Refund policies?

so, haven't actually bought anything from the asset store yet, but i am planning to.

thing is, how do i go about getting a refund if the product isn't as advertised or doesn't work as expected with proper integration?

for instance... i'm still looking for how to get the control scheme done and i HAVE seen some asset packs advertising what sounds like would fit the bill... but without actually being able to get my hands on it (there are some without demos) how can i even know that it's going to do what i need it to?

as such, i want to know what the policies about refunds are if the product purchased isn't as advertised?

... or is it just buyer beware?

 

I've seen some mention refunds. You probably have to contact support as the charges etc. is all done through Unity, you don't deal directly with the developer of the item in question AFAIK.

 

I'm curious about this policy as well. I'm sure no one wants to see people ask for a refund but it does happen at times. Any idea how one would contact support? Is it support@unity3d.com?

 

It depends on the license I guess.

For anything that involves code you can pretty surely assume that its final unless it completely fails to fullfill the description but in that case it would likely not have been approved by UT due to the expected backfire and administrative nightmare.

For art, you can normally not expect refund at all unless content that was mentioned to be present is not present. Doubt that such packages would get approved either.

if such stuff would be approved, well then the asset store totally fails to comply to its own target, being easy and trustable

 

I think its a case of actually talking to people who have taken the risk, or even the author. Thats what I do, I tend to lurk for a bit, chat a bit get some opinions then buy.

To this day I still haven't got a refund for anything. Except some bad eggs from tesco once.

 

I would really like to know about this too.
Im afraid i will have to disagree with you dreamora, I have had a art product on the unity store for a few weeks and have sold 2 and one has been refunded yesterday.....I have had no feedback as to why this is, and frankly im a little pissed off as I don't use dishonest sales tactics, its exactly what it says it is.
On top of this I dont see what is going to stop the user from refunding something but still keeping a copy on their PC.

 

You're damned right ! how can we prevent someone from getting a refund and still keeping a copy of the item in his hard drive ??!!!. I think it's an opened door to piracy ...

 

Hey Razz, what items do you have up on the asset store? Got some links?

I agree that there could be an issue where users could simply refund and keep the product. Art is difficult in that respect as it is easiest to maintain as it doesn't get updated much. But if you offer a scripting solution like EZ GUI then you want to keep your purchase for the subsequent updates and fixes that would get posted to the asset store. Honestly I feel that if someone sells something of value for a reasonable price few people will ask for a refund. It also stands to reason that anyone who looks to rip off assets from the asset store in this fashion will be caught eventually when they have so many consistent refund requests being made.

 

Let's try and keep the sensationalism to a minimum please. People who steal generally have no intention to buy in the first place. Though some may simply want access to something and the price is way above their pain threshold. I see some grossly overpriced stuff up on the asset store and I'm sure that is going to turn some people off.

On the other side, I'm seeing some very nicely priced stuff on the asset store. For example, 3dDude's FX packs. He has separated his effects into small packages covering themes such as fire, water, explosion, weather and soon to be clouds. Each pack at a price of $25. If he only had it available in one giant package for $100, it would most certainly turn people away. But at $25 for a small pack you can slowly acquire the bits you want at much more reasonable price.

People get frustrated and angry when piracy comes into the picture, but I think there are ways to work against it. You just have to expect that there will be some people who will steal it no matter what, even if it is reasonably priced and a valuable product.

It would be my hope that anyone who is trying to do a legit project with stolen assets will come around and buy them once they have the means. Though most who rip off everything in sight may just be a klepto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptomania) and will most likely never use the stolen goods for their intended purpose.

In any case, my rant is over. Moving along.

 

A few days ago one my my assets was refunded with no reason... To be honest. I was a little mad. But Its only 17.50 for me. I mean its a little cheap. I agree. It is something that can be taken advantage of.

I don't even thing that apple's Itunes store allows refunds.

For the asset store, I would like to see that they at least made the person give a reason before refunding.

Anyway.

Cheers!

 

The assets which get frequent updates benefit the most from sales since you need to purchase and keep your purchase in order to get an update, so thats a good incentive for both customer and developer alike.

Moral of the story: updates keep sales

 

Well sounds nice in practise, but if something is finished, it's kinda weird you can have a refund, as in 3dDude's case. I mean, it's a finished pack of assets and he provided a reasonable amount of information, screenshots and videos, of what you get on purchase.
I mean, practically, there's no evidence this person doesn't use the assets anyways, even with the refunds, as people already pointed out.

Don't know, but that shouldn't be an option, really, imo. People have every reason to be upset about such actions, imo :/

 

I have a history of purchasing from indies and never getting refunds. Instead I work closely with the developer, chatting until I know for sure that what they have made is what I want.

People don't mind your questions, if they potentially improve the product. I feel that if you should be able to get a refund from the asset store, you will be logged, so that anyone hoping to exploit this with multiple refunds so they can get free assets, will be banned. I am sure there is a system in place to detect this, it would be odd not to.

The occasional refund surely must happen though, and don't worry about it. The vast majority of people here are honest.

 

Being fair and declaring all digital sales final, as its standard on the WWW for any non fraudant transaction, keeps you sales too.
If you buy something you wanted it, point.
If you want to try out something, ask for a trial or alike, but don't buy it.

Not liking it is no reason to request a refund as its not possible for you to cover your part in the refund contract, the returning of the bought good, as its digital.

 

Officially all sales are final, but if you complain loudly enough they'll give you a refund. They track this though; if you exceed a certain number then you don't get any more refunds no matter what.

--Eric

 

the loud enough though normally costs you more time and thus money than the item you want the refund on. takes you easily 2 eternities, tried to get one for a program that was totally broken and didn't do what it advertised and just accepted it after 3 tries not working out just caues the $4.99 are not worth more than 10mins of effort

 

IMO anything purchased in digital form should be final. i.e. no refunds, as the purchaser doesn't guarantee that the product will a. not be used illegally, and b. has deleted it from their hard drive/storage etc. The only time that a refund should be considered for digital downloaded product is when the pruchaser can verify that the product didn't meet the specifications as per the sales page, or didn't perform the required task/s as per the sales page. Then in those cases the seller and purchaser should work out between them some sort of compromise. In most cases the seller will try his/her best to rectify the situation as one disgruntled customer can affect further sales. I guess it comes down to the individual.

I realise that people buy things for whatever reason, but in the case of digital artwrok, or even addon tools for like of Unity, the purchaser should, as dreamora stated above; "If you want to try out something, ask for a trial or alike, but don't buy it." Alternatively, as others who have purchased the items if they found it was value for money/did what the seller's claim it does, etc.

Admittingly there are some dodgy operators out there, and there are equally dodgy purchasers there too. Always check out a product through reviews and what other people say. I haven't looked at the Asset Store, but I would suggest that if hasn't got a feedback section for each product it would probably be a good idea to have one.

Having said that, I prefer to purchase directly with the asset creator if I can. At least on the Unity forums people can ask the asset developer questions about their products before making a purchase.

 

Yes, but some people are insane.

--Eric

 

Hey GravitySpec, i think you have a few good points, as do others on here.
Im quite experienced with online digital sales and the long and the short of it is piracy will always happen, its something that has to be accepted and controlled to the developers advantage, rather than trying to stop it all.

What I would really like to know is what is wrong with the product which caused a refund to be requested
this is the product in question http://u3d.as/content/export-2-reality/street-alley-pack-30-models/1CW it has now sold 3 and had one refunded.

A few of you on here have said you prefer to work directly with devs in order to get a product closer to what you want, what im asking is what is unity doing to make the asset store more like this set up? I have no feedback as to what people think of the product.

I do see the point about updating products, it works wonders for games on the iOS store. However it starts to become a different business model. One of the key reasons companies update apps on the iOS store is because it pushes it back into the new list, would this happen with products in the unity store? I have been planning on making multiple street furniture packs, perhaps they should all be rolled into one big pack that updates? but then what if you just want one lampost?

 

Tip: Link your official forum thread to asset store product description + readme.txt

 

Apple stopped that from happening ages ago.

--Eric

 

@keely Good idea thanks.
@eric5h5 Oh i didnt know that :S. Still i struggle to see how i could update an art package in the same way as a game, people buy them for different reasons.

 

One way could be a general planned expansion of the content. Instead of waiting and building all of the content up for release, you could launch with a few pieces with a lead-in that more is on the way. Just a thought.

 

Actually we very seldom have actual refund requests.. maybe 3 or 4 a month. However, we have had a few cases where people have fraudulently used stolen credit card numbers to buy many assets at the same time. When this happens we are notified by the card provider, reverse the charge, and then have to reverse that amount (marked as 'refund' in the portal). Consequently, many of you might see a single refund listed in your sales record.

We're taking steps to beef up the ways people can use credit cards on the store, so hopefully that will happen less frequently.

 

@gravity spec - Yeah I actually started to think about this after posting up here...its a good idea for lots of reasons...im going to try to implement an art pack that updates in the next few days so keep an eye out!

@Caitlyn - I thought It might be something like that, thanks for letting us know

 

Hey Caitlyn, I like the Asset Store web page links you all use. You don't currently get as much information on it as if you were in the actual asset store. Are you guys planning to beef that up as well? Would be awesome to look through the asset store when I'm not at a machine with Unity on it. You would just require the actual asset store in Unity to do the purchasing, unless you add all the login and purchase stuff right onto the site as well, then just hop on Unity and the package is already purchased and ready for you to download.

 

I think in a community like this there's a lot more honour than taking a cross-section of people the world-over, so I agree - if I buy things and they work I'm happy, but if they don't work then I will want a refund.

I find myself on this thread because after much vacillating over whether to buy a product or not I took the plunge only to find it crashed right away and I lost the first piece of work I ever did with it. I've emailed the company, so we'll see what they come back with, but if currently I have 100% failure rate with these script extensions and if that's representative of my experience using them, then I'm not going to want to keep it or use it. Everything else I've bought I've been delighted with and although playMaker and uScript aren't quite what I was after, I'm happy to keep those and use them on other projects...

This latest purchase, if it really doesn't work well, then it's not fit for purpose and I really don't want to have to pay for code I'm not going to use.

It's more of a problem because of the nature of editor extensions being scripted and not a somewhat less readable format such as a binary that cannot easily be reverse engineered.

 

I only expect a refund if something doesn't do what I expected it to do !

 

How do we even get a refund? I've contacted Caitlyn a week ago with no reply...

Maybe there are only 3-4 a month because there is no clear contact info on how to get one.

 

through the asset store support.

The board is no support channel nor would contacting the UT support be the right channel (they though would likely tell you bout that in 3-5 days depending on the current turnaround time for common support)

Best go to the contact page http://unity3d.com/company/contact to find the corresponding contact path. Shouldn't be that hard and the page is actually there to find exactly this kind of information.

 

Maybe it would help if support emails were on the support page.

http://unity3d.com/support/

 

Even in the above scenario, Unity Asset Store REFUSES to issue a refund.

I have now spent hundreds of dollars on the asset store, acquiring various things (mostly models and particle effects, but also some scripting.)

For some of these (like the 3D models), it makes sense to have an absolute "no refunds" policy, because you can easily preview exactly what you are getting. But what if they advertised models in the asset that you never actually received? That would be false advertising, and should be (well, HAS to be, by law) refundable.

A bigger issue comes with scripting; with scripts, you can only go by the description of what the script does and what you are getting in the package. If the script has BUGS IN IT that you then have to go and fix yourself, then the product did NOT match the description and thus Unity Asset Store is complicit in false advertising. This is exactly what happened with a recent script I downloaded -- it had bugs in it, which I then had to go through line by line and debug. The whole point of PAYING to download a script as an asset is to save us time so we DON'T have to do things like coding and debugging ourselves... so a paid asset that is buggy completely defeats the purpose, AND does not match advertised functionality, and should be refunded by Unity.

But apparently they don't do this, as per the response I received via email:

"Hi There,

Thanks for the e-mail.

Thank you for contacting us. As specified in the Asset Store EULA, which all Asset Store customers have agreed to, all sales are final. However you may wish to contact the creator or publisher of the asset for their assistance. In some cases, they may be willing to authorize a refund at their discretion.

Let me know if you have any further problems.

Kind regards,
Ben
Unity Support"


This was for a refund request for one $15 asset (out of the $200+ I have spent so far); at this point, I spent hours of my time debugging the thing... my time is worth $60/hr, that I won't get back. So I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a $15 refund of an asset that I purchased specifically to avoid wasting those hours...

Since they refuse to refund it, yet they also have not verified that the asset package is being sold as advertised, I am now going to file a dispute with my credit card to get my money back (I don't know if I can isolate the $15 from the entire $140 or so order, so I may have to dispute the entire charge...)


I'm really disappointed in Unity over this, and it really makes me question if I should upgrade to Pro like I was planning on doing...

 

See this

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/194783-Buyers-Beware-All-Sales-Are-Final?p=1322241#post1322241

 

Way to raise the dead.