Hi all
We’re about to undertake a load of new work on content to help you develop games in Unity - we’re starting by assessing what we’ve got and gathering your thoughts. I would really appreciate your help with this by filling in this short survey about your experiences with our Standard Assets packages - please share with others!
SURVEY HERE
https://goo.gl/forms/VdmDTf6dTWn5rzIp2
Thanks for your help, looking forward to discussing this topic more with you in this thread too 
Cheers
Will
I think that Unity will always fall short of asset store or bespoke controllers / vehicles etc. That’s a given. You can’t please everyone and you would probably need AAA experienced staff to get a car (for example) that is robust and fully featured so the standard assets should just be depreciated for the following reason:
The standard assets are IMHO in a difficult place. Templates are pretty much 9 times out of 10 going to be more appealing, more useful and more obviously useful across a wider range of developers. When devs see tower defence template, they think about what they can rip from it or build from it.
When devs see standard assets they’re like “whuh, whut” and wonder why they need it or why isn’t “official”. In short I recommend the immediate depreciation of standard assets and instead shift focus and effort on more Templates. Templates are exciting, visible in what they can provide (much more useful than standard assets) and also encourage building or modding a project instead of being lost with a bit of ill-fitting lego.
TLDR: Templates are more important to make noise about for user quality of life as standard assets will never be battle tested, focused or usable enough.
I agree. The only stuff I’ve found standard assets useful for are shaders and character controllers (latter of which would be better served with a template). There’s a lot of stuff in there that I don’t think will ever be particularly useful to anyone, because it’s so basic and generic that it’s not really good enough for anything.
Yeah I really only use Standard assets mainly just so i can get the particle systems out for quick prototyping particles I want lol.
Now if the new post effects were in it, I’d gladly use them, hate having to go search for them. In fact I think the new post effects should just be in unity from the start. I think it’s been in beta long enough, considering V2 is being worked on, why not go ahead and put V1 inside Unity?
Standard asset are not useful for game, but they are for experimentation and demonstration, I would expend them to go more into whiteboxing level of usefulness, instead of random toys. But we can do that with template too anyway, so template might share a reusable “standard” among themselves?
Standard Shader that supports vertex colors.
Considering how many millions get spent I would think this would be easy, but they still don’t do it.
I filled out the survey but I just want to publicly echo what everyone else has said here in that the standard assets would better be served by templates than the current setup we have now.
Can you expand on this hippo?
Are you (and it seems everyone else) saying instead of a standard asset pack Unity should create templates that would be starting points for certain types/genres of games - ie template fps controller, 3rd person controller, mobile UI ??. template top down shooter, template (basic) inventory system? I don’t know - I think I can see the benefit from of course character controllers, since those are the examples I have, and mostly the only reason I use the standard asset pack (for prototyping). But I can also foresee a headache for Unity when they start getting user help requests on incorporating all the templates into one system (help me make my game with all the templates combined) type of requests.
With or without the current standard assets - in conjunction with the handy training material available - what purpose would templates serve?
I’ve always thought of myself as moderately skilled with Unity… Thanks for the ego boost as I had to select Advanced according to the descriptions 
I’d like to see complete extendible systems added to the standard assets, rather than just some helper scripts and starter models.
Something along these lines:
As it is I find the standard assets to be useful when learning the engine, as it gives you something to play with and some example code to look at, but their usefulness in a shippable game is dubious. Turnkey extendible systems, where a game type is basically ready to go out of the box, and can be adjusted to fit the flavor of the game, would be really awesome. Allowing these to be extended with additional game specific mechanics, with commented code well enough for easy customization, would really raise the bar for standard assets.
You do that and you’d see standard assets appearing in a good number of shipping games. The key is to design them with customization in mind so everyone’s game doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Include horribly terrible models with these systems, so devs aren’t tempted to use the same default models as everyone else 
They might just call them “low-poly” and ship them anyway… D:
I think I understand what he’s saying. The templates that are broken out into their own packages are very robust and nearly fully featured. For example two really good ones are:
Endless Runner - Sample Game https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/87901
Adventure - Sample Game https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/76216
Now that I think about it Angry Bots was another one that was massively popular and re-used by tons of developers to showcase their own products.
As for Standard Assets, I don’t see these sample games replacing that or even a need for that. One of my suggestions in the survey was to break out the Standard Assets into smaller packages that keep stuff in a single theme. For example I don’t want to import a bunch of vehicle assets if I want to strip out the Particle FX. I can’t speak for other developers, but I use the Standard Assets all of the time to strip out the stuff I need to prototype with. I know I can manually un-checkbox each asset I don’t want…but it’s a time dump doing that. For example, if I need a camera rig or cool camera prototyping stuff I should be downloading a Camera Standards Assets Pack. If I need particle FX I should be downloading the Particle FX Standard Assets Pack.
I’m surprised there wouldn’t be any analytics sent to Unity that you guys can use to determine what Standard assets are being used.
As a few others have said, the standard assets are good for prototyping. Because of this however I don’t think they should all be shoved into templates. I don’t want to have to break open the RPG game template or whatever to pull out a generic grass texture to use.
It’s a bit hard to fill out a survey saying you haven’t used Standard Assets when you keep forcing me to say I’ve used them when I haven’t.
Did that not occur to the person who made this survey? Do you think that the Standard Assets are so amazing that we would be forced to use them?
I work mostly making 2D games. I generally avoid using Unity Physics so everything you have to offer is largely useless. I also work using pixel art - so I’m mostly writing my own scripts to force Unity to not compress the crap out of all the graphics.
Hey all just chiming in to say I’m reading all of these but gonna wait a little longer to see some patterns emerge here.
Seems like some of you feel SA is better served by templates, others by focusing on certain things. I’ll keep digesting the survey results as they come in. I appreciate you all taking the time to discuss this and @st33d yes I’m the idiot that stopped adding ‘I don’t use them’ options to each question, my bad.
What if the standard assets also came with artist friendly formats e.g. 3d models in Blender/Maya file versions, Photoshop textures, Substances, Sound files, Music files.
Or Unity asked some of the 3d modelling/art/sound/music software providers if they could help make standard assets that can then be stepping stones for budding artists to work with.
Then you can do art/sound challenges and learning courses that take the standard assets and make them something amazing, whilst learning and improving their skills.
So the standard assets are more than replaceable prototypes they are stepping stones for artists and developers to improve their skills with.
On the programming side what if standard assets were based on the single responsibility principle and used interfaces so even if the developers upgrade to asset store code it can conform to a good Unity game SRP interface pattern that would allow enhanced systems to be drag and drop replacements for standard asset code (SAC).
Also SRP code could allow the learning section to build a framework that works in many game formats and can be built upon. Or with this new SAC it could work like a meta template that other templates extend for their game genre and style.
Sad but true, they’re not instrumented for analytics.
I agree with the artist-centric focus & formats + template scripts that are well-developed.
(Full-disclosure: I’m an artist/animator/gamedesigner/toolsmith – but mostly an animator.)
I feel like if you guys offered some “template-style” art assets – such as various heads/body shapes for multi-part 3d characters, or hair styles that could be manipulated in a .blend file or something, that could be plugged-in to, say, a character customization template script “rigged” to a 2d body with some basic walking/running/etc. animations (to give people some toys to play with while simultaneously encouraging beginner artists/animators to author their own content by, for example, providing really low-quality textures with the geometry that is nothing more than a test-bed asset to let the budding gamedevs author their own content.
This could also be useful to experienced gamedevs equally by providing them with some simple gray-boxing assets they could either heavily modify in their 3d tools, or toss entirely when they create better assets.
Providing some script templates that are easily modifiable (to extend or replace portions of them) allows an experienced dev to easily, say, swap gray-boxed models/sprites/levels/geometry with more-final assets, but also giving it a general “use” to a beginner as well (by offering them an example of a “character customization” system created via this script.) That script has a larger purpose of being useful to anyone to, say, swap graybox assets with more final assets, and would essentially serve multiple purposes (with a little modification to any extender scripts and such) and would ultimately be a huge benefit a larger amount of people. Something like “auto-graybox-swapping” would be immensely useful to someone like me, who isn’t interested in programming such a tool from scratch, nor buying one from the Asset Store, but would totally extend it to suit my own purposes – if I had it available to me in some form (in a very-usable state) to easily do so.
These types of scripts are the golden-nuggets of an experienced Unity-dev to keep them from having to reinvent the wheel on everything as most of us pretty much tend to to do.
Only later do we find out that there was a free asset or script out there that did (almost) the exact thing that WE were trying to do~!
How many here have had this happen to you?
Wouldn’t it be great to have a common set of “standard” script and art templates that genuinely serve some use to /everyone/ for each of their own different/unique applications and purposes? – i.e. scripts and assets that were genuinely meant to be modified?
Also – I think lots of “buyer’s remorse” comes from the Asset Store because of things like this too. There are plenty of asset devs out there who like to capitalize on stuff that already exists in a lesser-known (but free) form.
Just food for thought.
Unfortunately, I can’t honestly complete the survey. One of the first questions are “have you used standard assets”, which I haven’t is my answer. But the rest of the survey only allows answers for people who have and are mandatory to answer. I can’t answer ‘what packs have I used’ because I haven’t used any. Your data will not be accurately represented due to the people who haven’t used it forcing to pick answers that aren’t true.