What if Unity bought the best asset store assets and put them in the box for free with Unity?
That’s it, the entire plan in a nutshell.
The key to it working would be making the assets easy to use well integrated but modular and well documented.
You’ve all seen it, posts on “How do I…?” or “Is there a way to…?” and the reply is a link to the Asset Store.
Pretty much all the missing features of Unity are on the Asset Store Now!
We have seen minor examples of this with the UI and TextPro, what if Unity went for a big Asset store consolidation to boost the features of Unity out of the box.
And what assets do you think Unity needs to integrate ASAP and why?
I do think there is some merit to the idea of Unity periodically picking a winner in specific asset categories, buying the tech, and including it for free with Unity. The key advantage of this is having an official solution to certain things, so it is easy to teach new users. For example, it was worthwhile to let many different asset store stores build different GUI solutions, and then choose the winner to integrate. That should have happened even faster, to be honest.
Right now, there are similar things going on with input, terrain, and other categories. With the input category, Rewired is a clear winner in many ways. With terrain, there are several assets that are very useful. Unity could leap forward to integrating the winners in a few categories.
I get what you are saying. However, the asset store should not be a permanent solution when there are glaring deficiencies in the core engine. If assets are being used to shore up a key problem, then Unity should periodically pick a winner in the category and integrate that into the engine as the official solution. That is the healthiest solution for the Unity community.
Arowx, why don’t you create a game engine? Its not really that hard. And I know you’re good at creating things really quickly.
Just get the PhysX library, bundle it with the Mono C sharp compiler and add a bit of GUI to show the public variables with c sharp reflection. Expose a few functions of the physX library. Add a simple 3D interface for placing objects and there you have it. You could call it the arrowX game engine. All the other features could be sold on the ArrowX asset store.
I set it to you as a challenge.
The part you are missing I think is that the asset store developers may be making a living off of their sales, and the only way for them to agree to this is if Unity were to give them a steady income at a certain level ongoing, or offer to buy them out with some large one-time lump sum. Then there’s also all the support for documentation, customer support, tutorials and websites and forums that support those communities etc. I’m not everyone will want to or even be able to just hand over their business. Sure enough a lot of stuff on the store is useful or ‘essential’ for various specific things, but like, how big do you want Unity to get in and of itself? And how is it going to make its money back if it pays these asset store developers tons of cash and then gives the apps away for free? In sheer volume of ‘oh its got some freebies’ increase in conversion rate?
They’ll need to offer something that TMP doesn’t. Yes I saw my sales dip with the introduction of JsonUtility but not dying by any means.
But yes, if this were done, a lot of publishers would suffer. Unity has to be careful not to completely alienate that community because they depend on it. It helps add attractiveness to the engine.
Really, is it Unitys job to give you out-of-the-box solutions to fringe problems? Lets take text mesh, how often do you need such a feature? How many people who need it couldn’t afford the small fee to buy it in the asset store?
I appreciate Unity delivering good stock assets. I would appreciate if said stock assets would be regularly upgraded, and not be dated crap like the terrain system for example. If there is a big reason why some people still spout crap like “Unity is graphically inferior to Unreal Engine”, its the dated stock systems that Unity in some cases is shipped with. A short trip to the asset store and about 200$ in assets will change that for the better.
Do I really think Unity should need 200$ in investment to compete with UE4 free offering? Well, no.
But if I have to pick where Unity should put their effort, I’d say let the thirdparty devs in the asset store do what they are best at, and only interfere when there is a glaring hole in the asset store, or there is no real competition and thus prices are way to high (like good water systems where only available for 250+ per seat some years ago... now there is competition, and you can get good systems for below 100).
Unity should in the meantime concentrate their effort and MONEY on improving the engine core, so the thirdparty devs can further improve their offerings and take advantage of the new low level abilities of the engine, and everyone gets a performance boost.
Killing off the thirdparty devs that have made this engine great and made it able to compete with PC centric game engines in the first place is probably the worst idea you could have, and trying to deliver solutions for 1000 different devs each with widely differing needs and demands will only see 999 or so stay unhappy while 1 gets what he needs, instead of improving the engine for everyone of them, and leaving the asset store devs to cater to their specific needs.
Really, I rather spend some bucks on the asset store and get dedicated support and a guaranteed interest in improving that specific solution than hoping Unity will ever cater to my specific need while they juggle a growing amount of different build targets, APIs, and an engine that is creaking under its own weight at too many places.
Your tool still provides more feature than JsonUtility. Not to mention lots of people are already famialr with its base.
I tend to only use JsonUtility for saving and loading game state that was already part of a mb or so. I use your tool for getting json data from a external source.
Well, we kind of are already doing this; hiring the NGUI developer to work on the foundation of Unity UI and acquiring Cinemachine, Anima2D, Text Mesh Pro for integration into future releases. However, IMO, it doesn’t make sense to do it for ALL THE FEATURES; as Unity would become bloatware and not every A$ feature is useful to the majority of our users.
However, integration is not as simple as ‘just put them in the engine!’; it takes a lot of time, effort and care to handle it in an effective and beneficial way. Thats why these Asset Store Packages are made ‘Free’ during this integration process, so you can use them right now.
I think it is ironic to claim that there is an ignore button and it’s implications whilst not ignoring. If the OP’s posts are so ignorable then why does he consistently get lots of views and spark discussions…often more interesting than the standard RPG/FPS boilerplate cycling through here daily.
There are problems when relying on the asset store to solve an important issue. When there are a bunch of different assets solving the same problem, new users are not always sure which one to use. Making sure a new asset works with every possible available asset can be time consuming. Eventually assets can become unsupported. With the example of the GUI, it made a lot of sense for Unity to pick a winner. The community as a whole was more efficient once Unity chose a GUI tech to build their integrated GUI upon. New assets no longer need to support several popular GUI assets. Educational initiatives (YouTube videos, blogs, articles, books, etc) can focus on a single, official Unity GUI solution instead of several popular 3rd party assets.
All I am saying is there are certain times when it is smart for Unity for pick a winner, buy out that winner, and integrate the winning tech into the engine. And I am not saying that because of the individual asset costs, because those are largely negligible in the whole scheme of a gaming project. Unity needs to periodically pick a category winner, because it stabilizes the community by standardizing specific solutions. Unity needed a single official GUI that the community could standardize around and build projects and assets around.
It is not a matter of killing off asset devs. In fact, standardizing around specific core assets periodically can actually make it easier for assets devs. When there were several popular 3rd party GUI assets and no official Unity GUI solution, a lot of assets (outside of the GUI asset category) needed to support all of the popular GUI assets. That was wasting those developers’ time, and slowing progress. Once Unity picked a winner in the GUI category, asset devs only really needed to support the official Unity GUI.
Now keep in mind, I am not saying Unity needs to pick a winner in every category. Many categories don’t have an obvious winner currently, and some assets are not considered core building blocks that other assets might depend on. But when there is a clear winner and other assets do depend on it, then I think Unity should pick a winner and integrate it into the engine.
And if they expect to be developers, game or otherwise, they’d better get used to that. It is normal to have a problem during development which can be solved in a dozen different ways, and you don’t have enough information to pick one.
The answer to this is not “someone else should pick one for me.”
Personally I’m in the “Unity is doing things exactly right” camp.
Making an asset free while it’s in transition to being fully integrated makes the most sense.
As far as just grabbing assets here and there goes, yeah, that’s not an easy answer.
The last thing that Unity wants to do is ruin its own ecosystem by essentially killing off every competitor in one swoop. If you knew that at any moment years of hard work could be flushed down the toilet, then why the hell would you ever do it?
While at the same time Unity’s elephant in the room of lacking features, the depressingly out dated terrain system, is a giant black eye when people are looking at engines to learn.
But what should they do? Pick a handful of assets and essentially kill of every other option?
