Not being a normal website is a HUGE disservice to both the community and Unity itself.
Right now, there is no easy way to know about all these wonderful assets, extensions, scripts etc until after you’ve installed Unity and learned about the store.
As someone trying to encourage fellow developers to learn about Unity they google some stuff and have no way of knowing about all these wonderful solutions. They then turn away from Unity.
Making the store public to the web would solve all of that. Unity assets would be discover-able in far many more ways then they are now bringing more people to try Unity and more sales to both Unity and to the people providing assets for Unity.
The iOS market, the Android market, the Amazon App market, even the XBOX market all have web interfaces even though none of them install anything in the browser.
I don’t want the asset store to be… “integrated”… unless it gave me any benefit at all! Like being faster than a browser, but not really, it’s slower! (And my connection isn’t very forgiving, sometimes it takes 30 seconds to download the screenshots!)
And when I open the asset store, I can’t minimize it to go back to unity, I have to close it, or drag it to the side. Sometimes I drag it too far on the edge of the screen, and I can’t bring it back!
I can’t watch several items at once, I have to watch 1 at a time. I can’t favorite any items, it’s inconvenient!
Oh, and it’d be nice to show up on google search! We could use the extra sales! :-p
Asset store is very good idea very badly implemented. Or from their point of view maybe not. Reason, why the shop is integrated into the Unity is probably simple. They want to have control over what you are downloading, browsing etc…But technically it is disaster, it is slow and really pain to work with.
Agree as well, also it shouldn’t be a huge problem, as I think that what you see inside Unity is web organized stuff.
In fact, you can browse individual products on the web.
If it was like a normal website I would look at it more often, but since it is integrated I rarely look at it, I think I only looked at it 3 times since they introduced it in Unity, and only spent maybe 10 minutes on it each time…
It might be nice to leave the in editor window there so that when you decide to buy something it can import it straight into your project, which is a nice feature, but then also have a normal web site where you can just go to browse.
"It might be nice to leave the in editor window there so that when you decide to buy something it can import it straight into your project, which is a nice feature, but then also have a normal web site where you can just go to browse. "
+1 for this, need an easy way to browse the assetstore without opening or installing unity at all.
I am using a whole bunch of computers, pads, laptops or netbooks for work or “on the road” at customers, but i can only check the unity asset shop on one specific desktop machine where the Unity3D environment is installed. So i can only get up to date with assets once a week sometimes. Listing by “last” items doesnt really help to get up to date in that case because it seems i can only see the last 10 items of a category. Both things should be changed because right now, i am certain in my case it results in lost sales.
I also strongly agree, its quite a hassle to open up unity every time I want to go through the asset store. It takes a few minutes to open unity of my system as it has to load my project which is huge and full of stuff. This really discourages me from wanting to visit the asset store. A web system would be great.
Or use the preferences to enable the project wizard on startup.
At one point the asset store was accessible (unintentionally) by standard web browsers, but they shut that off. Not everything worked, but it seems like those parts could be worked around.
i agree too , if the asset store would be a normal website more people would look at it, and the assets would have more awareness and more sales, and use the integrated version just to import assets you purchased in the past
