Releasing a "beta" version of an asset

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Hi,

I’m working on an asset that i’d like to publish on the asset store.

I would like to hear others’ experience on releasing assets, specifically:

  1. Do you submit a “beta” version for users to help testing? if so, where do you find those users ?
  2. How do you make sure your asset is not “stolen” if you’re releasing it for users to test?
  3. Is it possible to release a “beta” version of an asset to the store to gather some feedback, see there are no major issues, etc?

I would love to hear your experiences with respect to these questions.

Thx

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If you release a “beta”, please make sure it’s truly beta-ready and not really an “alpha”. It has to be basically bug-free and do something useful, even if it’s not full-featured yet. Your first few reviews and star-ratings will almost certainly set the tone for the entire life of your asset. You won’t get much leeway just because the description says “beta”.

A common strategy I’ve seen on the Asset Store is releasing the product at a lower price for early adopters, usually 50% off or more. Their reward for testing out the beta version and giving you feedback is that they can continue to download updates even when it goes to full release.

Otherwise, you could distribute a free unitypackage informally among a trusted circle for feedback.

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Do you have any thoughts on where i can get more users to try out my asset, in case my trusted circle is not enough users ? Have you tried something like that yourself ?

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I’m doing it right now with a procedural quest generator. I’m fortunate to have a great group of developers using the Dialogue System who are interested in this related product. Even so, I’m not receiving as much feedback as expected. The devs are more focused on getting their own projects working with the product than evaluating it in a broad sense, and I totally understand that. But this is good feedback in itself. When I get questions about how to use a feature, it tells me they see value in that feature and I need to make it clearer to use. If I don’t get questions on a feature, maybe I should cut it.

On the other hand, the advantage of putting the beta on the Asset Store is that you can reach many more testers. So long as you’re sure that you’re giving them excellent value even at the beta stage, I think this works best. plyGame comes to mind as a good example. Even in beta it provided good value.

If you don’t want to go this route, you could try to find a group that you can meet with in person, for example through Meetup. Or, if it’s a code asset, compile it to a DLL and include a “beta version” watermark on the screen.

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