Yesterday, I was chating with a friend about some unity stuffs, we exchanged some links for free unity tools.
And unfortunately the free tools were not free anymore. They were on the asset store.
Here I must say, that i learnt a LOT looking at those free things, tools, projects, and other.
I think for the community having things like http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
is really great, but who will continue to publish free things if they can try to sell it ?
So i am against the asset store because i think that it kills the sharing side of the community, thats the side that helps noob people like me becoming good at unity.
The Asset Store is about selling AND sharing. You don’t have to charge anything, you can post stuff for free too. There are already some free assets available. I think there will be just as much free stuff in the Asset Store as there is available now, it will just be easier to find and you’ll be able to download it right into your project.
You must have been looking at strange stuff that started to cost due to the store and was free before. I’m not aware of a single thing.
SpriteManager2 always cost, EZGUI always cost, ShaderFusion was only available for free during beta (and that was mentioned there) and all the other editor additions that are on the asset store that cost were never free either
What the asset store finally made simpler is finding all these great editor / runtime extensions that you previously had to hunt down with google and board search
I think you’re wrong…the tools that were free before, are still free on the asset store. Just because it’s on the asset store doesn’t mean the author is charging for it. Maybe you can show an example of what you’re talking about, because I don’t see any. As someone who might have contributed the most scripts to the wiki so far, I can say that I haven’t stopped contributing there, nor do I have any plans to stop. The more complex utilities I do charge for, because I think it’s reasonable in the case where I’ve spent a significant amount of time and effort working on them. The asset store hasn’t changed that either; I didn’t even increase the prices there because I’m guessing a potentially larger distribution channel should more than cover the 30% take going to Unity Technologies.
Back on topic, I like the idea of an asset store, but will not have a final decision on it for at least a year to see how it is used and what goes into it.
I think that the Asset store is going to be great for developers who are good at “tool” making for other people, and maybe not the best a finishing a game project. There are plenty of other places to get good tutorials and example projects to get started.
My only gripe with the asset store is that it diverts Unity developers’ time from working on things I need to working on things I don’t need. Although searching the forums and wiki for assets might have taken more of my time to do, it didn’t require any Unity staff time to maintain, develop or fix. For Unity Technologies it’s a win opportunity as it opens another avenue for revenue. For Unity users, look at how many of the top wish list items are now in Unity 3.1 and how long we are still waiting for issues in 2.x and 3.x to get fixed. Everything has a cost, and IMO the “cost” of the asset store far outweighs the benefit.
I hate to break this to you, but UT have rather more than a handful of developers working on their baby. Besides, the Unity Asset Store is mostly back-end web / server-side development and requires very different skills to those working on the Unity Editor or its underlying code. (The Unity Editor client part is basically just a WebKit-based browser component and a bit of additional plumbing.)
Even programmers specialise, so those working on the Unity Asset Store aren’t the same developers as those working on Unity’s Editor and engine.
There are, in fact, far more people working on Unity than there were just three years ago. No, they won’t necessarily be working on stuff you, personally, want, but that’s because you’re not their one and only customer.
@stimarco - No, you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know and please try not to make this personal. But if you look at the Unity feature request site you’ll see that there are many other features (Linux support, GUI designer, etc. etc. etc.) that other people want that are many, many times more requested than the asset store.
I’m not against it but I believe some people are trying to gouge money from others with assets of lackluster quality. But this occurs in all sales environments.
An additional revenue stream for Unity means they have more money to work on those other top list features you’re waiting on. As far as I know, the asset store was worked on mostly by Keli for the back end stuff and then I suppose charles and nicholas probably worked on the GUI and layout for it, so it didn’t have a very large impact on those features you are waiting for, and some of them are actually showing up as user created extensions in the asset store.
By what UT mentioned, 4-5 persons were working on it not 1-2
But they also mentioned that the people were not assigned something else “they pushed back” for it, so its nothing lost likely or if then so far primarily bugfixes as new features wouldn’t have happened for 3.1 anyway
Even if it were a webstore you couldn’t use it as U2 does not load U3 packages from what I recall.
That is all OK as long as new features are not developed because there is something similar available in the Asset Store. For example, it wouldn’t be nice if the promised 2D engine was pushed back or dropped because SM2 is available to buy on the Asset Store.
