this situation. Refunds that occur due to this, which are outside of our standard refund guidelines, will be reimbursed to publishers in April (likely in time for May payout)
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Re @UnityJuju
Half true, but some customers who purchase recently in February(haven’t downloaded), they immediately apply refund and charge us back.
Meanwhile, to be fair, if customers can get full refund in 6 months.
Why not Asset Store refund/compensate publishers 30% commission(last 6 months) due to the short notice of banning us?
For example, we’ve spent 7 years on publishing asset to store, you guys taking 30% revenue for 7 years. And we got less than one month notice?
Publishers are helping Asset Store build cool tools and promote Unity for years, then Unity can sell in a very good price to China.
Unity team takes all the advantage anyway, shows no respect to all the contribution from developers/publishers. After days of discussion in this post, they don’t even have any plan to compensate the disadvantage/damage to developers/publishers from China, HK, Macau.
Will Asset Store consider refunding 30% commission revenue back to publishers??!
Lastly, just thoughts to other publishers:
Why shouldn't us move to Fab directly, which can reach both Global and China regions with only 12% commission from revenue? It should be trending after March 31, and Unity Asset Store might become Nokia 3310 (was a good store in history, but outdated~)
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Don’t be sorry, it’s not ur fault, we all who is to blame
here’s another story I’ve heard: Unity is planning to sell its China business. Though its engine is capable, its licensing fees are prohibitively high, even for small independent teams. As a result, Unity has struggled to gain traction among local Chinese developers. This abrupt shift could be an attempt to boost the unit’s valuation and secure a favorable sale price, perhaps to offset Unity’s recent stock market setbacks.
Either way, for a leading industry software company to make such a move is like “drinking poison to quench thirst.” It risks being left behind in the coming storm of the AI revolution
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We’ve updated the affected assets list in the main post. This list will be updated every week to help users identify affected assets.
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This feels like Unity is trying to play a joke on us. The previous document was a PDF that required people to manually search each asset they own to check whether it appeared in the list. The community eventually created several programs to parse the PDF and automate this check, something Unity could easily have done themselves. In reality, it would take no more than a couple hours of work.
After those programs were created, the people who developed them, including myself, pointed out that using a PDF was not ideal. Converting a PDF to CSV can introduce errors, and it would be far better if the list also included the package IDs for the assets. Relying on string comparisons is very prone to mistakes, especially after a PDF-to-CSV conversion.
And what did Unity do? Not only did they fail to create an automated tool, and not only did they ignore the requests for package IDs and the issues with PDFs, but they also changed the ordering of the assets in the new PDF from being alphabetically sorted by publisher to being sorted alphabetically by asset name. This not only makes it nearly impossible to track the changes, but it also causes most online PDF-to-CSV converters to fail to produce an accurate CSV file. In many cases, rows are generated incorrectly because strings are split across multiple lines.
On one hand, there are a few people with irrational complaints among the many justified ones. On the other, Unity seems to be doing everything it can to show that it not only ignores feedback, but also makes any attempt to mitigate the issues it created more difficult for the community. Instead of providing an automated tool, they leave the community to deal with the problem, and then sfter the community does that, they make that process harder.
So, what convention can we expect from this list?
- Will Unity publish an automated tool, or are we expected to keep updating our own every time the format changes?
- Will the list remain a PDF, or can we expect a format that is easier to process?
- Will we ever get package IDs, or must we continue relying on fragile string comparisons?
- Will the next PDF be ordered alphabetically by publisher name like the previous one, by asset name like this one, or should we expect something entirely new, perhaps ordered by the astrological sign of each asset?
At this point, I won’t be updating my tool that automatically checks for assets: GitHub - meredoth/Check_Assets: Check if you have one of the assets to be deprecated because they belong to a Chinese publisher · GitHub
The code should still work, but I can’t justify spending time trying to accurately convert the PDF to CSV. If anyone feels like doing that manually, since all five online converters I tried failed to do it properly, you can try running the program with the updated list in CSV format.
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@meredoth your tool, that html one Reddit - The heart of the internet why didnt unity just approach you guys and go, hey thanks for saving us a bunch of work, can we use/buy/promote your tool so it has a stamp.. and let people trust and use them
no
sadly not
I think thats the biggest travesty, One thing a friend and I talked about was that unity assets sometimes go depreciated, why cant unity tell us that? they can tell us it got updated? why not warn you some s*t you love is no longer supported.. The whole asset store is frustrating.. As someone with waaay too many assets, its amazing how many of them dont seem to work out the tin, or out of date.
I appreciate like the apple store its hard to manually check each and every one, but when you can buy and then the next day find that the asset is depreciated and no longer available unless you already have it they have withdrawn it etc, thats just sucky and feels like a con
I released my tool under the MIT license because the concept behind it is very simple. The only difficult parts were that I had to use reflection for certain calls due to their internal accessibility, and that I had to rely on string comparisons instead of package IDs.
These issues do not apply to Unity. They can directly access internal methods and already have the deprecated package IDs, so they could easily adapt my code and turn it into a one-button check. At the very least, I would expect them to help by providing the IDs so we could implement it ourselves. Instead, they did not provide them, kept the PDF format, and even changed the ordering for no clear reason, making everything harder.
This is a complete organizational mess, typical of large companies with a middle management problem. It is hard to believe that a company with so many developers could not allocate one developer for a single day to make things easier for everyone.
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My tool https://github.com/vklubkov/March31st parses the pdf itself, so it still works with the new file. But I can’t guarantee that it won’t miss anything, obviously. Parsing pdfs isn’t 100% reliable.
And I totally agree that this could be handled better by Unity in many ways.
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I’m not currently significantly affected by this, but having worked there and with studios using Unity for years I seriously sympathize with anyone caught up in it. I’ll keep my speculations to myself, other than to say I have a hard time believing this is truly the best they could hope to reasonably achieve. I think most users here won’t understand until this kind of thing affects them directly, but depending on your specific situation it’s insultingly low effort, and a huge violation of trust.
If you’re a Unity employee: continue to help in any way you can. Like the runtime fee fiasco it seems like what’s done is done, but if there’s anything left, either at the root level or by improving on the solutions you’ve come up with, please do.
If you’re an asset store developer: I’ve never published anything on there, so I can’t really speak to that experience. But it seems like alternative platforms with better terms and direct sales would be reasonable things to explore, especially when the rug can be pulled out from you like this.
If you’re an asset store user: show preference to directly supporting developers and better platforms when they’re offered. Barring a meaningful change on this decision (probably even with it), I can’t imagine leaning on the asset store in any significant way going forward.
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So I had to update the tool.
While it is relatively easy to handle double lines, the libs I am using treat underscores as the second line in the new file, thus making some names invalid (e.g., a_b_c becomes abc\r__).
So I remove '\r`'s, underscores, and spaces before comparison. And as I am displaying the publishers from the pdf to avoid additional asset store requests, some of their names are displayed incorrectly now (though I consider this a minor issue).
I also added table sorting, and the optional approximate string comparison. It takes longer but gives you additional results for similar names.
Aside from just finding out in April, will there be any other means to tell which refunds will be reimbursed?
I understand this is a frustrating situation.
Just FYI, we updated the PDF alphabetically by Publisher names, so it’s easier to process through the community-created tools.
I’m still checking whether it’s possible to share a CSV file with the team, but for now, the PDF is what we have available.
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Refunds where the users haven’t downloaded and purchased within 2 weeks are normal refunds, so those will not be compensated.
Those outside of that, if they have been downloaded or are more than 14 days old, will be compensated.
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Ideally, if you can share the assets’ package IDs, that would be best. Doing so would make the reliability of all the tools we create effectively 100%, since string comparisons are very prone to mistakes. If you can provide the package IDs, the format does not matter much, we can extract them and perform numeric comparisons, which are fully reliable.
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