Subscription based Assets

Hi,

I am a small time Unity user buying Assets from the Unity store --- and some of the products on the Assets store is amazing - but I feel some products should be "subscription based" so that the developers that develop these products can keep upgrading them - as some products are amazing but the developers do not support them as it is too much effort for a small payment once of.

Or maybe Unity can have an additional license where you pay a subscription and those proceeds go partly to "Approved" vetted developers who constantly Contribute to the Asset store?

Just an idea - and yes I do not want to pay more - but I also don't want to pay high price for an Asset and then it gets outdated and can't be used anymore.

Or maybe someone has a better idea?

The community is amazing and I feel some developers need more options to improve their income.

 

Some assets handle this themselves outside of the asset store.

Odin Inspector, for example. requires a enterprise license agreement with a yearly fee if your revenue is over a certain amount (100K I think). This however they manage themselves.

I agree being able to support assets is a good idea. Though for Unity to manage it is a bit much. I'd rather they do so on their own individual level, whether it be with enterprise agreements, donations, or something like Patreon.

 

Thank you - that would make sense.

 

F*** subscriptions. I want to own the S*** I pay for, not have to deal with yet another recurring cost on top of the more than a dozen others I deal with for development alone.

 

My personal view:

Subscriptions make sense for services. I.E: cloud storage or web hosting.
I can understand from a service provider's perspective, I'm using their resources for my own purposes, and it costs them money whenever I do so, therefore, they need a constant income flow so that they can continue providing the service.

Subscriptions don't make sense for products. I.E: a standalone offline application.

When I launch & interact with, say, Inkscape on my PC, that application is using my PC and only my PC's resources. I could launch 100 instances of this application, leave them running until the end of time, and it won't cost the publishers anything, so why would I pay an annual fee to use it?

Jetbrains Rider, for example.
I know everyone keeps saying how much of an amazing IDE it is. I don't doubt that it's a really amazing IDE.
But, it wants an annual subscription, so I frankly don't care. I have no problem with continuing to use Visual Studio Community Edition.
If Rider were a one-time payment for a perpetual license, then by all means, I'd gladly pay for it.

Same goes for the other typical names in software - Adobe & Office suites in particular.

 

Rider has a perpetual fallback license if you pay for a year of it, either cumulatively or all at once and always allows you to download the version from. That's what I did, in fact.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license-

 

I dislike subscriptions. Essentially subscription based project has its price set to "infinity",. Well, there are limits of human lifespan, but for example, if you use photoshop for 50 years, that'll be about $12500.

 

I have so many subscriptions already, I'm not looking to add more to that stack. Even more so for niche Unity assets that likely won't even apply to my next project.

Everything's subscription based these days to the point I'm actively looking for non-sub alternatives. Sadly, there aren't any for Photoshop's extensive scripting support. And Unity's own PSD importer is starting to become pretty powerful. I didn't think of just sticking with Rider's fallback license. That's an option to consider, but I'd lose both the updates and the stacked discount.

 

You lose major version updates even with most purchased licenses. The only two major ones that come to mind that do support it are Modo and Zbrush, and Modo only provides a year's worth of updates. This was actually one of the big "selling points" used to transition most everything to sub licenses.

 

With persistent license the software you bought is yours forever, while something like adobe will stop working when you stop paying. While mixed schemes exist, I do not beleive they're the norm.

Additionally, with all the subscription based services, many developers try to push everything they do as Saas whether it makes sense or not and tie it to some pointless profile in attempt to lock people in or harvest targeting data. Which is another problem.

I actually think that previous scenario where you would buy major and upgrade at discount was decent. Because if you never needed an upgrade, you could use the old stuff.

Speaking of updates, ideally I'd want a tool to be finished at the time of purchase with no further updates being ever necessary.

 

I did not deny any of this. It is, in fact, the point of my post. Additionally, if you owned Adobe Suite CS2, you had to pay for a CS3 upgrade. The same applied to Unity licenses. This was the norm in most professional level software for literally decades. You would pay for a major version and the updates you'd get for that major version would be, generally speaking, bugfix releases.

 

I mean, the opposite to subscription services is as it was in the days before them: huge one off payments.

At one point - pre 2010 - if an Australian wanted to buy a copy of Autodesk Maya, it was fair dinkum cheaper to fly to the US, pick up a copy, and fly back.

Obviously smaller, periodical payments are a lot easier to digest, even if when you do the maths they stack up over time.

Otherwise one off payments of a smaller size probably don't make for the most sustainable business model (this is assuming that companies are operating in good faith about how much income they need to rouse up).

I think flexibility is the key, honestly. I would be much happier with my Adobe subscription if I could just subscribe for the programs I want. However I can't just sub to Photoshop, Illustrator and Premier. I'm more or less forced to sub to the entire Adobe catalogue (which doesn't include Substance designer, grr).

Give us the choice and let us pick the one that works best for us.

 

Wow. This escaped my notice. Apparently it happened back in 2020.

https://odininspector.com/blog/enterprise-announcement
https://odininspector.com/pricing

 

Yeah there are some hilarious reviews on the asset store from folks who were livid over this.

I think it's personally reasonable for such an amazing asset, especially one receiving regular support and has a good road map. It doesn't affect your regular solo user like my of course (not unless I release a game that takes off).

Of course people in Enterprise situations may have different feelings.

 

It's understandable too. Asset development is not sustainable in the long term with one time purchases.

 

Recurring payments of some sort are absolutely necessary for a product that is evolving and being updated. I also understand that if someone wants to buy a fixed version outright, they shouldn't have to continue to pay a subscription.

The paid upgrade system is the natural result of the lack of variety of options, and it's not a particularly bad system, as it caters to both types of customers. It still has some issues though. First it comes so infrequently that it's easy for customers who want updates to get blindsided by it. Second, it asks for a relatively high lump sum of money that a customer might not have lying around when they need it. And third, it suffers from appearing like a sneaky way to make more money by 're-releasing' something that already exists. That means you really have to do community management, and even so, a lot of customers won't be in the community for whatever reason, and will probably be unpleasantly surprised.

Personally I would go for a subscription model with the option to buy fixed versions, but this requires a lot of work by Unity to create and maintain that sort of system. In the meantime, all developers who support their products long term, in my opinion, should do paid upgrades rather than chasing the diminishing returns of stuffing new features into a product and hoping for an compensating increase in the user base - something that can actually have the opposite effect, and sometimes results in a product being a porridge of systems only vaguely related to its stated purpose.

 

Except they... did... do this.

There was, legitimately, a period of time where subscription licenses and major version purchase licenses overlapped. It was a whole thing and they phased it out.

 

Why not own current year and pay yearly perpetual upgrade like substance used to do?
It makes more sense for asset store, given you will only get more income if you actually update & upgrade your asset next year. This also improves year to year compatibility with Unity.

 

Yeah I was aware that something had been tried. Far as I know unity see subscriptions now as being too unpopular. I still think it should be an option for asset devs.

Still it means the problem remains - you have updates, customer support etc that is a complete grey area for developers in terms of being compensated, and its very difficult to design a one or two yearly major upgrade that both looks like an attractive offer in its own right, and makes up for whatever the dev did in the previous years that didn't get paid for.

 

Thanks - that would also make sense - leaving you with owning the product but can still upgrade when needed...

 

If You a hobbyist like me, stacking sub is nightmare.

For enterprise if u have decent budget on a game, it shouldnt be a big problem ofc unless u overuse asset store

 

You're forgetting that there's a wide range of professional indie developers between those two points and a lot of them are gonna get hit hard by sub stacking.

 

Or, how about asset developers charge an appropriate amount up front?

A part of why I'm not a huge fan of the Asset Store for code-oriented assets (or anything with ongoing support needs) is that prices are encouraged to be unreasonably low. Often I look at the price of an asset and think "jeez, if they give me one hour of support with this thing ever then they're losing money on that sale". And sure, if they were operating at the scale of EA or Microsoft or whatever then that'd be fine, because the costs are amortised over millions of sales, and only a small percentage ever need dedicated support. But that's not the situation for Asset Store sellers.

Ongoing fees for ongoing support does make sense and plenty of stuff is indeed sold that way. But if people are in fact willing to pay more to get better support then why not encourage vendors to make things simpler for everyone and just put that in the price from the start?

I think the issue is that most of the Asset Store audience is not willing to pay more. So vendors who want to maintain higher pricing do so elsewhere, even if they also have some lower priced stuff on the Asset Store.

 

I think the problem is that it's very hard to make a decision on a product that is sold let's say in the hundreds of dollars compared to one sold in the tens. $20-$50 isn't a big deal for a lot of people, but almost anyone is going to be hesitant about $200 - $500.

The other thing is, high prices run counter to the way that software is sold generally these days. Most stuff is subscription based - you can get Office, Substance, many 3D modelling and sculpting tools etc either for a small monthly fee or even for free. Even the game engines themselves are free. This means you can essentially try everything before you buy - even software on a subscription often has a free trial period as well. And these are all highly reputable, polished, professional tools with millions or billions of dollars behind them.

Now put an asset from the store, something made by a fellow indie dev without a reputation that precedes them, in front of someone and ask them to cough up $200 or more before even trying it, without having an option for refund once they use it and no trial period? Not going to go down well.

Even at current rates, I get emails from people asking for a copy to try out before they buy. They could be scammers, but more likely they are people who don't really know if the asset is going to work for them, can't justify spending that money, and thought they might as well see what their options are.

OK maybe one might say these people are not 'real customers' but that's like saying most indies are not 'real developers'. The community of people who buy assets is what it is, a lot of people are just having fun bashing stuff together and don't have a lot of money.

It's not an easy problem to solve, I think the market could be easily killed either by highballing (customers quit) or lowballing (devs quit). From what I can see, the pricing solution needs to:

- Enable customers to dive into an asset without too much upfront cost

- Encourage procuring assets within the 'just playing around' framework that many indies have

- Enable customers who want every improvement and update to easily set this up (and pay accordingly) with a minimum of fuss and big decisions (and nudge everyone toward this option)

- Enable loyal customers who want to continually support a dev to choose a payment option that does that (there are people who love my products and community so much they want to send me money on Patreon, but I'd rather they paid me through the store for the product itself).

- Make it easy for devs to justify improving and adding features to their product without having to wait until 'next year's re-release' to get compensated.

- Preferably provide on-store options for different customer support levels - basic being free of course, going up to things like 'I need something added or modified for my particular game'. I believe @JasonBooth has been advocating this. It would make it obvious to customers what the basic customer support entails and what it doesn't, before they even buy.

What I would like to be able to try is something like:

1. A subscription plan OR the option to buy the current major version of the asset outright, with bugfixing support.
2. Release a major version every year or so.

I would also look into something like Allegorithmic's old subscribe-to-own option, where you own either the product or a major release after the subscription has paid the outright price. That way perhaps the price of the product could be higher without discouraging people from trying it out.

All in all I'm not too unhappy with the current system of paid upgrades, although it has probably not been fully normalized yet. But it is an incomplete, hackey approach that relies on smoothing things over with good community management and hoping you don't get too many nasty reviews, since, because it isn't reflected on the store interface, it easily comes across to people who aren't aware of it as if the dev is trying to game the asset store and that it isn't even something Unity support themselves (they do). That's why I believe more payment options need to be there so that devs can try to build something that works for them - not every product can or should be sold the same way.

 

Check out Simul, developers of trueSky. I think they've managed to basically address everything you've said. 30 day free trial, $100 indie license (which can be paid in installments), and a "Pro" version if you have more than $100k or are targeting consoles.

Of course, they're able to do that because of their reputation. Studios with big budget multi-platform releases do use their stuff, so that's where they make their bread and butter, and that's what enables them to have a cheap indie version (though even that still costs more than most stuff on the Asset Store) and a freebie trial.

And for the hobby crowd (of whom I'm one) that's perfectly relevant. I occasionally buy stuff to mess with because it looks cool and, indeed, it's cheap. From that perspective for a certain audience, groovy.

For the professional crowd (of whom I'm also one) I don't think it's relevant at all. When I'm in professional mode the decision I'm making is "buy license(s) for $X vs. spend dev time worth $Y". Usually, X is a heck of a lot less than Y, and if the provider is established and reputable there's a good chance they'll have done a better job than a small crew can afford to put together in-house.

 

They aren't on the asset store, it's all run through their own website. Maybe they can do this because of their reputation or because Unity isn't their main customer base, but my understanding is that devs who have tried to move off the store have generally found it doesn't work at all.

Based on the amount of revenue I make during sales compared to normal, my estimate is that the large majority of customers fall into the hobby crowd, at least in terms of their purchasing decisions.

The asset store cannot, in my opinion, be run as if it is primarily for enterprise customers. It just isn't in its nature. If you got rid of the hobby crowd I'm not sure exactly what you would have left.

 

It would be stupid to get rid of the hobby crowd and I don't think anyone is suggesting that. The problem is that right now the asset store is a bad place for enterprise business, not that it's a good place for the hobby crowd. Enterprise customers:

- Need a way to know what the full license costs so we can get properly compensated
- Need to know the asset is supported and not going to fail on them

Those two are inherently linked. Assets get dropped because they don't generate enough revenue to be worth the maintenance cost (and PITA of supporting the mob of hobby devs), and they don't generate enough revenue to support the maintenance costs because the store is structured as a low cost content shoveling system instead of having channels for proper enterprise software. There are many, many ways to solve this issue, but as far as I can tell the UAS seems more interested in getting a few more shovels into the content shoveling process than they do addressing these issues.