Asset creators not supporting their work

How about a multi tiered UAS? Pure indy section: The guys who want to post leftover scripts and random junk with no support can go there. documentation not required. Prices are Free up to $50 --- Midlevel tier: Quality items. May or may not have personal support. Documentation is required from here on. Asset support is expected. (bug fixes and stuff) $50 -$100. ---- Pro: This is for the High Quality big leagues. Big boys will be buying this. Asset support is required. Seller support is expected but not required and may be offered as subscription based. $100 to $200. --- $200 and up...Pro Advanced. Company made for Company /teams to buy. All forms of support required.

At least something like that. Sellers would know where their items get posted to and what price to put based on what they are doing with it. Customers would know more about what to expect.

I mean, thats the kind of asset store to start up. I imagine it would be hard to switch an established store to though...

 

Yep, low and free support on forums when author is available, and paid support.
I think this is what could work to get big plugins getting income and would motivate the authors to continue supporting their plugin doing bug fixes or new features.

PS store is not so much trainwreck, it's lot more complex to get a game approved for PS4 than submitting it on Steam.
Anyway perhaps a solution is UAS author to propose year upgrades for plugin owners and some overall price increase for new buyers, because of Unity releases needing them to put lot of time in modifications or because they bring new features.
This could be a way for them to get some money from existing customer that would want to continue using the plugin, and that would keep them more motivated to do bug fix or continue support.

 

I don’t like it any better than you, but truth is Steam is the leading store for customers and developers.

Also, the reason I’ve pointed out Asset Store devs are indies, is because they need that quantity to survive.
AAA doesn’t need that, they have their own marketing budget of millions of dollars.
If Steam had merely a handful of AAA games and nothing else, all the better for those game tittles, less competition.
Alas, If Steam had merely a handful of small indie games, and nothing else, it wouldn’t have enough traffic.. it would be itchio, and itchio has more than a handful of indie games, but even that’s not enough to bring traffic, especially competing with Steam.
Asset Store doesn’t compete with a giant, heck, they are the giant.

 

I believe after reading we understand support in 2 ways.

Customer & product support. I believe the OP was focused in product support and to me is the most important one to fullfill what product claims it does.

The customer support IMO should be done via forum thread this way other users can also help.

As long as there is product support (or is publicly notified it is no longer updated) I'm happy with it. I've an asset that claims be able to move 100 cars and barely can handle 5, the handling is awesome but documentation is an unfinished 2 page word with barely any info, still as handling good I don´t drop it but dev wont answer not me not anyone and that sucks.

 

It's not just the asset store developers that sometimes abandon support. Crazytalk had an interactive plugin for unity which cost about $275, when browsers started to drop support for plugins, Reallusion simply abandoned that plugin. It was barely around for a year, and although the browsers no longer support the Unity webplayer in general it still worked in Unity. Unity is changing so quickly to compete with AAA engines, that major changes are being done that completely undermine a lot of these plugins, so even outside the asset store, even with large companies, expensive assets just get abandoned.

The crazytalk avatars were pretty good, for a talking head it was about 100 Kb compared with a 22 mb video file of the same thing. However, even if I decided to stay with the last version of Unity that it worked with there are bound to be problems with some players using the game, as the CT plugin is largely a dll and Reallusion no longer support it, if there are problems on PC I can't deal with them, and there is absolutely no support from Reallusion - I can't take the risk so in effect I just threw $300 away. I can't get a refund because it is Unity rewriting their codebase that has broken the plugin and they are rewriting their codebase to compete with an engine like UE4 although I would imagine that most games being made in Unity don't really require an engine like UE4 so their emphasis seems to have changed to support a minority use case.

No wonder developers chuck in the towel when it comes to support.

 

No one is forced to make complex plugins, when you make one it's your buziness about support, the price you ask, paid upgrades or why not some priority paid support.
It's not Unity fault or problem.
While Unity could help getting for each plugin a plugin sub forum locked and only available for users that baught the plugin in the Asset Store

 

Make you wonder why they didn't multitier the engine itself too. Unity Lite for indy and students. basic needs. Patches only. Unity Pro = Mostly UE4 level. Patches and some upgrades. Patches and some new features as well as some new beta features.
Unity Enterprise = Blows Ue4 CryEngine level feature rich lets you into Unity source code AAA makin Latest PC parts requiring game dev son of a gun. Patches, all new features.
Could go along side with the price model too.

 

Not everyone is able to use engine source code and make their own features.
UE4 propose high level features out of the box, it's invaluable for 3D artists or indies as many won't be able and won't use source code. But i agree getting access to source code for some skilled teams can make a difference when users are able to bring features beyond what Unity proposes out of the box.

 

Yeah. Thats why I say 3 different downloads. Noobs gets Unity lite. You get basic package that lets you make the low end indy games. comes with standard shaders, effects, scripts.

The way I proposed, would have been able to let devs choose their tier based on their skill and intentions.
First time using Unity? get Lite. experience? get pro. highly experienced/working with a team? get enterprise.

 

With plugins if you got the skills you can already achieve a lot without needing the source code (Gaia, CTS, MegaSplat, RTP3 , Alloy etc ... )
Well subjects is plugins not Unity source code lol

 

Unity can't really have tiers. The reason is that the main strategy for Unity game engine is overwhelming popularity that leverages it's ease of use.

It really doesn't matter the quality of games can be lower due to beginners using this engine. What's important is that it has the largest market share and this can be monetized through subscription model for licensing (which is accessible for individuals and corporations alike) and asset store purchases.

 

Yeah, I seem to have more ideas for a startup, than I do for something established.