Rejecting my asset store package after 52 days of pending review

Hello, the submission of my asset Word Master - The Word Game a complete 2D game template has been rejected saying it is too simple for the current standards. I would like to know more information on why it was rejected. I believe it is very well polished.
If you guys, could help me understand more on what should be improved, it will be appreciated. Thanks

 

Looks like you posted this complaint to multiple threads. Let's keep the discussion focused in one place.

I'm going to give a blunt feedback, but I hope you will take it as constructive. While I can see you had to build up all these different screen layouts, there really isn't much "juice." That is, the sounds are minimal, the layouts are static, there are almost no animations. No sparkles, no satisfying snap or pop or ka-chunk when you accomplish something in the game. Even the confetti particles are kinda slow and limp. You're consistent in your color and texture choices, but it all looks like the kind of shovelware that filled the CD-ROMs of the early 1990s.

In your defense, it seems like your intent is to make a template project so that your customer can then add all the juice themselves, customize it to their liking, add the sparkles and style and then go off and sell their version of it on their own. If that's the case, then its success would hinge on how easy it is to take your code and assets and customize it quickly and uniquely. Your video does not show any customization beyond the barebones look you show off. Without downloading the project, I can't tell for sure, but probably the Unity Asset Store staff looked at the code and decided there really isn't the kind of customizability and desirability it would need to earn more than a handful of sales.

There's a million Candy Crush or Infinite Runner clones because there's a million different skins and game rule changes to make each one stand out just a little bit from the rest, and because there's tons and tons of sparkly juicy satisfying gameplay tricks in every little part of those games.

As unpopular as it is to hear this, the Asset Store's purpose is ultimately to make money for Unity-- and if an asset would likely earn fewer sales commissions than it would cost to host the asset, they will give it a pass.

 

52 days pending review is a long wait. especially to say "too simple" yet there are "UI" things which are no more than a bunch of icons/buttons and some backgrounds with a bit of text on and zero code, yet they seem popular enough. One thing i have seen is that there doesnt seem to be a universal standard, its like some of the reviewing team will say sure and others wont..

Id disagree as little here as it appears to be a working game, not just a few bits of UI - yet as mentioned above, theres quite a few "UI" things where you get like 10 buttons and a couple of backgrounds and thats it, but thats fine.

 

I once wrote a blog post to provide some pointers: https://codesmile.de/2023/02/08/is-your-asset-too-simple/

In this instance I think you can answer it yourself: would you actually download and play a game exactly like yours on a mobile device?

As polished as it may be - this isn't a game that provides much entertainment value to players. And I tend to think you haven't even tested this on a mobile device. Just by looking at it I see it would be super-awkward to hit the right letter because these buttons are just too small for touch input.

A common complaint about such "simple" game kits like this one in particular is "hard to extend". Your template presumably can only be used "as is" - especially when it comes to how the game is played. Therefore, its value is greatly diminished.

Then nobody likes assets where you can merely change the graphics & audio - neither devs, nor gamers, nor Unity as it would rub off on them as being a "clone game maker" tool of sorts.

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Then a very similar game template with the exact same name has already been published to the store 5 years ago. This tells me you didn't even research the market and competing products (or chose to ignore them).

You would have noticed that this particular asset has not been updated for long, doesn't even show a "views last week" counter meaning it gets less than 10 hits per week. But most importantly you would have realized what other "word game" assets are in the store, what they provide, and in how far yours would have to match up at a minimum while either exceeding some of their features or (preferably) providing a unique value proposition (UVP) of its own that sets it apart from existing assets.

You would have saved yourself a ton of dev time by doing market research before starting development.

And before you argue "but this asset is very similar and it's got approved to the store!" do check the "Latest release date". If that date is more than two years in the past, you can safely assume for a script-heavy asset that it has been abandoned. And for any asset that's been originally released to the store years ago, it may actually get rejected too if it were released as a new asset today. The submission standards continue to be raised over time.

 

You are comparing apples with oranges.

UI Button graphics are a sprite pack. Nobody expects them to have any function of their own. If the graphics look the part, certainly someone might make good use of them in a game.

For a game template on the other hand, it needs to be modifiable, extendable, and provide significant value over assets already in the store and it should not be a trivial game.