Lightning Deals advertised 90% off, discounted 80%. Not cool Unity.

I opted to not pick up everything I wanted, I still went through with some, but I think Unity should refund that 10% back as charge corrections. That's a S***ty thing to do. What kind of business does that? Come on. You want to stick to 80% then advertise it that way.

 

The way it works I think is it's 90% at first, the more sales it has, the lower the discount, so from 90% it becomes 80%, 60%, 40%, etc. Until a certain amount it stays at, maybe 30%.


This was also never explained to anyone, it's a messed up situation.
It's pretty bad, you add it to your cart at 90%, do checkout, and when you pay it turns out it's now 80%. This might've happened to you.
People getting charged full price left and right. Plus the crash
Although the discounts itself were nice, and I hope to see more of it. Just need to explain it better and get ready for it.

 

It was 90% when it went in my cart, therefore it should be 90% but thats not what they charged me.

 

Lightning deals were only for the "Buy Now" button. If you had them in your cart, there supposed to be a banner in your cart that it's not a lightning deal purchase, bright magenta.

 

No i hit the buy now and got like 60%. But said 90% when I was in cart and bought. It said 90 but I got charged like 60 and 70

 

So no asset buying for me then. I was really expecting this 90% discounts since exchange rate is garbage in my country. Thanks unity.

 

Should have made that more clear how it works rather than enticing everyone with 90%.

 

It seems that they only posted this information on their Asset Store Twitter Page on 12th.

 

Well as a consumer, when you see something %90 or any percentage, don't focus on that too much, focus on details. This was also on details:

During Black Friday, there are 20 licenses available at 90% off, 50 at 80% off, and 400 at 70% off. Once those have been claimed, the asset will no longer be a Lightning Deal, and will remain 50% off through the end of the sale.

 

That information never given in their Asset Store page. Only information we had was it will be limited. Most of the people do not visit their twitter account for it.

 

What details are you talking about? The rules you are quoting were nowhere to be found on the Asset Store's website. This wasn't just misleading and dishonest, but also a huge waste of everyone's time. Those involved in this embarrassing failure should be ashamed of themselves. The apparent lack of business ethics is hurting Unity's image and reputation, if you'd ask me.

 

Many people can't even visit their Twitter account anymore, because they have been banned from the platform just for expressing opinions about certain topics that don't fit/match Twitter's political and geo-political views. The amount of censorship on Twitter is really shocking at the moment.

 

The information should be somewhere here,, not on a damn twitter XD. I mean the quanityty - % values

 

Who even cares about percentages? Either you are happy with the price before checking out or you just don't buy it.

 

It is a pretty lame (immoral?) way to sell assets whatever - hey quick buy this while it is at its cheapest, even if you don't use it - still 90% off! Wait 80% now... hurry!

 

I couldn't even log in for a few hours, then once I could everything was at 70%. Definitely feels like a bait and switch....

 

Actually I thought they were on store page too but yes they weren't. I remember I read somewhere and get this from google search but that's not good to not putting these info on the store page.

I think they wanted to show the numbers before but since servers went down they couldn't. Right now it shows the amount left for that discount.

 

All in all they did not informed people well + if you are starting a deal this early in the morning it should pays off for the people. Only thing the most of us left with is frustration. I was planning to buy 4-5 assets. But even if I opened the site when the sale starts I was left with 70% deals for those. So I will probably buy none. Unity should stick with the fixed amount of discount as always.

 

There is early in the morning somewhere in the world all the time.

 

While i understand the frustration due to the server issues, they did say limited (this could of course have been detailed better as I don't follow their twitter either), and they didn't pull some lame crap like "Only 1 at 90%". 20 units at 90% seems pretty decent. If you couldn't get it i guess its just down to luck? Some one somewhere managed to get in and managed to buy it so either they got in first before the system crash and bought it (fastest fingers first) or got in fastest after the system was back up (luckiest). While 20 is not as lame as 1, its still a pretty small number, in the time you took to click buy now and complete the payment process, 500 other people could be doing the same thing. I don't think the payment screen can update the price display dynamically as units are purchased... factors such as internet connection quality, timing, the 5 extra seconds someone took to consider their purchase could all make a difference.

As developers, surely you could think of the mayhem if the price and unit were locked just by adding it to your cart/buy now without completing payment. Someone could lock up all the units forever without purchasing... then some one else (maybe still you? <- in a hypothetical sense, no offense meant) would be here complaining about not being able to purchase

Also, other then their bundle deals, 70% is still pretty sweet compared to their usual 50% off... why would you prefer a flat/fixed 50% off...

(PS: The sale started at like 2pm for me)

TLDR: Some people got the 90% despite the server crash, you didn't, remember to make an offering to RNGesus before the next sale.

 

I was planning to buy a few assets, but if the price I see might not be the price I pay, I will not be buying anything.

 

I wish you were right, but the Asset Store doesn't appear to have suffered from any server crash or lag whatsoever, since they had no problem accepting payments from those who did manage to connect to the store in the first few hours of the Flash Sale.

I used to be patient and understanding like you, but I'm afraid I have seen too many misleading marketing campaigns from reputable software companies in the past to condone this kind of business practice, especially when a company sells products on behalf of the creators of those products, like Unity does.

Anyway, I hope that Unity will learn from this, and that they will return to their old marketing style/format, which was much more reliable and fair.

Maybe Unity should give the annual bonuses for the marketing department to the Asset Store creators this year, because they deserve better representation.

 

This is simply not true. I was there at 0 seconds. Barely could buy the four assets I ended up with. The asset store borked out in the middle of the payment process, I wasn't sure they went through. I had to open up the editor and the package manager and check my assets that they showed up. Three did, the last one I had to try again and ended up probably one of the lasts or even the last person who bought it for 90% off. More of this here.

 

Some people are really rush to defend the Unity. I can live without an asset but the problem is misleading people and sharing the full information on platform which is not actively used by the customers at all. You people getting things personal even if you are not the target and please stop doing that.

 

Correcting false information != defending anyone.

I have no opinion whether or not this sale was good in spirit. I personally knew what I'm buying into and acted accordingly, although I can understand if you feel otherwise.
But, I think Unity should have invested in their infrastructure before an event like this, that's for sure.

 

Most assets are on 70% which is still a really good and there's many copies this time so it's hard to miss.

Their mistake was not communicating it clearly in the asset store. Although they said it was limited, how limited? What does that mean (how many copies)? What happens after? Most people don't read their twitter, especially this one tweet where they explain it.

Sticking with 70% from the get go would've probably been a safer choice, no one would be angry at missing the even if a crash happened, because of how many copies they're offering for the 70%.

 

You sound like a corporate lawyer who desperately tries to mitigate the damage done by the marketing/sales department.

Why would you come to Unity's defence when customers are complaining about the disastrous Flash Sale in the only forum that they have access to as customers?

Why are you doing this? Are you an asset creator perhaps, or maybe a Unity employee who is using his private account for the company's PR? Your post is a textbook example of mitigation (in disguise).

Whatever your motivations are, you should know that your post only adds insult to injury.

 

I think that's a stretch
He's not really defending them, just correcting some info

All in all, the discounts were great, 90% was mostly there for shock value but for the people who got it, that's one hell of a deal. I hope to see more of it in the future, unity's discounts for the asset store are always good.

what happened wasn't great, but cheer up beautiful people, 70% is still a steal
I wish i could buy all the assets I'm interested in for 70%,
but I already bought them for much higher. Oh well, c'est la vie

 

When twitter can ban you for posting 100% accurate information it should not be used by large enterprises to communicate with the customers.

 

Lotta people mad they didn't get quite the money off they were or would be already getting.

Only the paranoid immediately assume the big nasty corporations are out to steal their money.

Just got myself PEEK at 50% off. Can't be mad at a discount like that.

 

After things going wrong everyone already figure it out so there is no false information to correct. They either should stick to their fixed discount amount as always as I previously mentioned or provide sufficient information. This is not a market in the corner where people fight with each other to be able to grab something on sale.

What you are just doing is keep saying lets face it and move one while they are expressing their frustration here. Denying people to express themselves is not correcting something. We are on this forum for that and if Unity thinks we are disinforming people or hurting their feelings can ban us for good.

All of us here are customers in the end and we are indicating the problems of this sale. So please let them say something about the issue.

 

What I meant to say is that Unity itself did not appear to have suffered from server malfunction/overload/lag, since they handled sales and payments uninterrupted, and they updated the Flash Sale page several times over the past few days by adding new products to the sale (products b.t.w., that all have a detailed product description, as is required by the Unity Asset Store rules!). So, there appears to be no excuse for the misleading advertisement by Unity.

If Unity really cared about providing sufficient information to the customers, like Unity expects from each individual asset creator, they would have updated the description of the Flash Sale before the start of the sale. I don't have any reason to assume that they did care about the customer in this campaign. I think Unity has the burden of proof here.

 

They did write the 90% off would be only in limited quantities ahead of time, right on the Asset Store sales page. What wasn't there though was the fact that there'd be multiple rounds of increasingly lower discounts and apparently that was information that was only on their Twitter, which I don't read. To me though it was still a welcome surprise to still get a higher discount after I expected to miss out on 90% due to the limited quantity and that it would be 50% right after those are gone, but there was a good chunk of time to get those higher discounts after the crash and stability issues recovered as well.

It overall went about as I expected, but they should definitely have done a better job communicating it all and they especially need to work on the stability of the servers and scale them up when they already know there will be a massive traffic surge ahead of time.

 

I did not subscribe to Unity's Twitter.
I thought that the official website of a company would give the most detailed explanation of the rules? No, they only put the truth on Twitter.

 

Most people commenting about how Unity did in fact say "limited quantities" were not sitting refreshing every second trying to get the deal at 0 seconds last night and then deal with refreshing and frustration at broken site. While I am happy I got about $700 worth of assets for around $150 I am not happy about how the site went down and Unity did not prepare for the sale. I DO appreciate the sale and the devs that let their content go for so cheap but it could have been planned better. Definitely a lesson learned for Unity and us. Now to make a game out of all this stuff I bought

 

Unity is teaching by example new ways you can fool your phone game customers to accidentally buy things during a sale but not actually give them the discount, then count on the fact that 99.9% won't go to the trouble to do anything about it.

And all the nice people will assume it was just a silly little miscommunication error. More corporate psychopathy.

 

I do wonder, seeing all bad delibret UI designs and service; On top continuous miss communication with the community, if will not lead evwntually to some collective sue cases against Unity.

I really sometimes got feeling many things happening around Unity is just "internship" jobs.

Soon we will see officials saying something along the lines: "we apologise for caused issues with selling services, your feedback is important and we working constantly on improvements."
Then silence.
Then next year will be a groundhog dejavu day.

 

Did Unity learn a lesson?

 

Yeah, this kind of thing is so commonplace that it does make me genuinely doubt Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." For instance, I don't think I've ever seen an advert which accidentally implies a smaller discount than the one on offer, but over-selling things? Unusually common.

 

...How is the asset store page this bad? I'm just trying to browse the deals, and it's a complete pain in the ass to use.

Simply scrolling up and down in the landing page causes the whole webpage to jerk up and down violently, I presume due to the sliding div banner. I remember reading somewhere that the website team were understaffed, but you could solve this issue for free by just not having a sliding div banner.

If I click 'next' to view the next page of lightning deals, my browser's back button doesn't do anything.

I can't wrap my head around how such basic functionality like this can be so mangled. Maybe it's just going to make me sound old, but why do so many modern websites—it's not just limited to the asset store—have to be these over-engineered JavaScript monstrosities?

I just don't get it.

 

This can be solved by X-ing/closing the purple Black Friday banner at the top of the asset store page. Was having the same issue before I saw that somewhat hard to see little cross in the top right corner.

 

That does help, thanks.

The problem is still there, but it doesn't jerk as far now.

 

That thing is also in the store itself. On the landing page they disabled the scroll bar, and on the store page I can tell why: dragging it causes the page to rapidly shake up and down.

 

Still wonder why they took away the store in the Unity editor. Like it worked well then all of a sudden you have to use this ugly UI that is slow. I being to wonder if they have a saying at Unity "if it works well, change it"

 

I'm a developer like you and have published 0 assets on the asset store whatsoever... I'm a post graduate student, researcher and software engineer by training, and work at a university

Erm... because i'm a unity customer and a member of the forum and wish to participate in the conversation and offer my point of view? You can check my 100+ posts over the past years... they don't defend unity.

But... its the same for any flash sale on any e-market platform... You could blame it on the server load and the server crash, but even if you didn't experience that, you might not have gotten it... It is down to luck... are you saying if the server didn't crash, you 100% would have gotten 1 of the 20 units? I too had assets which I wanted, and I just didn't get them. I'm just waiting for the next sale... its not a life or death situation...

My deepest apologies if you were offended by my post but my point still stands... you didn't get the asset due to bad luck... no other reason. As mentioned I do agree that 1) They should have been more open about the number limits on the asset store itself as I don't check/use the twitter either 2) They should probably have allocated more server resources or handled the sale better to avoid the lag/crash issues which people had. BUT the horrible user experience and you not getting the asset at your desired price, are two separate issues (at least in my opinion). If you feel unhappy with the price you were charged which was contrary to your expectations (e.g. 50%/70%/80% discount instead of 90%), you could always go ahead and request a refund. Don't give in to them! Show them who's boss! Its 90% or nothing!

 

This. Unity's history with its websites and store leads me to conclude this situation is more accurately explained by Hanlon's razor ("never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained as stupidity").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

 

7 people complained it slowed the editor down and instead of closing the darned thing they forced this change.

 

I was hoping to get an asset for -90% discount too, opened the page around 30 minutes after the beginning of the sale (woke up in advance since it was beginning at 8 am here) and was probably the last person who was lucky to grab it at -80%. The rest of the assets were already -70% by the time I opened them. Can't say it was a bad discount, but lack of information about (very) limited amount of units at the discounts declared was disappointing.

But yes, everything was crashing and I had to refresh the page very often.

 

Am I missing something about this whole stupid campaign? I have been on when some just become available and they still show 70%.. never 90%. Its just lies! Makes me less inclined to buy anything on the black Friday sale at all.

If the 1st 20 are 90% off then whats this... lies

 

Well, I just grabbed an asset with 90% discount 2 hours ago. So clearly it's not a lie.