Feedback Roughly 1/3 of my Assets are DEPRECATED

I had the feeling that "quite a few" of the assets I have purchased on the Unity Asset Store were deprecated but never really took the time to actually check out how many. My feeling would have been "probably 10% or maybe 20%". But in fact, it's:

224 assets of 673 assets are deprecated!​

... and I don't blame the publishers: The pace in which Unity adds new implementations (often of features that already existed), that are not compatible with existing approaches, then implements them to about 80% or 90% "complete", then starts something new, drops support for the old implementation, rinse, repeat ... well ... it's tough when you're developing a game, but even much worse when you develop for the Unity Asset Store.

The good thing is that some of the deprecated packages do still work, even in current Unity versions. But still, using packages from the Unity Asset Store does add quite a risk to any longer term project.

 

Maintenance is one big reason that assets deprecate. The EULA stipulates that customers buying a license are entitled to updates forever which is not a sustainable business model. If you want to do any significant update to a good product then you have to publish a new product and deprecate the old one, then set upgrade pricing from A to B. This is basically because there are no tools to really help publishers build more sustainable pipelines. In fact, this clunky upgrade system is supposed to be the solution, which is odd.

Amateur customers are also an issue. Most good assets will thrive regardless but amateur developers constantly ask stupid questions, cannot comprehend API's or documentation correctly, apply no due diligence to solve their problems before asking questions and burden the asset publisher with questions or problems in their project that are very often unrelated to the actual asset. This costs the publisher time, and scales with popularity. Eventually some publishers just get tired of this, and then the entitled generation of amateurs will vomit 1 star reviews due to their own ineptitude, further demotivating the publisher from keeping the asset alive.

The store also force-deprecated all assets using UnityScript/JavaScript. If you didn't update your code, your asset was deprecated.

DMCA's and other things also apply. There are a lot of reasons why something would be deprecated.

 

Yup. Also, support can eat quite a few resources. I do believe that they let you do paid updates now, though, so that should help ... but maybe I'm wrong about this?

So I probably misunderstood the system. That is not how updates should work ;-)

Oh yes, I've had my fair share of that. And then, I had customers that had a few questions and then told me to send an invoice for support. Of course, those were not amateurs ;-)

They did handle that one really well, though, with early warnings, and repeated warnings. I have had a few JavaScript/Boo examples in my package that I had to remove, so it was quite easy. And converting JavaScript to C# is also a fairly straightforward process (I believe there are even ways to do it without breaking any references).

Hm ... DMCAs should have a special warning, however. "DEPRECATED" does not tell me as a developer that I cannot use the package anymore - it only tells me that package won't receive any more updates. But if Unity received a DMCA for a package that they sold to me, I think they should let me as a developer know that this package received a DMCA, so I can remove it from any projects.

Otherwise, every developer using such a package runs the risk of also receiving a DMCA or worse.