To give a little context: I’m by no means a professional game developer with loads of experience. We just work on games in our spare time, earning a livelihood through other means for the meantime. But everyone in our team has at least a bachelors degree in their relative field (computer science, game design, etc.) so we’re not totally clueless. We can do most things we want to do but it just takes some more time because of a lack of experience with Unity, etc. which ends up in a lot of research time.
Anyway, that’s how I see it as a professional software developer that just tries to get into seriously making games:
Some assets were really nice, especially in the beginning. Since we haven’t been using Unity intensively for all that long, not everyone had them. But all in all I feel like it got worse and worse
For me there were 3 kinds of free assets provided through lv11:
1. Assets I can use in nearly any project
Especially things like Playmaker or the Custom Handles look really nice. I don’t think I’ll be needing them all that much myself as I do most things with scripts. But it will certainly help me in providing useful tools and an easier workflow for the people that put together the game in the editor and have a bit less of a technical background. It’s great to know they won’t have to spend as much time waiting for me to extend scripts (or even messing around in them theirselves) and with the handles I can give them some visual feedback that helps them tweak stuff without having to just mess around with numbers in the editor. What’s even better is that I can use those in nearly any project!
2. Assets I don’t really need right now but that I can probably make some use of somewhere down the line
We’re mainly talking Edy’s Vehicle Physics here. It looks great and seems like providing a feature (good car physics) that Unity doesn’t. I’m not working on a game needing cars right now but I don’t have any trouble imaging a lot of different games that need them.
Fluvio would have made the list if it was the pro version. I know that that one is 200$ and can understand that that’s too valuable for giving it out for free but what am I to do with the standard version? I don’t absolutely need the source code of the pro version but the standard version doesn’t have Unity native compute shader support and if I’m concerned about anything concerning physics then it’s performance. If I was to use this asset in a project, I’d probably have to upgrade to pro for 125$ which makes Fluvio standard feel more like a discount on the real product instead of a free asset
3. Assets too niche or simple
E.g. the tribal totems looked nice in my opinion but how often were you thinking “oh, I need totems for my game!”. That’s just way too specific of an asset to be of any use to a significant percentage of pro users I’d say.
Then there’s stuff like the Hidden Object Game Template or the fireball prefabs. It isn’t that they’re low quality or anything. But like others pointed out, they’re just assets that most probably aren’t of any use to a pro user. If you’re prepared to shell out as much as you do for Unity Pro you probably mean business and don’t need assets containing stuff that you could very easily do yourself.
What I’d wish for:
I’d like more assets that I can potentially use in every or at least a lot of games. Ironically (and maybe very purposefully those assets were often those just discounted). I’m thinking of stuff like
- Shader Forge
- QHierarchy
- Ultimate Bloom
- Substance Painter
- Suimono (granted, not usable in every project but Unity is just very, very lacking in the water department in my opinion and there are quiet a few games out there you might want to have some more feature rich water for)
- etc
I know that a lot of the tools I listed are probably already owned by most pro users but maybe Unity could do something like giving you 3-5$ worth of store credit for every lv11 “free asset” you already own? As things stand now and if I had to pay 19$/month I’d be far better of just putting aside those 19$ every month and thus get 228$ a year I can spend on assets I really want. Further (don’t have the time to search it again but a Unity employee definitely said this in the forums) you can quit your Level 11 subscription on a monthly basis. Since you keep your assets after quitting Level 11 I’ll be far better of just buying it for a month if I get more than 19$ out of it which I would have done only once (for Playmaker) or maaaybe twice out of this 5 months.
To be honest, I somehow regret not asking for a refund when I had the chance. Level 11 sounded a bit like an apology to those who bought Unity 5 pro and I was expecting a bit more out of it (although I know I’m not entitled to anything and Unity didn’t make any promises - so that’s my fault). Now that the free version has all technical features that pro does we’re not limited in any way development wise and until we have something we have a game big and good enough to need pro, I assume that at least Unity 6 or maybe even 7 will be out. If I could go back in time and knew what Level 11 has in store, I’d most definitely go for the refund. As things stand now I paid a pro license for a dark skin, no splash screen and maybe 80$ worth of assets I can really use.
