The asset store is a wonderful place that is growing steadily with a large number of assets being added each week. Lately though, I have come across several assets where I thought ‘why would people buy these’? For example this asset:
I don’t think that an asset like this should stay on the asset store, it only supports Unity up until version 3.5 and the asset hasn’t been updated since January 2013. The asset is currently just taking up space and cluttering the store. I think that Unity should have a system where at a certain point of time, they remove some assets. Of course I imagine that there are certain tools that are submitted using Unity 3.5, and the developer became inactive since then, but the asset remains relevant, even though the developer no longer supports it, but Unity is changing so much that these cases are extremely rare.
You can use the filter functionality to hide assets that have been not updated for longer than x days. The default value for that whatsoever is 5 years. Perhaps Unity simply needs to adjust this default value from 5 years to maybe 1 year?
I don’t like this idea. Someone who paid for an asset once won’t be able to download it again once it is removed. Also, someone actually might need that tool later. Old packages should remain available.
Making old or unsupported assets cheaper would make sense. Removal of those packages would not.
You have a point! But are there actually people using Unity 3.5 though? I just think of the asset store as one of the marketplaces where the assets are of pretty high quality, and if I see assets that haven’t been updated for years and probably produce tons of API errors on startup, the quality goes down in my opinion.
I still use 3.5 because some stuff are simply incompatible and I don’t need new fancy stuff, and I don’‘t want to redo the codebase until I have enough validation of whats’ there. Also legacy maintenance for game release with older version.
Also even setting the filter by default to 1 year could have people miss out. One of my assets goes very long amount of time with no updates. But that is because the UI system in unity that it provides tools for is fairly stable and hasn’t changed much since 4.6.
It doesn’t matter. I hate “ethereal” nature of the internet. You use something, read something, then someday it suddenly poofs and disappears because it was taken down and then it is gone forever, because of this buying old stuff becomes very very difficult even if it was originally digital.
The way I see it, Information that was once available should remain available for a very long time. Someone one day might need it and might be willing to pay for it. While keeping everything available forever might be a bit too much, a 50 years of storage life, maybe a century, would be a good default.
True, but if you no longer support the asset it would make sense for someone else to take over the pricing adjustment.
Firstly, there are assets which do not need constant updates like 3D models. Unity can’t just make assumptions on behalf of the publisher and lower the price.
Secondly, they simply push it down the line to hide old assets. So, if a publisher ever makes an update, it will certainly be pushed up and become more visible. Makes it harder for people to stumble upon depreciated products.
Finally, people must always read the content before finalizing the purchase. One of the things they must look at is the date of the last update. You wouldn’t buy milk without checking the expiration date, would you?
But I do agree that Unity needs to make some changes. The very least could do is making it easier to see whether an asset is old or new. For example, add a notice like “This asset wasn’t updated for over 5 years and may not support the latest Unity version”.
I very much agree with this, not just because I think it applies to this discussion, but because one of my huge pet peeves with the Asset Store is developers who create “empty updates” that don’t do anything but change the date on their product. Now I have to waste bandwidth downloading a product again because either the developer thinks they have to make updates to stay relevant or because they’re trying to game the system.
Music is another area where updates just aren’t needed. Once you have a good piece of music on the Asset Store, unless you’re adding to the project, you’re only updating to change the update date. (And I have more than one music product in my library that does this.)
Yeah, I’ve fallen prey to a music pack I thought received updates in its actual content because of the update date and the initial release date and I’ve kinda been kicking myself since.
I think rather than forcing developers to remove old assets from the Asset Store, Unity should be forcing ALL developers with products to provide detailed patch notes for any change of date so we customers can see what’s really going on.
