every time i go on to the asset store the featured items never seem to change
here is a few i am contently seeing
NGUI
Bitmap2material
Probuilder
2D toolkit
on the asset store submission guidelines it portrays that a well made and presented assets will have a chance of being featured but it seems to me only the biggest selling items get featured and i find this unfair on the developers of the well presented assets i have seen.
city slums building pack
terrain-mesh blending tool
set builder back street manhattan
liquid partical systems
this might just be me but this seems a bit unfair and add your own input on assets you have came across that deserve to be featured
Well, the actual determining factor behind Unity’s asset store feature decisions are a bit of a mystery to mere mortals like us… it seems to be somewhat weighted by popularity, but I think most of it is simply via internal marketing decisions at UT. It’s their store, thus their prerogative. Fairness for you and me isn’t really in the equation (nor should it be, imho)…
My own asset has been featured on the little buttons twice, and as the main feature once… over the course of it’s current 7 month life span.
i 100% agree with both of you it is very hard to get featured with these top sellers taking the featured spots so often and Chingwa’s interactive water is an asset i was following before it was submitted great work.
the asset you mentioned Set Builder: Back street Manhattan is my asset and allot of work went into that and even though i would love to see it featured i’m not got get my hopes up.
Well,
If you search for “Water” and sort by Popularity, you’ll see my asset ‘Easy Water’ in the first place. But if you look to the featured waters you can see everything but mine. Actually I never saw it. I don’t know if I missed something. Some are being featured over and over.
It seems that the developer of one of the featured waters is working in Unity now, so maybe there’s probably some networking and politics involved. Not sure about that, also no disappointments at all. I know how things are.
Anyway, I stopped caring about being featured at all, and I can’t trust the featured assets anymore. I’m not the one to be misled by advertisings. I always buy assets by searching and researching. I can only do my best to make Easy Water remain popular.
It’s make sense to put the most popular stuff in front of the most people. That’s business. But to me it does seem as though there are constantly new packages being featured in the homepage boxes etc over the course of time. It may help to have attractive, high-production value, quality images.
Although I’m sure store front visibility would be nice, I’ve had no problems selling just adveritsing in the forums and posting some youtube videos (in fact selling much more than I expected).
I hear similar complaints about a lot of web stores. I use NGUI and Probuilder, they are awesome tools and I understand why Unity would want to promote them. With that said, It would be nice if the little guys got a little more visibility.
I agree. One of my packages was visible once in the big feature and another once in the small feature. Personally I’d like to see more products featured that I don’t know already in and out. This way one has a chance to find some hidden gems, but marketing wise it makes sense to feature the top sellers, I guess.
I have never visited the store without seeing NGUI and either uScript or Playmaker among them (or all 3). You’d think the top 10 lists in the sidebar would be enough, but I guess they are trying to sell to the last 5 people who don’t have any of those.
I guess those are the most popular items. Business wise that makes a lot of sense as the AssetStore should be marked as high quality for new users. On the other hand, there are literally thousands of assets and they can’t feature them all.
It would be cool to have a user specific feature place with “things you also might like” or “similar customers bought these”
Trouble is there are so many little guys that want attention, how can you possibly be fair? The fact is the content has to be presented in terms of space on the screen and the fact that no two pieces of content can be in the same place, so that automatically means someone has to come first. But I guess you’re saying you want it to be a totally random selection, so that the really good stuff shows up equally as often as the really bad stuff? Is that useful?
Apple actually have a sort of solution for that on the iOS App Store. Every week they’ll have their staff picks, but also new temporary groupings. Instead of just categories they have grouped apps into “Games created in the Nordics”, “Great apps for <insert profession/school ages/other grouping of people>”, “ you may have missed” and such. Sometimes the groups are outstanding apps in their category, or a highlight on a sub-category in a category, like tower defence, platformers etc.
A similar strategy can help the Asset Store, I think. Give temporary highlight groups a week or two in the rotation, group things intelligently and see how it goes. They could make groups like “everything you need to build your FPS in Unity”, “complete turn-based hex strategy collection” or “all about nature”, “2D platformer design”, “CARS! CARS! CARS!” etc.
I agree. Some sort of rotation to keep the front page looking fresh would be nice. They already do that for the featured item (the biggest one in the front page): After a few days it changes. But maybe it should be cycling with a next/previous (I am reminded of Steam’s front page).
If there’s a user logged in, UT could make it that stuff you already saw would be put out of the way, something related to Lukas’ “things you might also like”. Generally some way to curate the front page based on the currently logged-in user’s purchase history or assets already viewed.
I agree with orb, instead of having only a “most popular overall” in the front page, we could have highlights on each category, or perhaps a “most popular assets for less than $10” etc. etc.
One only needs to look at iTunes, Google Play/Chrome Store, Steam, or GOG to get ideas here.
Yeah I dont think its right that unity employees are putting there own paid assets on the store. Especially when hes supposed to be working unitys gui solution.