Dear unity,
I love you! But what i love most about you, is the asset store!
When i was deciding between game engines, what tiped me over unity wasn’t the licencing (vs the royalties of UDK co) but 2 things
- .NET based
- The asset store
Everything else came as a far away third +, while unity may not be as triple A looking as UDK out of the box, it’s pretty hard to match what you get once you spend on the asset store and i think i’m as close as it gets to having purchased almost all assets on the store!
So here’s my little rant, because i feel this gem that is the asset store deserves some upgrading and love
1) Licencing terms
It would be nice to have, in plain english, the simple licencing terms. I once asked that to support and get an answer that was basically, editor upgrades : 1 per person, music : 1 per title, everything else : 1 per company. The issue i have with that is that it isn’t made clear anywhere i’ve found and also that it isn’t clear WHICH one of those an asset is, if i buy something to make volumetric grass that comes with an editor, is it a model type of asset or an editor extention? Does it depend on wether one single person will be editing? The solution i would propose is to add this information on a per asset basis, decompose assets in those 3 licencing terms and make it clear “which” it is when browsing the asset.
2) Assets management
I literally own around 100 paid assets i think, and i actually use most of those in a single project, this is hell! Help me! While most of those work just fine together a few modifications to the way the assets work would make including, but mostly updating all those assets trivial.
- I want to place assets wherever i want, please require all assets producer to use relative paths (and provide an “AssetInstalledPath” or similar variable), right now i’m forced to drag drop assets, this is bad as hitting update will duplicate data, so every update is actually a delete and re include and fix anything that may have broken.
- Do not allow (and automatically force at upload) standard assets upload, this breaks things on multiple includes, add a way to say "require x standard asset) and have unity automatically import the latest locale version when importing an asset that depends on it, if not yet imported.
3) Company assets management
The asset store kinda breaks down as soon as you are well . . . over 1 person in the company! I want to manage a company account, not individual accounts on a per person basis, devs aren’t getting the company credit card to purchase individual assets. For now i’m a 1 man team but i think of growing pretty soon and i feat the hell of licence management when i will need to keep, even at 2 person, 100 assets purchased on both machines, some and some not (not music, which is per title, but yes for editor extentions etc). A company account to which you attach regular accounts and “allocate” assets would be nice. (note that the same for unity licences would be lovely too)
4) Realistic reviews
The assets on the store are evolving very quickly and i feel the star rating system is pushed over it’s limit, it’s nice for a book, not for something that gets updated up to once a week. I’ve seen reviews at 1 star with the author saying it was fixed and to please review it, 6 month before! I think a good system would be to only account for reviews that are at least newer than 3 month old OR than the last update, a review can still be fair after a year if no update happened since then. A way for a seller to tag a review as unfit and have someone in unity review the veracity of the review would probably do some good too!
5) Clear assets
Have each asset be tagged as compatible (and supported/tested as compatible on) unity 3.X latest, unity 4, and whichever platform the seller checks, include a per account filter where the user can state he is interested only in some platforms, for exemple an iphone app maker may want to exclude all non IOS compatible assets. This would be very good for sales, i think that there would be more purchases if it was easier to find the right assets for you in this very large and growing pool of assets. On top of that, most of the reviews i saw that requested, or offers by the author to refund, were about incompatibilities that weren’t mentioned (doesn’t work on mobile etc). Not making this an advanced search but simply a per account automatic filter would make life easier for many, of course include it in the asset description too (in form of an icon).
A separate issue, and i may be in the minority to care about this, please if you implement per account filters, allow to filter out “non standard licencing terms asset”, i’ve bought a few occasionaly and that was by mistake, the very largest strenght of the asset store for me is that purchasing there means clear licencing, and i would never have purchased anywhere close to this is i had to contact the seller with licencing terms on a per asset basis! I’ve even put off purchasing 3DFoin assets for month which i really wanted untill they got on the asset store, do not underestimate this.
6) Asset store sellers are companies too (sometime)!
Please have a 2 tier level for sellers, if a company wants to sell an asset in the asset store, is well established and has known support channels, don’t treat it like a risk, treat it like an asset. Get rid of the validation of assets (except for automatic and instant feedback validation of the type i suggested earlier) and let them manage the issues themselves, multiple times i’ve asked for a fix, got told it was submited to the asset store by the asset maker, then 3 days later it was refused, tested the version they sent myself, it worked just fine, they resubmited and it was accepted! This is a waste of time and while i understand it is probably done to protect asset makers against themselves you should really have a 2 tier system there depending on who the asset seller is!
7) More integrated experience
The asset store is great, you get everything you want, instantly, even broken and will never be fixed again assets! Rating assets is good, so is rating sellers, but as i mentioned earlier time flies and sometimes ratings and reviews get obscolete. I would be very much for a more integrated experience with sellers, directly in the asset store.
- A support ticket system, submit issues directly to the asset seller from the asset store, sends him an email directly and he can answer and mark your bug as fixed in the asset store. This means i no longer have to care about who made the asset, i get my support where i purchased, and unity still doesn’t need to intervene.
- A forum system with a subforum on a per asset basis, (like steam does for games), to help foster the community of large assets, automatically created when a paid asset reaches 100 download or a free one reaches 10 000 (numbers to tweak, but the goal would be to have community forums only for assets where there actually is a community). This keeps the unity community together instead of spreading it to custom company forums.
