des-integrated asset store - not the smartest move

you integrate all services inside unity, even stuff I personally couldn't care less about like analytics or ads, but suddenly someone very clever at HQ decided "hey let's remove the single biggest contribution Unity did to game making out of the engine".

alright everyone, fire that guy and let's go back to something more sensible

 

oh and in case it's a bug (a brain bug) I reported it as such
1231046

 

Oh come on, the asset store was using an ancient web engine and never worked well. Do you really prefer to browse the store in a slow, tiny window inside the editor rather than in a fully fledged browser just an alt-tab away?

Removing this allows them to free resources for something more important, like polishing the Package Manager so they can finally start testing the UPM format for assets. Also, they're not "removing the single biggest contribution Unity did to game making out of the engine". They are making a more streamlined way to access your assets. The asset store as a concept is not going anywhere.

PS: Maybe tone down the passive-aggressiveness a bit?

 

yes
you got me doubting about the integrated asset store so I just tested it in 2019.3 and it's just as slow on Chrome! What you're seeing is just bad web programming or slow server.
press spacebar and the "tiny window" becomes screen wide, problem solved
the package manager asset store wasn't working I thought, but I noticed a tiny wheel thing at the bottom so I waited and 20 seconds later things started to show up and 20 seconds after that the icons were updated, slow as molass but that sort of stuff will improve when the servers work properly (or whatever web devs do) once it's up and running it is very cool so I agree with you (just on that )

here you are most definitely using the wrong words about this post, passive-aggressive means aggressive in a covert way, as you see i don't do passive anything or subtle, everything is harsh and angular so what you mean to say is "maybe tone down the aggressive-aggressive tone"

 

Damn it you're funny. I can't argue with that

 

It's really nice that ctrl+9 doesn't open a useless, ugly store anymore. It'll also allow Unity to not bundle Chromium Embedded Framework with the editor. That should shave off some 200 mb of Unity's download size, which is nice.

And, yeah, the asset store opens something like 4x slower in the 2018 in-editor store than in my browser. I really don't want Unity to be spending resources on maintaining the in-editor store. That's probably an immense engineering effort, for very, very little value to us.

 

as it was just the normal asset store inside unity i didnt think it was that big a deal for them to do it that way.. i often found myself browsing assets while i was there.. now I wont.. so.. maybe i can cut out drooling over assets i want but probably dont need

 

The webstore was easier to use. Good riddance.

 

The asset store UI needs a lot of work so if this is part of it, fine by me. We need fullscreen image previews and pre-loading of those images for starters.

 

I think that when they notice a drop in asset consumption, we'll start seeing ads in the forum.

 

The old Asset Store integration is replaced with a new micro-transaction system they work on for a while. The idea was prototyped during Hack Week 2016, see here for details.

For example, much effort is being put into functionality that plays an Ads video every time an Unity Personal user is pressing the "Enter Playmode" button.

If you want to get rid of those Ads, you can buy "Unity Cubes". Unity Cubes is their virtual currency that can be used, among various other things, to remove those mentioned Ads.

Unity Cubes can be used to unlock better performance and get rid of an exquisite selection of bugs as well. Bugs that occur on the native side cost twice the amount of UC though, not sure why that is. There is also a daily-rotating selection of bug-fixes you can unlock, much of them for 50% off during this time.

The feature is planned to get released along with 2020.2 later this fall, to make sure it's definitely available for the 2020 LTS cycle. There are also discussions going on right now whether to back-port to 2018.4 and 2019.4.

They call it the "free-2-create" model and got probably inspired by the free-2-play mobile market. Just a guess though. We will most likely see more info on that in a blog-post soon.

BTW, you can buy Unity Cubes through the Unity Asset Store of course. You have to make money somehow, right?!

Spoiler

 

I'm a big fan of it being in package manager. Runs a lot faster now.

 

Is there a P2W element to it? Can we spend Unity Cubes to have C# compile at a reasonable speed for instance?

 

There is no pay-to-win element intergrated. There was a big discussion on it some when in 2018, whether this should be added. However, the advisory board at Unity Technologies decided it must stay fair for everyone, so the idea was dropped.

Sure! As mentioned earlier, various benefits incl. better performance can be unlocked with Unity Cubes. This isn't limited to editor performance only, you can also unlock faster compile speeds! Hint: compiler offers are planned to happen on Friday's only btw.

 

Meanwhile, at John Riccitiello's mansion's private-ultra-secret-future-share-holder-meeting.
Five mysterious figures, shrouded in the shadow, sit around a mahogany table and argue in despair.
Their host, instead of partaking, browses the internet for cat videos when suddenly his sorrowful face lights up.

JR: "Guys, guys, stop the neg talk, shut up and read"

He hands his diamond-encrusted laptop around the table.

KR: "WOW!"
MZ: "infinite growth self perpetuating money machine"
PH: "Can we, like, have Yorkshires instead of Huskies?"
AA: "The IPO is real"​

 

(Thread Necromancy Ho) As a heavy user of the asset store, I agree that the integrated store was always a bit weird. Not being able to watch videos or view models without switching to a browser was a freaking drag. But here's the problem I'm having:

There are several assets I own that have recent updates (e.g. June 2020) that for whatever reason are not in the packages (which only show updates to 2018 or whatever). I could still download the newest of the newest using the integrated store's interface, but with 2020 I no longer have access to these updates because "Open in Unity" just hops to the in-app Package Manager... Yay! Yes of course it's all on the asset creators but there are enough of them that it sucks. It wasn't how I expected my first foray into TwentyTwenty was going to go. :-(

Plus... I was hoping the "Package Manager" would ultimately "manage packages" a bit more than it does with assets... It seems to be just a cover for the per-file downloads we had with the old store:

• It doesn't remember what I've installed in my current project
• It doesn't notify me of packages in my project that need updating
• It doesn't help me remove a package if I so desire
• There's not even a way to filter by what packages I have downloaded vs not

 

Actually I think it's worse than I thought, many of my favorite assets who are typically very diligent with releases show months-old versions in the package manager in contrast to what I see in the store. What's the holdup getting new content to the PM?

 

And grrrr I can't label packages for the PM in the manager itself (to manually filter what's installed), I have to go to the website. WOT