I think its pretty easy for most or all of us to agree that there are issues with asset sustainability.
Iâve called for something like subscriptions in the past, and I recognise there are flaws with this solution.
Thinking about it more, I decided to dwell on the various reasons why some assets are not sustained. Sometimes it is money, but there are other reasons too. Change in life circumstances, sick of the amount and nature of the task of providing support, tired of how much updating can be required to keep up with changes in unity releases. And perhaps sometimes people get bored of their asset and struggle to find the motivation to continue it. Income can influence these things but sometimes no sensible amount of income is enough and some assets will still die because of this.
Sometimes I wish that, in order to offer a solution to the problem no matter the cause, it would be nice if unity had a division that pro-actively came along and did deals to take ownership of certain assets that were otherwise about to be abandoned. Not very often, just with certain assets that have been extremely popular, are not on their way to natural obsolescence, and are complex & powerful enough/involve areas of unity that evolve all the time and require maintenance. Yes there are some issues with this âsolutionâ too, and obviously to date unity has not really gone near this area.
Without Unity âinterferingâ in this way, I suppose the market place does tend to function along the lines of where there is still demand, some other product will come along to fill the demand left by the previous assets departure from the market. I suppose the problem with this solution is that many of us recognise that our time is money, and would rather pay money periodically to keep alive the asset weâve already invested time in learning & integrating with our projects & other assets, than have to start all over again.
I cant say Iâm that optimistic that the problem is fully solvable when I think back to events surrounding the demise of many of my favourite assets from the past. Public discussion on forums etc often recognises the signs of slow demise or reacts in shock to a sudden one, but its not that often that it seems like there are real opportunities to change the fate of the asset, often it just becomes clear the developer(s) are done with it, the end, bye.
Given many of the assets that were cherished by me that have since âdiedâ were in the category of assets that inject themselves into the graphics rendering somewhere along the way, the whole Scriptable Render Pipeline stuff thats slowly coming alive during these first cycles of 2017 releases is on my radar as a period of some uncertainty - itâs way too early to judge yet, this journey does not really start quite yet, but that also means I have to prepare myself to have no preset expectations about which assets I own and love now will thrive in the scriptable render pipeline era.
Actually speaking of that I may as well admit that I have a âromanticâ dream about a whole bunch of talented asset store devs coming together and adding a ton of really cool stuff to the base render pipeline examples that unity will provide (eg HD pipeline), in one new branch. Iâd love to subscribe to that, that would be worth money every month to me, but I know better than to expect it to happen.
