Recently I purchased an asset from the Unity store as my boss required me to create a mini game in 2 days. In short it was the most horrible purchase that I could imagine, poor coding practices, terrible project structure, and the game had a flaw that essentially breaks it.
I contacted the seller and he refunded my money without any trouble, but has now asked me to remove or alter my review as it is affecting his sales. In my opinion I should leave it up, as the point of the review is to scare of buyers who might fall for the same trap, but I’m just wondering what everybody else thinks?
Also, are you able to request an asset get removed for being of poor quality?
If your review is accurate, it definitely should stay. I’m glad to hear he refunded you with no problem, but to me, it seems like an unreasonable request to ask you to remove or alter your review. Publishers have the ability to respond to comments, that should be the route he should take.
I would amend the review to include that author did in fact refund you (if he was nice about it). As that does go some way toward building trust and hopefully a better product.
Not posting the name of the asset shows that you want to be fair to the seller but also help possible buyers too. Getting your money back and no longer being able to see future updates means that your review can only be accurate for the current version and won’t help future buyers. It would also hurt current owners that want continued improvements to the asset. Demanding a refund sends the clearest message to the seller. It’s a review he sees in his bank account. He’s on notice that he needs to improve and if you spelled out your problems, he may be well informed what needs work. I feel you should remove your review now that you are no longer an ongoing customer. It doesn’t sound like the seller is a cheat. He can improve his asset or face more refunds if he doesn’t. Current customers will give their opinions and update their reviews as they choose.
Your question about asking the Asset Store to remove the asset because it is of poor quality raises a great question. As a purchaser of many assets, I see the spectrum from great to awful assets and I always read reviews. I’ve seen some assets that I’d be generous to call pre-alpha. I view my purchases of many assets as funding ongoing improvements. For business critical use, I’d only use mature assets with great reviews. Many assets on day one of release are just barely OK. The point is that I’ve seen many of them improve over time to be far far better than when they began. It’s just HARD to release an asset on ‘day one’ that is remotely as good as it will become after a year of customer feedback and even part-time ongoing improvements. If the Asset Store pulls assets down before they have a chance to evolve with customer feedback, we would all miss out on dramatically improved assets. (Painful mixed metaphors ahead…) Buyers would suffer if tottering newborn assets couldn’t clear some quality hurdle. I enjoy seeing the amazing creativity of assets vendors. They make some products that would never have occurred to me. I feel that most would never have a chance to evolve if they could be ‘pulled down’ for a shaky start. I also worry that competitors would press for new competition to be pulled down. Life just gets in the way sometimes. I’ve seen people ask if a product is abandoned after one week of inactivity from a vendor. Some great but busy programmers come and go to their assets. I’ve seen master programmers improve their assets only when time would allow. Their assets would be pulled down if activity were a hurdle. Quality and activity hurdles causing asset ‘pull downs’ would change the Asset Store in some bad ways.
I like to see assets improve because of an innovative new competitor. Some very good ‘hard to use’ systems are forced to improve when a good ‘MUCH easier to use’ asset appears next to them on the Asset Store. Shaky as the new offerings are, they often inspire the older assets to improve. When one competitor adds a great feature, other assets often add great features in response. There is a freedom to the Asset Store. Someone can have an idea and KNOW their asset will be released if they put in the effort. They can improve it or abandon it and the community will sort it out with reviews and on the forum. If the Asset Store didn’t go to so much effort to block stolen assets, we couldn’t exist. The Asset Store does a great job of blocking cheats and stolen assets. THAT protects honest vendors from having to compete with stolen property. If you work, you can sell. If you steal, you can’t get on the Asset Store. THAT is a hurdle I like. Most of all, I like how the Asset Store and Unity Forums have allowed new programmers and artists to ‘get their start’ and refine their work with customer feedback.
Reviews for prior versions are clearly marked as such, and the vendor can always respond to the review explaining that they’ve taken the feedback on board and made relevant improvements.
The idea that a review shouldn’t stand after a user has got a refund doesn’t make sense. Those are valid experiences, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be shared. And surely the cases where an experience is so negative that the user seeks a refund are some of the ones a potential buyer might find the most beneficial?
I recently purchased an asset that just flat out, outright did not work. I contacted the vendor for support through 3 different avenues and, after a month, had no response whatsoever. In the end Unity refunded me themselves. Are you saying that future potential buyers should have to go through the same experience themselves rather than read a review and be informed ahead of time?
The wholepoint of a review is to affect sales. You put reviews up specifically because you want to direct others towards things you’ve found helpful, and help them avoid wasting time/money/effort on ones you found the opposite. Vendors should influence the reviews they get by providing great products and great services, not by asking people to remove them or to do anything other than soliciting honest reviews. Trying to influence reviewers in any other way doesn’t seem entirely honest to me. If I were the vendor and I wanted the review updated, I’d consider a) improving the product and then b) providing the updated version to the reviewer and asking them to provide an honest update to their review based on the changes.
Firstly let me say that it seems like you are very much trying to do the right thing, and what I’m saying here may not apply to you and this scenario (given I don’t know the asset in question).
As a seller a negative review, particular one for an old version can be a real pain and often undeserved, one small problem can often lead to a poor review, a few other people run in to the problem before you fix it and suddenly its the “most helpful review”.
For Platformer PRO I’ve only just now had a 3-star review that was 2 years old drop off the front page (noting that over 199 reviews the average is 5 stars).
I’ve had a 2 star review because someone spent five hours to ‘fix’ slopes behaviour. Turns out they had the checkbox for ‘enable slopes’ turned off. Despite no support ticket, despite my immediate reply to their review, they never updated it.
So this is probably not the situation here, but at least consider if your review is objective: if the asset would never work for anyone, or if it really seems like the seller is misleading the buyers, hammer away. But if its something that could provide some value in some situations you may want to temper your review a little.
Agreed, he has in fact updated the game to fix one of the issues - which my review mentioned. However, I believe that the quality of the asset is still not up to scratch, and my review still stands to warn off future buyers.
This asset looked pretty terrible from just the screen shots and supplied demo, however due to short time constraints I decided to give it a shot. It cost $100 and had very positive reviews, but none of them described the asset in depth, the simple said “AMAZING”.
From an overall perspective of the asset, to fix it properly you would need to rebuild it. The core mechanic is so broken that it allows the player to end up at coordinates without a single decimal place of precision, which in turn stops the player moving as each frame it tries to translate less than the amount of precision.
@alexisrabadan hrm sounds like its pretty broken, as I said I wasn’t sure that what I was talking about applied to you, kind of just an opportunity to vent my own frustrations
I agree with you. I find negative reviews very helpful. Even seeing old ones about prior versions allows me to see if the vendor is improving based on more recent reviews. I think it’s very important for vendors to respond to negative reviews when those problems have been fixed. I see the vendor as much more interested in their product when I see a reply to a review. My bias is to help asset vendors who are trying to improve their products over time. I’ve seen some very unfair reviews and attacks. I dislike reviews that ransom a 1 start review for 5 stars if some feature is added. I couldn’t agree more about the vendor you describe. That is why I feel that the community can sort things out so well. I just want to encourage asset vendors that make the effort to improve. It’s easy to forget that good asset vending is HARD. Good asset vending deserves respect and encouragement. Bad asset vending deserves bad press and bad sales. Agreed.
I agree! If a review is accurate for the time it was created and you were being honest, PLEASE leave it up! I read reviews and I won’t buy assets where the only review is “Amazing!”.
I would be more likely to buy an asset that had an honest review, even a bad one, with a follow up by the developer than one without any in depth reviews. I don’t trust those generic reviews. Some might be real, but who knows.
Real reviews actually say something about the product, good or bad. Those are the valuable ones.
