Missleading lighting deals adverts on the asset store

On the asset store lighting deals are shown with countdown timer and most show -90% during countdown.
However when countdown ends then the assets are on sale for 70% discount. Very misleading.
I had set my alarm clock to get an asset but seeing this trickery made me sick.
I have a very limited budget so every penny counts but even so its not about the discount only its about being tricked by trickery lying adverts.

Shame on you Unity Assets team!

p.s. attached screenshots are just an example. the tricked was used plenty earlier.

 

They advertised the sale as offering a limited quantity, and that is exactly what we got.

No lies, no deception, just a lack of information on the assetstore itself and a horribly planned start of the sale that I personally would say were bad decisions.

All assets of the lighting deals are off 90% for everyone that manages to refresh the page for the asset at the start of the sale and bring it to checkout before 20 people bought the asset for the discount. Yes, this means that more than 20 people can get the asset for 90% off, you just have to manage to reload the page and press "Buy Now" in less time than it takes for 20 people to actually completely buy it.

If you refresh after 20 people bought it for 90% off you get offered 80% off. Same thing applies as above, just with time for at least 50 people to buy instead of 20.

And after this you get offered a still very good 70% off. This time until 400 people bought it, which means that everyone that wants it and isn't waiting a full 24 hours to refresh the page is more than likely going to get it at this price.

TLDR: You just are slower to refresh your asset page than 70 people are with fully buying the asset. This might be your internet connection, latency, computer or browser speed or a sheer lack of physical speed with your finger. But the discounts for 90% and 80% were absolutely there. Often it takes less than a couple seconds for 20 people to buy at 90% and less than 1 or 2 minutes for the next 50 to buy at 80%.

I hope this clarifies it a bit for you - and I hope this doesn't give any room for yet another thread about this. We already have a few.

 

thanks for explaining. Not that it would have mattered much if i did know this before hand because waking up at 5 AM to get the asset, the asset store itself was almost unresponsive (stuck loading assets) or showing error screen for an hour or so. (I guess it was hammered by others) Meaning i had no change what so ever to get in on time.
So even do it may not be a deception technically but it feels like it anyway.

I only hope in future this will be done differently.
At least i learned something.

 

Right, I forgot to add "The assetstore crumbling under the amount of people refreshing the page and RNG deciding to serve the page to other people first" to my list of possible reasons above

The store wasn't available for over an hour to most users when the sale started, so not the first time that's the culprit.

Just wanted to clarify that they didn't lie or deceive, but instead made some bad decisions on how they run this sale

 

After the last 2 years here ... I wanted something at 90 % off .. Missed it ..

I just see this as another FOMO sale .. and if I can't get it when they SAID 90 % ..
I am not buying it at 70 % ...

 

I'm curious which package you were considering at 90% but wouldn't consider worth it at 70% off.

I'm asking because I'm planning to ship my own asset(s) next year and I find it super useful to hear people's feedback on asset pricing. Its really hard to put a sticker price on something when I spend 3 solid months working to ship it, but I know that those hours have absolutely no relationship to the amount I can sell it for :-D

Also, as a side curiosity -- what kind of game were you looking to build with the asset?

 

For me it was the Pro Radar Builder | Utilities Tools | Unity Asset Store
for a game i am working on that needs a radar map.
second asset i was considering was:
Shadero Sprite - 2D Shader Editor | Visual Scripting | Unity Asset Store
for a later project.
Its not the price of the assets are to high priced.
it self as rather the cash i can spend on such things.
For me its just an hobby i have hardly time for and so far havent released a game.
I have limit funds and my wife thinks its all just wasting money. (as i have bought plenty of assets in the past and earned €0,- from anything.
So lets just say buying an asset for a few euro's i can get away with ;-)
Besides to be frank the radar is only worth a few euro's to me anyway as most options i do not need or want. So i have just to find the time to make it myself.
The 2D Shader is an other story. That's not possible for me and my limited time.
It is well worth its 100% value i think but not for just an free time/part time hobby developer.
An other problem why assets can be a waist of cash when buying them for later by the time you need them they are not longer developed. That happened to me 2 times with expensive assets.

 

Are you guys not slightly disturbed by how much you're manipulated? Artificial time slots and quantities are just manipulative sales tactics.

I'm not actually attacking Unity for this - all stores have some form of manipulation but this sale in particular does have quite a few more negative responses than other sales, so clearly while it benefits Unity, it is also more manipulative than other sales.

This is demonstrated by the fact people are feeling forced (manipulated) to attend the exact moment a digital timer decides when you can buy, and how many can buy.

However what is the human cost of missing out on discounts you were on time for?

 

Thank you for your detailed feedback. I totally get it. My comments are inline:

That's a pretty awesome looking asset. It would take me weeks to make something look that good, so in my head, its totally worth that price if I needed something like it and thought I could integrate it easily. With that said, I totally get not being able to sneak the full price past an astute partner, but for me, I just skip going out for dinner and drinks for a few weeks in a row, and I make up for the cost of the assets I buy pretty quick.

I also make the argument that if I were to build that asset myself, even the most basic version would take me at least 10 hrs of building & debugging to make it work like I want ... so I just have to decide if my 10 hrs is better spent working on something else in the game -vs- doing this feature.

Lol, I have WAY too many assets that I've purchased for future projects. Someone help me stop!

What if you went with the angle of being a consulting developer for other indie games developers who need a radar asset like this integrated into their game? I find that when I buy an asset, I spend at least the first week just reading the docs and watching whatever tutorials that come with it so that I can integrate it into my existing game .... but I'd totally pay someone to integrate that asset into my game. You could probably pay for the asset's full price pretty quick as a contractor helping me ship my game.

This is a *real* problem with asset purchases in general. Not just the no-longer developed ones, but in many cases -- there are ones being actively sold on the store but that are not "out of the box" compatible with modern LTS Unity (no unit tests, no integration tests), so even when the asset claims that it is compatible with Unity 2020 LTS, there is no way to know until I try to open it. This isn't a per asset problem though -- it is a whole asset lifecycle problem that Unity themself will have to figure out.

 

I am a US based indie developer. Because of location, when someone calls it a "black friday" sale, I know what I'm getting into. BestBuy will have exactly 3 TVs at their "black friday" price and then 300 "similar" tv's at pretty much 100% their normal price, and the people here will literally trample one another trying to get one of those 3 at 6am so that they don't have to pay full price for the similar tv.

I do hate that this kind of fomo and fear based marketing is so popular in the US, but its pretty normalized for me as a consumer, and I understand how it makes money for Unity and the asset store developers, so it doesn't bother me too much, just kind of makes me sad about how marketing to humans in mass works in general.

 

Fairly sure a few bundles and jacked up prices happened before the sale began as well in prep for it, also a common (but illegal in retail, in some countries) practise.

In some cases, assets are consistently priced high by default for the inevitable and frequent sales, as a long but fat tail tactic. Can also catch the occasional clueless whale.

Perhaps I should not care. People who can buy are obviously adults. If they choose to lick their fingertips and press them slowly into plug sockets then perhaps it's for the best.

 

For me -- the cost of assets has always pretty much been worth it if the asset will do the following three things:

1) teach me some new techniques to help me be a better game dev
2) save me time when adding this feature (or art) into my current project
3) provide me good support via discord, forums, emails, youtube tutorials, and docs

I'm sure I'd have a limit, but I've purchased pretty much every assets I've come across when I believe that they are able to fulfill all of those 3 requirements. If its an expensive asset, I just try and pickup some extra work as a contractor somewhere and spend the 5-10 hrs the asset saved me making extra cash to make up for the cost.

 

I've clicked on about 6 or 7 asset a micro second after the sale clicks over and have only got 90% off once.

As for marking up before a sale, 99% of my game sales have been when they are on sale, very few at full price.

Also I know my own buying habits, I almost never buy an asset at full price unless desperate/ need it immediately.
Usually means I have a lot of asset I don't use, but might in the future.

 

In my mind everyone that sees this 90% before page has been updated, should get the asset for that discount.

There is no way around the fact that if this does not happen seem like a cheat.

Simply put, the 90% discounted quantity should be exactly as much as sold before the forced by the server page refresh where you loose the ability to the press the button, while the 90% discount is visible.

Otherwise is generally a very not fair situation, especially since depends so much on internet latency.

 

I think in the next sale Unity is going to do loot boxes.

 

Came to post this.

 

How is possible that Unity company can be able to offer this kind of Lightning deals if the servers CAN NOT keep and work with the flood of buyers?

"Internal server error: Fail to get redis data" appears when trying to do anything.

even after half an hour after beginning the Lightning deal the website is still frozen and does not work. So what kind of website they have that can not keep with such a high demand ?

Only after 45 minutes I could be able to see the asset store again and I have a very fast internet connection

I totally agree with this, because I could not be able to buy anything at black friday with the Lightning Deals as when I tried to buy it after a second passed it was already finished and it was 70% discount instead of 80% or 90% but then I could not buy either because the servers did not work and it was not possible to buy

Today February 8 in 2022 what happening again another Lightning deal, I have been waiting for the very first second to refresh the page when the sale started and on the very first second the sale was already at 50% instead of 70%!!!!!
And when finishing the checkout the server gave me the message error
"Internal server error: Fail to get redis data"
Hopefully this time I could hit the refresh and it wen through but with only the 50%

Then There is NO way to refresh the page for anything else because all the website is broken and frozen even after a few minutes.

 

Ridiculous offer unity. I hit the page 4 mins into the sale and the price is back to normal. Really disappointed in your sale tactics... especially when the redis server was playing up.

 

As with previous similar sale, this is just not fairly handled, for example the site crashed and also the offers are not respected, if you see -70% you should get that offer no matter what, if the site has not refreshed.

This is definitely one of the worst things Unity store team has come up with, simply because is so unfair.

So this would work if the site had enough bandwidth and what user see is what he gets. Otherwise i think is ultimately bad for the store reputation and harm both users and asset publishers.

 

Well I was waiting and just on first second after opening the sale I click on the buy now button it was already 50% instead of 70% so if you go after 4 minutes is true that it could be back to normal price.

BUT THE WORSE is that you can not buy it because the checkout server freezes and breaks and it does not recover and takes much time until you can see it again, and so all the deals are gone.

 

The main problem of this is that the servers crashed and gets frozen even after the first second so as you say very well it is very unfair so it seems that it will work only for a very few persons that are able to buy it.

I totally and absolutely agree that the Unity store SHOULD HAVE ENOUGH BANDWIDTH to be able to support the possible flood of user at the same time to keep up and be able to buy what you may want and do not break and when trying to buy you get "Internal server error: Fail to get redis data"

 

Unity is too big to care, IMO.

 

Here is my guess on what's going on and why you should avoid Lightning Deals altogether.

Since the first lightning sale set up such a small number of copies at that super low sales prices (e.g. you get the 90% discount for the first 5 copies sold, 80% discount for the next 5, and then 50% discount for all others sold) -- there are probably some enterprising developers out there that have figured out how to script the purchase of assets via scripts the moment the sale starts.

Furthering my assumptions here -- I'd bet that the code is probably being shared somewhere out there on the internet, and that is probably why the site can't handle that many transactions all happening the exact moment that the lightning sales start.

Just like black Friday sales here in the states, I highly recommend that everyone stay away from Unity Lightning Sales -- if for no other reason than for your own mental health.

If you've got a solid game already (or even just a fun core game loop), and you need an asset to spruce it up or take it to that next feature level, find a solid partner or investor to invest in your project (to buy the asset full price) instead of trying to beat the system and saving a handful of dollars (and yes, I'll take DMs if you are looking for a micro-investor on your project).

 

Unity can add more servers and increase the bandwidth as much as they want, but the only benefit to you will be that you can see that there's no more licenses faster and without interruptions.