But Unity’s support for the free version is mostly their community sites, where we help each other. Most assets don’t have enough of an audience for that approach to work. Also, you get away with less support for something that is free than for something that’s paid.
I agree that a lot of stuff on the asset store could use better documentation. Actually, it’s my primary complaint about the system in general. There’s no standardised form for documentation, and the documentation for some assets I’ve purchased is either pretty useless or nonexistant.
(I initially wrote “more documentation”, but I realised that’s wrong. One asset in particular that I’ve used has bucketloads of documentation, but as it’s not organized or presented well it’s incredibly difficult to find what you need. Adding more text/videos/examples does not necessarily help. Quality of material is more important than quantity of material.)
The biggest strike against me paying for things on the asset store straight up is that theres a bunch of rubbish on there, which is hard to curate obviously but basically makes the purchase a risky and possibly very disappointing experience. And you often have absolutely no idea how things are going to pan out - even stuff that gets positives on the forum has disappointed me, and vice versa, but mainly i tend to take reports of stuff on the forum, and in reviews (often the reviewer is an awful reflection on the asset), with a big pinch of salt. I understand how hard it is for unity to process this content and decide what should and shouldnt make it in, but i think there shuld be some really strict standards about some things that have to be met for the potential buyer to have confidence in the product (and hence the asset store entirely) - like not just good documentation included but very good examples available before buying that shows a buyer exactly what to expect. And it should be as exhaustive as it can get, like a unity qa can ask ‘where’s a youtube video showing me through your package’ and there be one and it be relatively well presented and accurate, and explain some standard gotchas right from the beginning. In fact in the asset store there should be a little row of ticks or something to show wether source code is included or that it’s a dll, how appropriate it is for each version of unity and directx/opengl, and platform and so on - that be part of the asset store submission and presentation/implementation and quality assurance process. Being able to filter results by these flags would be nice too
As he pointed out, competitors set prices. If more people bought stuff from the asset store, more people would start producing content, undercutting competitors, and driving the price down. At the small cost range of many of the assets, producers lowering their prices wouldn’t really result in more sales for them (at least not to offset the price cut)
The top paid assets are the ones that provide great value and are generally ones that apply to all games. Which makes sense, a lot more copies of Playmaker or GUI apps are going sell than racing building kits or animated goblins.
Race Building Kits must get lots of sales because they are expensive been that way for a while now. I’ve not seen them on sale once. I’m very hesitant to spend $150 (the two big ones) on possibly a too fat for mobile race building kit.
I’ve fooled with AI Driver Toolkit thingy? Its actually pretty neat for an out the box job, and runs absolutely fine on mobile (I fooled with it in a ‘i wonder how many things i can put in this until my phone gives up’ situation, it was by far not the most taxing thing my phone was doing at runtime).It’s hardly forza but who’s making forza on mobile? Only took a few minutes to grasp and get things racing too. Gets my thumbs up. Give him your money
I have experimented with pricing and there is no difference in sales by pricing from $20 to $10 to $5. At these low levels, price is not a barrier to anyone who can afford a computer, software and a monthly internet bill.
I do believe marketing a sale and advertising the drop in prices has a big effect.
I fooled with price as well. I try to stay inline with the other similar scripts though there’s nothing that’s exactly comparable. I can say though that dropping from $50 to $45 seems to have made a huge difference in sales numbers, although my asset is still fairly young (first published on September 13th) so there are other factors such as users seeing how I support the product and waiting for reviews from other users so it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly how much difference it made.
While im in a good mood: i dont own your asset Dustin, i dont need it, the json thing, but its assets like that that make unity much much more than just a thing for making games, that kinda thing makes ‘interactive experiences’ (Which i like the sound of more than games) world go round. Just saying. Nice work
Appreciate the kind words. And yes it does go a long way, especially if you want to start integrating with RESTful services like MVC WebAPI. However, I’ll be the first one to tell people that sometimes it’s overkill. If you are serializing very simple things and don’t need the extra BSON or collection support, then other libraries like LitJSON are free and will suit your needs just fine.
Anything that can feasibly stretch out the tentacles of my games in surprising ways must be a great thing, an experiment i ran out of time to do was to have someone playing a game i made on an OR but they were actually roaming around in a world that was part of an amusing on-rails fly through being played at a ska/punk club against a wall with a projector, dancers could interact with a kinect throwing by punching the air, throwing things at the or user who was down far below in the scene wandering about while the club camera followed its path (Thinks being thrown at you from high in the sky in an OR can be a disconcerting experience, in my experience). That was a real pity we ran out of time, but next time! Being able to do that then extend it further until its playing with peoples websites, being used to draw abstract graphics on a diff clubs wall at the same time referencing whats going on, while sending amusing precooked twitter messages informing people who has hit the or-er with what as it happens… its all very silly but it hints at higher things! I’d love stuff to get connected like that - the forza 5 drivertar made me think of it a bit
And yes it does go a long way, especially if you want to start integrating with RESTful services like MVC WebAPI. However, I’ll be the first one to tell people that sometimes it’s overkill. If you are serializing very simple things and don’t need the extra BSON or collection support, then other libraries like LitJSON are free and will suit your needs just fine. 