I am a small time Unity user buying Assets from the Unity store — and some of the products on the Assets store is amazing - but I feel some products should be “subscription based” so that the developers that develop these products can keep upgrading them - as some products are amazing but the developers do not support them as it is too much effort for a small payment once of.
Or maybe Unity can have an additional license where you pay a subscription and those proceeds go partly to “Approved” vetted developers who constantly Contribute to the Asset store?
Just an idea - and yes I do not want to pay more - but I also don’t want to pay high price for an Asset and then it gets outdated and can’t be used anymore.
Or maybe someone has a better idea?
The community is amazing and I feel some developers need more options to improve their income.
Some assets handle this themselves outside of the asset store.
Odin Inspector, for example. requires a enterprise license agreement with a yearly fee if your revenue is over a certain amount (100K I think). This however they manage themselves.
I agree being able to support assets is a good idea. Though for Unity to manage it is a bit much. I’d rather they do so on their own individual level, whether it be with enterprise agreements, donations, or something like Patreon.
Fuck subscriptions. I want to own the shit I pay for, not have to deal with yet another recurring cost on top of the more than a dozen others I deal with for development alone.
Subscriptions make sense for services. I.E: cloud storage or web hosting.
I can understand from a service provider’s perspective, I’m using their resources for my own purposes, and it costs them money whenever I do so, therefore, they need a constant income flow so that they can continue providing the service.
Subscriptions don’t make sense for products. I.E: a standalone offline application.
When I launch & interact with, say, Inkscape on my PC, that application is using my PC and only my PC’s resources. I could launch 100 instances of this application, leave them running until the end of time, and it won’t cost the publishers anything, so why would I pay an annual fee to use it?
Jetbrains Rider, for example.
I know everyone keeps saying how much of an amazing IDE it is. I don’t doubt that it’s a really amazing IDE. But, it wants an annual subscription, so I frankly don’t care. I have no problem with continuing to use Visual Studio Community Edition.
If Rider were a one-time payment for a perpetual license, then by all means, I’d gladly pay for it.
Same goes for the other typical names in software - Adobe & Office suites in particular.
Rider has a perpetual fallback license if you pay for a year of it, either cumulatively or all at once and always allows you to download the version from. That’s what I did, in fact.
I dislike subscriptions. Essentially subscription based project has its price set to “infinity”,. Well, there are limits of human lifespan, but for example, if you use photoshop for 50 years, that’ll be about $12500.
I have so many subscriptions already, I’m not looking to add more to that stack. Even more so for niche Unity assets that likely won’t even apply to my next project.
Everything’s subscription based these days to the point I’m actively looking for non-sub alternatives. Sadly, there aren’t any for Photoshop’s extensive scripting support. And Unity’s own PSD importer is starting to become pretty powerful. I didn’t think of just sticking with Rider’s fallback license. That’s an option to consider, but I’d lose both the updates and the stacked discount.
You lose major version updates even with most purchased licenses. The only two major ones that come to mind that do support it are Modo and Zbrush, and Modo only provides a year’s worth of updates. This was actually one of the big “selling points” used to transition most everything to sub licenses.
With persistent license the software you bought is yours forever, while something like adobe will stop working when you stop paying. While mixed schemes exist, I do not beleive they’re the norm.
Additionally, with all the subscription based services, many developers try to push everything they do as Saas whether it makes sense or not and tie it to some pointless profile in attempt to lock people in or harvest targeting data. Which is another problem.
I actually think that previous scenario where you would buy major and upgrade at discount was decent. Because if you never needed an upgrade, you could use the old stuff.
Speaking of updates, ideally I’d want a tool to be finished at the time of purchase with no further updates being ever necessary.
I did not deny any of this. It is, in fact, the point of my post. Additionally, if you owned Adobe Suite CS2, you had to pay for a CS3 upgrade. The same applied to Unity licenses. This was the norm in most professional level software for literally decades. You would pay for a major version and the updates you’d get for that major version would be, generally speaking, bugfix releases.
I mean, the opposite to subscription services is as it was in the days before them: huge one off payments.
At one point - pre 2010 - if an Australian wanted to buy a copy of Autodesk Maya, it was fair dinkum cheaper to fly to the US, pick up a copy, and fly back.
Obviously smaller, periodical payments are a lot easier to digest, even if when you do the maths they stack up over time.
Otherwise one off payments of a smaller size probably don’t make for the most sustainable business model (this is assuming that companies are operating in good faith about how much income they need to rouse up).
I think flexibility is the key, honestly. I would be much happier with my Adobe subscription if I could just subscribe for the programs I want. However I can’t just sub to Photoshop, Illustrator and Premier. I’m more or less forced to sub to the entire Adobe catalogue (which doesn’t include Substance designer, grr).
Give us the choice and let us pick the one that works best for us.
Yeah there are some hilarious reviews on the asset store from folks who were livid over this.
I think it’s personally reasonable for such an amazing asset, especially one receiving regular support and has a good road map. It doesn’t affect your regular solo user like my of course (not unless I release a game that takes off).
Of course people in Enterprise situations may have different feelings.
Recurring payments of some sort are absolutely necessary for a product that is evolving and being updated. I also understand that if someone wants to buy a fixed version outright, they shouldn’t have to continue to pay a subscription.
The paid upgrade system is the natural result of the lack of variety of options, and it’s not a particularly bad system, as it caters to both types of customers. It still has some issues though. First it comes so infrequently that it’s easy for customers who want updates to get blindsided by it. Second, it asks for a relatively high lump sum of money that a customer might not have lying around when they need it. And third, it suffers from appearing like a sneaky way to make more money by ‘re-releasing’ something that already exists. That means you really have to do community management, and even so, a lot of customers won’t be in the community for whatever reason, and will probably be unpleasantly surprised.
Personally I would go for a subscription model with the option to buy fixed versions, but this requires a lot of work by Unity to create and maintain that sort of system. In the meantime, all developers who support their products long term, in my opinion, should do paid upgrades rather than chasing the diminishing returns of stuffing new features into a product and hoping for an compensating increase in the user base - something that can actually have the opposite effect, and sometimes results in a product being a porridge of systems only vaguely related to its stated purpose.
There was, legitimately, a period of time where subscription licenses and major version purchase licenses overlapped. It was a whole thing and they phased it out.
Why not own current year and pay yearly perpetual upgrade like substance used to do?
It makes more sense for asset store, given you will only get more income if you actually update & upgrade your asset next year. This also improves year to year compatibility with Unity.
Yeah I was aware that something had been tried. Far as I know unity see subscriptions now as being too unpopular. I still think it should be an option for asset devs.
Still it means the problem remains - you have updates, customer support etc that is a complete grey area for developers in terms of being compensated, and its very difficult to design a one or two yearly major upgrade that both looks like an attractive offer in its own right, and makes up for whatever the dev did in the previous years that didn’t get paid for.