I have purchased a few items through the Unity Asset store, but it seems that every time I visit the store the same few items (NGUI, 2DToolkit, etc.) are featured. They are great assets, but shouldn’t the point of the asset store be to expose developers to as many quality assets as possible and make it easy for us to find what we need?
Does anyone know why certain assets get featured over and over and other quality assets are ignored?
It becomes more obvious when you are a returning customer, but usually in ecommerce most customers are new visitors, and you probably want to show them your best products and offers most of the time. Would you put a $5 asset on the front page of your store when you could be putting a $100 asset there? Probably not. Would you put a very unpopular, badly performing asset there just to be fair? Probably not. Unity a business. There is only so much room to go around, not everyone can get featured. It’s also to do with branding for Unity and the store itself and the kind of image of professionalism the asset presents.
The featured assets most often are featured (from what I’ve seen) simply because they are either on sale or they are very popular ie have sold a lot of units. One of my assets went on sale and due to the units sold crept into the popular assets area on the homepage - it’s automatic. Over time again after the sale other more consistently popular assets took over those placements again and I dropped off the leaderboard, as it were. I think Unity maybe hand-picks some of the main featured items, though… but a lot of it is based on various algorithms to do with popularity, gross sales, the average # of units sold over a recent short timespan, etc… and I’ve noticed each area of the store is slightly different in how the algorithm is tuned.
hi imaginaryhuman,
you have made some very good points.
but unfortunately not everything you have said does not correspond to reality as far as i can say.
if the “top paid” tab does not lie there are some sub sections where there are packages featured which a have not been among the top paid ones for a long time (and are pretty old). they even do not have a good rating or user review.
and there are other sub sections where there are packages featured unless they get among the top paid ones.
just my 50 cent,
lars
I guess even if the featured section is a combination of a popularity/units sold and handpicked assets, I think the newest assets should at least be given a section like the ‘Most Popular’ one on the home page that is right under the featured items (expanded and with the icons visible).
Right now, the latest items are shoved over in the lower left hand corner, you have to expand them to see anything, and even when you do you only see the top icon. I just think it makes it more difficult for new asset authors to be discovered, and also for users to easily browse the new assets.