Long term support question

Hi there, i'm wondering what happens if an author just stops updating an asset from the store which you bought, let's say a plugin/package that must be updated or would stop working after updating the Unity version.
Would i lose the money because no one is going to update it?

Thanks!

 

Pretty much, yeah. Sometime if you're lucky they let it be open source and free for commercial use. If you're extra lucky Unity or some other dev buys it. Most of the time it's pretty much as is and the updates are a perk.

 

So as i though there's no warranty or responsibility, i'll have to make sure so pick my unity-version-dependant assets carefully haha, thanks!

 

Products get discontinued. That's a normal lifecycle. Unity discontinued support for Unity 5, Microsoft discontinued support for Windows 95, etc. However, while a product is still being sold on the Asset Store, the publisher does have a responsibility to support it as advertised. (Note that supporting advertised features is a very different thing from adding new user-requested features, which the publisher is not obligated to do.)

That said, please have patience for publishers of assets that are designed to work with different rendering pipelines. The vast majority of publishers are individual enthusiasts who just want to provide tools to help their fellow devs. The constantly changing state of the rendering pipelines across different Unity versions has made it very difficult for them to react immediately to every breaking change in Unity.

My advice is to prefer assets that include complete source code / source assets (e.g., original PSDs). That way, if an asset gets discontinued, you can update it yourself for new Unity versions, or hire someone to update it.

 

It's not always the case though, see for example: https://odininspector.com/ where license stuff gets more complex

Personally I wish more useful assets would bill on a sub basis so that they could support themselves better and I have to stress less about fixing their code in latest Unity