I liked to study the reviews of popular assets. No matter positive or negative reviews, the number of reviews is increasing much slower recently.
Current assests having 1,000+ reviews can trace back to 5,6 years ago (Exclued post procerssing). Newly (within 1 or 2 year)popular paid asset only can get 100 reviews. It’s impossible for them to get 1,000+ reviews. But some popular assets made in 2016 have several hundred reviews, so something changed between 2016 and 2017, and that make the reviews less and less.
In 2018, the trend doesn’t change, less reviews. Less reviews mean less new developers. So it is an loop. New assets are less in quantity increasing and quality increasing.
In popuar asset page (old version), choose “Show only 3 most helpful reviews”.
Then click the potrait of the reviewers. You can understand most reviews are made by new developers.
You make a couple huge logical leaps, that less reviews = less new developers (ok I can kinda see where you’re coming from but it’s still not science, maybe the UI changed and makes leaving a review less prominent).
the next one i really don’t get:
“New assets are less in quantity and quality.” ← What? Why? in my 8 years as a Unity dev the assets on the store only seem to be improving.
That’s what a maturing market looks like. Look at the development of any product, the first 3 iterations make leaps and bounds in improvements, after that it’s very incremental.
Markets mature as the problem space gets resolved. Assets, like any product are only successful if there’s a business case for them. A lot of the obvious business cases have been catered for. Competing with them makes little sense unless a new asset creator can do it much better, but that likely has increased dev costs and makes the business proposition less attractive.
You are aware that the definition of “helpful review” is literally just people giving thumbs up or thumbs down to a review and nothing else, right? I have seen “helpful reviews” that were anything but helpful and reviews that didn’t qualify but were very much helpful buried under them solely because no one was there to vote them up.
How many products, reviews, and reviewers have you looked through to draw that conclusion?
Same, and in fact checking my profile shows that I have never left a single review. I have been working with this game engine for several years, purchasing assets for it, and have never left a single review (I really need to go through some of my assets that I regularly work with and leave reviews).
Since the OP is basing their statement off of random guessing I’m going to throw mine out and suggest that what we’re seeing here is simply that the vast majority of people making purchases never review the products they purchased and it’s definitely not a phenomenon limited to Unity’s Asset Store. It happens with just about every major store out there.
Let’s see an example. Here are the top three sellers in Amazon’s Toys category.
Clearly the number of reviews is not a good reflection of the number of people buying them because there is simply no way that Play Doh with 2,000 reviews would have more sales than Cards Against Humanity if a single review equated to a single sale. Let alone Relative Insanity having only 47 reviews while occupying the number one slot.
With only one hundred samples I think the error rate is considerably worse. When I search the store for assets released in the past six months (basically the vast majority of assets from 2018) there are 127 pages with each page being 42 assets each. That’s a total of 5,334 assets meaning you checked only about 0.01% of them.
Maybe with the new package manager unity can keep track of how many projects are actively using each asset (retention), it would be a better indicator of usefulness than reviews and a far more reliable statistic.
Classification is important. Unity store is very different, the customers are developers. In fact, 3D models asset and editor extenstion asset have different review rate.
On a side note in the new asset store Platformer PRO has much less ratings vs the old store. I guess some kind of time filter or migration issue. Maybe ratings from the previous major version update don’t get pulled across to new store as the older version is deprecated.