The asset store has a problem with bad assets and lack of demos.

I've had several bad experiences with purchasing relatively expensive assets that turn out to be very buggy, unwieldy, poorly programmed (variable names like c, br, tm all over the place making modifications impossible to make), or just not work on our target platform. Reviews doesn't say much as most users doesn't take a look at the code, or use all features of an asset.

I'm not rich and need to spend my money on things that work. Now I'm in a chicken-and-egg scenario with several rather expensive assets I want to get, all lacking demos. I need to test the assets before I purchase them, but I'm expected to purchase assets so that I can test them. Often, I'll message the authors, asking them to simply send me the asset so that I can evaluate if it's what I need (in which case I promise to make a purchase), but the authors doesn't seem willing to do this (I haven't got any responses).

How can this be solved? Maybe demos should be mandatory on the asset store? Maybe Unity need some kind of SVN'ish test environment?

 

I never had this problem I spent time checking if the assets have a forum, read the review, then you know if it will work for you. when an asset have problems its quickly reported on their forum, if they do not have avoid the asset, it mean most of the time the dev is not fully available for support

 

My experience doesn't confirm this. Reviewers rarely evaluate the code itself, even some of the most popular assets on the store are spaghetti monsters of horrible variable naming on the inside (which is problematic when changes are needed). Reviewers doesn't test the asset on all platforms, especially consoles (I don't expect everything to work on consoles, but I need to have the asset to find out how much effort is needed to make it work, which is why a demo would help so much). Reviewers usually don't test every feature, make stress tests, or check how much garbage is being generated. I'm suspecting people write reviews very early, before they start to run into problems. All bad assets I've used have had very good reviews, and the problems has not been reported on the forums.

 

Any store that has minimal policing of content is going to suffer this problem. You've learned that most users don't exhaustively test or look at the code of assets, so don't trust their reviews. The only thing you can trust is a demo. Why not just ignore assets that don't offer one? You are doing your due diligence by messaging authors and asking for a trial. If they don't want your money, that is fine.

I'd rather force asset creators to make demos with our wallets than create some store policy that requires them. Too much policy and we risk shunning developers that Unity is designed to attract.

 

Yeah, maybe. Problem is, some of the assets would be incredibly useful to me if they turn out to be very nicely programmed. It's hard to ignore an asset I really want when no similar asset offers a demo.

This is already making me spend way less money on assets in total just out of fear that they are bad, and maybe other users are in the same position. This must be bad for both sides, so I think it should be looked into. If not requiring demos, maybe there is some other ways to fix this?

 

I've found that the quality of assets vary wildly on the asset store. I've paid $5 for code that was absolutely beautiful, and I've paid hundreds for code / software I wouldn't expect from a 1st year student. I'm still way up on cost / time ratio even with the frankly rare "dud" asset (so far really just 1 for me out of nearly 100 purchases). The vast majority of authors have gone way above and beyond for the pittance I'd paid for their work (although I've only contacted 2).

Expecting flawless code at the price points offered in the asset store is pretty absurd, and wanting it fully tested across unitys extensive platform bases equally so. I'm almost certain you'd know the cost of a professional code review, and full set of exhaustive testing (and we're talking well over $10k+ for anything non trivial). It certainly is true there's some "big name" assets I would have hoped for more quality from but even those are perfectly usable.

There isn't really an elegant solution to this, it might be nice if Unity offered a "certified" program, or something but for it to be worth while the costs would be huge, and probably do the "market" more harm than good. Would I pay say $150 for an asset that would be $50 pre-certification? Actually yes, although I'd guess I'm in a minority - and the author would have made a LOT more profit at the smaller price. The market is also far too small (albeit growing massively) to just be able to soak up such costs without passing it on.

I'd personally like a more clear platform matrix on the assets (e.g. a list of platforms with ticks next to them if it has been runs/is tested on it). Mainly because at the moment you need to be fairly eagle eyed to spot assets with DLL's, which instantly remove the web player platform etc. That way the smaller subset of console developers can spot when the asset has actually been tested on such platforms.

I guess in a perfect world the abstracted interfaces supplied by Unity would actually completely isolate platform specifics, but alas we won't be there for a good few more major versions.

 

I suggest posting on here and requesting feedback on specific assets in regards to your target platform. Demos are too easy for people to rip off, and asking for evaluation versions will likely not get you far, as you've seen. If an asset does not work, you can get a refund if you request within 7 days.

 

I couldn't afford to get 100 assets here, just getting one of the more expensive assets is a big deal to me. However, I didn't suggest a solution that involves that every asset is flawless and tested on every platform, I'm fully aware how ridiculous that would be. What I'm mainly requesting is a way that I can test and find out myself before I make the purchase. However, maybe it's just practically impossible

 

I have never been satisfied with any non model asset off the asset store. Even models you have to be careful because they are portrayed in a way that if they look x good into the screenshots they will look x/2 good in Unity (look for hazy screenshots with loads of image effects).

With non models, a big warning is when the author says "easy" in their presentation, thats actually a secret code word that means - incredibly obtuse, obscure and difficult to use.

Either never ever bother using an asset unless it has a demo or just spend what you can afford to lose without caring.

 

That's wrong. Managed dlls work perfectly fine in the web player.

 

They must be plugins submitted a long while ago if they have no examples? My first plugin Master Audio was rejected the first time I submitted it for not having a good enough example scene. I still had one though...So what I am saying is: in most cases demos ARE required.

Also, I try to provide fully functional (but crippled in some way) free versions of our plugins. I wish more people would do this.

SmellyDogs, I can't say nearly the same. I've bought over a dozen awesome non-model assets that are indispensible to us. Sure there were a few that had terrible support and we no longer use. Which ones did you buy?

 

I don't really want to say specifically which assets for fear of starting arguements but lets just say I've brought for example:
Shader packs that crash and have continual glitches.
Road generation tools that simply don't do what they promise.
GUI tools that are incredibly difficult to work with and don't work nearly as well as promised.
Weather effects packs that stop working after updates.
I could go on here.

Often the attitude of the developer is a snarky response like "what do you expect for only $50?".

In a sense that is true a lot of APIs cost 1000's but even so I've brought some great programming tools for $50 or even freeware from Github that worked so well, the expectation is there that assets are going to be as good as that, but they are not.

To me its not worth the hassle anymore so I write my own, and I know I'd never sell my work as assets because theres a big big difference to something working on my machine, in my head making sense to me contrast to how it makes sense to someone else, getting it to work in their environment, workflow, keeping the updates etc. just to sell at asset at $50? I kinda see why asset devs are snarky.

 

Fair enough. Our two plugins we originally made because they didn't exist (what we wanted to do) and later adapted them to be more generic. If the things you made are "holes" that currently exist in the Asset Store, I would urge you to pick the best one and release it as a plugin.

$50 is not worth it, but when you get hundreds of sales it may well be. Support can be an issue sometimes, but if you are having to offer a lot of support that generally means you have tons of users, which also means you've made some money off it.

Still (devs are snarky comment) to some degree you've been buying the wrong plugins. I can site some plugin developers who have killer support. Neatplug, Unikron, ArenMook and hopefully myself for starters.

 

I'd like to think most developers (myself included) want to help people enjoy and gain value out of what we produce. I'd like to see some better CRM tooling provided from the asset store to engage my customers and get feedback and deliver more fluid support.

Right now, I check every avenue I can think of a few times a day for any communication. Forums, PMs, emails, asset review posts (another huge issue.... not enough sales channel pushing to do this from Unity). There is no customer portal for someone to log in and access support channels.

Forums are not CRM tools, yet they are being used as one. And to boot, its being coupled as a marketing channel as well. If I log into the Asset Store as a customer, I should have an account profile that I can goto.... a unified control panel that then allows me to delve into each product I own and each product should be issued a support and issue repository (that can be exported to real tracking systems as well like JIRA, TFS, FogBugz etc).

Part of consumer confidence is allowing the potential customers visibility into this support. I wish potential customers could see how much effort goes into products to give expected levels of polish and usability... even for a single person's request. If I could see that the developer was even willing to add in a single feature to make someone happy and I was already on the fence, I'd feel more comfortable purchasing. As opposed to seeing that there's only been two releases and nothing's been improved and there are lots of open issues against it.

 

Sorry Nifflas, I didn't mean to be as harsh as that sentence seems in isolation. Demo's, and light version are excellent ideas - and it is very much worth supporting those that provide them. Finger in the wind estimate would be the market already rewards such activities. I've read posts about how easy it is for people to steal unity assets from things like demo's/webplayers etc. which I believe makes a few authors wary. If/when I publish an asset I'm certainly not going to let that aspect cause actual customers to suffer.

Dantas, I'm fairly sure pulling a sentence out of the middle of a paragraph and pulling it apart in a removed context seldom helps. My point on DLL's is that if it's not stated if a plug-in is web player compatible then it's a rather solid warning sign (and I have no idea how to tell from an asset store listing if a DLL is fully managed or not). In most cases unless it's something I really want I exclude it anyway since I like reading code / being able to fix stuff. Not that DLL's implicitly mean full source isn't there (before I'm called on that...).

Tstpierre, you know what. That's a rock solid idea. Many times you see support requests for asset store stuff in the most bizarre places (my favourite is youtube comments). Trying to keep up with all those different points must be a complete mess. Even something simple like an RSS feed for asset comments would make life a long easier I'd guess.

 

Or my favorite place: seeing people who have never requested any support from our company at all, but go post a bad text review on the Asset Store instead with mostly incorrect points. I cannot understand that mentality, especially as a cursory read of the other comments will indicate we are extremely responsive and helpful on support issues. Making it worse, responding to Asset Store review comments does not notify the original reviewer, so they may never get the help they need if they don't go back and read our response. It makes me sad.

 

I find it's generally not feasible to offer demo versions, but I do have a 30-day guarantee if you buy assets from my site (I'd do it for the asset store as well, but I don't have any control over that). So far I've had one person request a refund, which makes it a < .01% return rate. I make enough from them that I don't respond to support requests with snarky comments. I know of people who've added their own functions, so I expect the code isn't too hard to work with. I put a lot of effort into not having unnecessary allocations and so on, and I actually use all of my assets, so if I find anything difficult about them I say "Well, that's annoying" and fix it, aside from taking user feedback into account.

--Eric

 

Your sentence in the middle of the paragraph clearly stated:

You can write that with or without context, it's wrong. I certainly understand now how you meant it. But there are many people who think that dlls don't work in the web player at all. That's why I wrote that. It was not my intention to offend you.

 

100% incorrect in my experience. I couldn't get a refund 15 minutes after a purchase.

 

I've gotten a couple refunds myself. 15 minutes doesn't seem like a reasonable amount of time to allow the plugin author to help you out. Just sayin'

 

I've gotten support requests sent to my personal Facebook, YouTube comments, and all sorts of random places. Someone even got a hold of my cell phone number once (still not sure how that happened)...

 

You know, most of my problems with the Asset store have actually come from my dealings with the Asset Store itself rather than publishers. Just a few days ago I had issues where they overcharged me due to problems with their checkout system and what do they tell me? Take it up with the publisher, who had nothing to do with this error, and ask them for a refund.

Fairly ridiculous if you ask me. Same thing goes for all the shady license changes they make constantly, as well as their pulling off assets whenever they feel like it without any warning to customers.

And they're getting 30% of your money, for this "support"?

I'd say the best thing about the asset store are most publishers. There are a few bad ones there but thankfully I've been able to avoid them.

Honestly to all publishers out there, I'd recommend making your asset available outside of the Asset Store as well and maybe incentivize with a small price cut (20% or maybe even less than that, whatever) that way you get more profits for your asset and I on my end, get to know that my money isn't supporting a storefront that's not doing their job well atm.

Of course Unity please feel free to prove me wrong by improving your services. Right now, the only reason I ever buy assets through it is if they're massively discounted, and even then if the asset creator has them for the same price on their site, I usually gladly buy through them instead.

 

Unfortunately this is against the Asset Store release policy. So if you sell your asset for cheaper elsewhere, they will most likely pull your asset from the Unity store. I somewhat understand this... to a point... but it takes price control away from the author when they also want to have their product up on the Asset Store (and let's face it, most will sell waaay more on the Asset Store than off their own website...)

 

Not sure how accurate that is, can you link to that clause?

The Asset Store has always stated it was a non-exclusive store which is opposite of pulling product for multiple sales channels.

@Rico - Last few weeks I have really come to agree with your thoughts. I am a professional engineer and have been for many many years. I've worked at many large software companies. I know all about support and maintenance and brownfield and bugs and firefights and insert other buzzwords here. It is very clear that they are undergoing some serious growing pains in the Asset Store department.

And at the Asset Store, I'm available for consulting

 

The thing that challenges me is that if I am interested in an asset but need more information...trying to get hold of the dev can be hell. One had a very bad WIX site with no email address on it. Other just did not respond.
If the sellers want respect and sales they need to be transparent versus stealth.
I have bought many assets but only buy now from devs that can clearly communicate and understand the value of long term customers.
Some of these sellers communicate VERY well, and understand the value of a good seller to buyer relationship.
Megafiers
UnityFS
Playmaker
exploder
AxisGameFactory

 

Agreed. Many assets I've bought I had to change a lot of things to make it work and that means sellers most of the time are RUSHING to sell things instead of providing us a good experience.
Whenever someone email me I try my best to help with my stuff, but when a seller ignores my requests I find myself so **** angry that I end up never buying anything from that one again, no matter how much I may need the asset.
And my worst experience to date, by far was with NGUI's dev. He was so arrogant when I asked for support that the situation almost made me sick for buying that S***. But that was way back on early days of NGUI though, dunno how things are now with them.

 

It's under Item 6 on their submission guidelines page...
http://unity3d.com/asset-store/sell-assets/submission-guidelines

"Items on the Asset Store may not be sold for a lower price on other similar services. Attempting to grossly undercut pricing of similar products is actively discouraged."

This has nothing to do with granting them a non-exclusive license to sell your product. This is their qualification for accepting your license on their store.

 

Thanks for the link. 'Grossly' undercut is a vague word for a legal statement. So I'd assume as long as you're not above the 30% cut as a discount rate, it wouldn't hit the radar. But again, its vague. What is defined as 'grossly undercut'? 10% 20% 60%?

 

The key words are "other similar services", which is somewhat vague. I wouldn't say that selling your own assets on your own site is very similar at all to the Unity asset store. It sounds to me like it would have to be another general Unity asset store that sells a collection of assets from different vendors. (Are there any?) The "grossly undercut pricing" part is a different matter, since it's referring to competing items in the Unity asset store, not other sites. So if Joe Schmoe has "Joe Schmoe's GUI System" for $100 and you make a similar product for $25, that would be discouraged.

--Eric

 

I agree the wording is a bit vague and I assume that is to the Asset Store's benefit. I wonder if we can get clarification on this..

 

I have to agree with the OP. What I do now is check if a "lite" demo version is available and check for a forum entry. If not, I avoid it like the plague.

I've been burnt now 3 times with bad assets that did not perform as intended or were riddled with bugs that I could not figure out myself in less than an hour, I have since then left reviews indicating as such.

The point of the asset store was to cut production time by utilizing economies of scale. instead I have bad assets near useless, time wasted, and approx $300 less dollars in my pocket. Lesson learned.

I won't even get into the beef with the asset store itself and how I recently was charged 28 times on one item, which caused my credit company to put a block on my card.

 

yeah the quality does vary greatly. some assets are very poor and should be pulled from the store. unity3d should do a bit more for their 30% than all sales are final. authors should be held to some minimal standards and assets should be reviewed by unity to make sure they adhere to those minimal standards. then all sales are final is not a problem. for i would suggest that if you buy a bad asset at minimum create a review detailing the problems to warn others. also, file a complaint about the author and asset with unity that way at least they are aware.

the current reviews are not enough cause many are outdated and are very superficial.

perhaps it would be good to create/maintain a bad assets thread... or better a best of category thread. so for example if someone is looking for a sound manager they can go there and find like the top 3-5 listed. that way they know if they pick up one of those up they would at least meet some minimal standards/criteria. they will know that they would be getting at least something that will work out of the box and that will be documented and supported. i think criteria like working out of the box, including examples, documented, that is supported, not that is not abandoned, and whether it includes full source code or not, etc. reasonable stuff that buyers would be looking for an asset before purchasing. alternatively asset that fail some criteria could be noted so people could stay away form them if that is something that is important to them.

 

I'm a bit of a lurker here but I agree with the comments somewhat. If you look at anything like the iOS store, Android store or Steam and Greenlight any case where you have too much user content to grade and publish then your going to have lots of quality issues. You can have great content at a fair price and junk for an overblown price. I think there is already a rating system that helps filter out some junk but it would be nice to be able to flag up potential issues with content.

I am surprised somewhat that there are still many holes in the asset store, still room for developers to make lots of good quality content and stater packs.

 

the biggest holes i find in asset store is out dated reviews and that unity is more than happy to release an asset that does not even import and run...

unity could resolve this by having like rating for this release and rating for all releases like cnet.com

and unity should at least import the asset before releasing it.

let alone set some minimal standards for authors.

plus i notice some authors dont even bother with release notes or even changing the release number. let alone doing any documentation at all...

so there should be some minimal standards with some real teeth behind them.

 

As a publisher I am a little bit surprised about some of your points.
Unity checks every asset before they release it. Indeed they can be pretty nit-picky, which is very good!

It is hard to believe that there are assets that can't be imported or run. I don't say that there are no such packages. My experience as a publisher is that they are very strict in general. Of course, if you try to open something that was created for Unity 4 and you try to use it in Unity 3 it is very likely that it won't work. Or if a coding package was created for an early Unity 3 version and there were no updates since a long time and you find no information that is is compatible with Unity 4, you should be skeptic before buying it and ask the publisher.

You don't have that issue for the best sellers. Most other packages don't get many reviews, that's why I am not sure if it would help.

They do more than that, at least for editor extensions.

It happened just recently to me that I accidentally deleted the release notes before I submitted an update of one of my packages. It was rejected because of it. Maybe if I had submitted it at another day, it would have slipped through.
With the newer versions of the Asset Store Tool, it is not possible to submit an update without changing the version number.

There are standards. You find them here:
http://unity3d.com/asset-store/sell-assets/submission-guidelines

 

ah dont take it wrong, im not here to bash unity store. i buy from it all the time and i would not be doing so if it was not a good deal. still i do have like a spreadsheet of several thousand assets, and i keep buying more and adding to the list... so i have lots of assets. not just from unity store. and they are from 5/5 i cant believe how amazing to i cant believe that its legal for them to sell me this.

so yes i can name more than one where they did no such thing... ive seen those so called standards surely they were not enforced on those assets i have in mind...

also guidelines are as good as who is enforcing/following them...

i guess some authors/assets get/got a pass... or perhaps its your luck/karma that they look at yours so well

i can tell you that there are indeed assets that the instant you import them they begin to throw exceptions and refuse to run at all. and yes they are at the asset store this very instant and yes they were updated not that long ago and yes they are broken and yes 0 testing by author 0 checking by unity. you can buy one today if you like. but remember all sales are final i'm told. worse there are assets where all you get is some dll and some broken code and that dont include any documentation at all so have fun using them. there are also many abandoned / unsupported assets where if you just looked at the last release date and even tried clicking on the authors website you very easily see that they are gone and that the only thing that remains is some paypal account to collect the money... also there are assets that are poorly documented and/or documentation is outdated and does not match the release. there are assets where you see lots of nice screenshots, lots of nice videos, lots of nice webplayer demos, but where you dont get any of it and what you do get is something else. also there are more than one authors that update their assets but do no include any release notes or even bother to increment the release number, so i guess they didnt use the latest release of the asset tool. so surely unity asleep on the switch on some of those...

but lets not bash unity, since unity is in it for just 30% and they do the store, forums, game engine, documentation, tutorials, support, and a very long list of other things. at the end of the day the authors are responsible regardless of any guidelines. as i pointed out the authors that i have seen in this thread are not the problem, i know their work for the most part, and see them around all the time. so its like taking it to heart when there is no need to . but their are authors who know what they are selling. they certainly collecting the money and doing little for it. they are that ones that should at least do a good job to make sure their assets work, continue to work, perform appropriate testing, reply to customer questions/issues in timely amount of time, include appropriate documentation/examples that would be needed. ect... ect... ect...

if you like i could send you a list of my favorites examples for you to spend your money on in disbelief and so you dont have to be so surprised

so while we can easily verify by a long list of posts from authors over a long amount of time in the countless threads in this here forum that the asset store can be very picky at times, it can also be easily shown and proven that it is less than picky at some other times...

 

Most of the assets I've gotten from the asset store have been high quality and well documented, but I have gotten a few with code that would be ripe for terrible code blogs. Unfortunately unlike art assets you really can't tell what kind of code you're getting until you dive in. What I did find disconcerting is the only negative review I've bothered to write was removed somehow by the asset creator. No wonder there are so many 5 star reviews.

There are some amazing assets with great code, docs, and support like 2D platformer controller and Ultimate FPS and I hope Unity polices their store well enough that they don't end up getting drowned out by half baked crap.

 

i hope they are not deleting negative comments, that would be very troubling indeed. let's hope that unity keeps in mind who is paying for the party...

anyways, yes assets where basically the code is the asset is the hardest to shop for. one way ive found is not just reading the reviews but by coming here and looking up the asset and reading every single post in the assets thread, seeing that the author is immediately responding to problems, not days, weeks, months, never. seeing the sort of issues being posted about. if mean if you see post after post where the author never response, takes months to replay or where you see post after post saying this asset is abandoned and that the author does not reply, well that is not a good sign. but even with that the code could be very bad, unmaintainable, ect. so that is why the reviews are so important and why it is important to write a review and to be detail and accurate. sadly lots of people have problem writing negative reviews, or just write i just got the asset, i think its amazing 5/5 cause otherwise i would not have bought it but ive yet to even load it.. i mean would you buy an asset you knew sucked and was total waste of your money, so the minute yo bought it is cause most likely you thought it was the best in that category that you were shopping for. so if you dont look at it i dont see why even bother writing a review. read the reviews you see a lot of them like this... "ive not had a chance to look at it yet, but im giving it a 5/5 cause everybody else gave it a 5/5 so it must be amazing..." another thing is have your friends buy a copy and create fake reviews sites like amazon have had problems with this kind of stuff.. im not sure how they would police it... i guess a bunch of reviews coming from same ip address. who knows not my problem, i guess that is why they are in business to figure out these things...

another issue with these assets is if they dont give you the source code at all, no documentation to speak of, only a dll and some outdated, incomplete, half baked demo scene to sort of show you with little more than spaghetti code ans single valve variable names you know f = 1.4 instead of float radius = 1.4f and 60,000 lines of embedded if statements. anyways what makes these little more than ticking time-bombs is that the author could easily vanish, provide little to no support and with smallest of unity change break and your stuck with a dll and no way to fix it, a complete waste of money. then again when you do get source code oceans of it, galaxy full of it and its f = 1.4 to the gb, that is not fun at all as well, complete waste of money since its unmaintainable and could be described as self obfuscating, usually better to compile it and then run the dll through disassembler since that will at least give you better code to read

 

It's not possible for asset creators to remove reviews, although it briefly was possible due to a bug a while ago. It's long since fixed, but if you happened to submit a review during that time, then I'd recommend submitting the review again.

--Eric

 

@im, I understand to you are not pointlessly ranting! My intention was to simply bring a different view into this discussion. They are aware of many weaknesses and my impression is that they are constantly improving it. Nevertheless, I am aware that many things should be improved.

I don't think they remove bad reviews, except if the are too extreme. Some weeks ago I reported a bug that I may click the delete button for any review on my products. Don't know if it actually worked, because I didn't try it. Maybe some reviews were deleted like that.

Anyway, in my opinion there should be a way to get rid at least of some reviews. When you have a paid asset, the people who buy it want it to work and take the time to understand it. That's unfortunately not the case for free assets where I often have the impression, that some people spend more time to write the two sentences for the review than actually trying to figure out how to use the asset. Especially if the publishers tries to help them in the review section, but they actually don't care as they most likely didn't really try it out. I mean, that's the purpose of a review section, isn't it. Sure that's a special case, but for publishers it's annoying and clearly not helpful for the reputation. And it is also not motivating to continue to spend time to improve freely available assets.

 

@dantus, i never said you said i said

i do have to disagree authors should have 0 ability to delete reveiws only unity should have that power and should use it very sparingly and after careful review by some trained employee and then only by some trained manager. so anyone can flag a review, like they can flag a post, but only a trained manager should be able to delete it cause it could end up blowing up in their faces both legally and image/brand wise. so the fallout could be bigger than the simple act of deleting a review, and once you give the power to delete reviews out and start with one review who can say how many reviews will end up being deleting and what uneven criteria. its a nest full of problems. one employee may not have a problem with a particular review, but another might. so there has to be some training and rules so its evenly sparingly carefully used, not willy nilly.

anyways dont be too concerned about any one review i have your free decal system and am considering your paid one and u dont see any searing, scolding, scathing scorching review from me

 

Free assets are a slightly different situation. Since no money has exchanged hands I could see different policies for those.

In the way you get a little preview of art assets when clicking on them in the asset store I think there should be a short preview of the first 20-30 lines of any cs or js file you click on. That would at least give you an idea of the author's coding style without giving away too much for free. Hell just seeing how they name their variables can indicate someone doesn't know what they are doing.

 

@im, I totally agree with you that not the publisher but a trained Unity manager should only be able to delete reviews, but even then it wouldn't be easy to handle. As you may know, I didn't get bad reviews for my Decal System, but for my Cloud System Free. As it is about a free asset, I could easily create X fake accounts and write X nice reviews for my own asset. But as it would feel wrong to me, I won't do it.

@Fuzzy_Slipplers, I fear that programmers would learn to polish the first 20-30 lines really well . You are right that it is not possible at all to judge the coding work in the Asset Store which is indeed a problem. You may exclude the worst coding packages by inspecting the first few lines of code, but even they could easily learn to write some nice variable declarations. It is also not possible with art packages to see if the details are good, but at least you have some pictures to judge the overall quality. That is certainly not the case for coding assets, but I don't see a practical solution for that.

 

I'm fine with being able to respond to the bad review. Use it as a way to demonstrate how good your support is and how much you care about your product.

 

@JohnnyA, your are right. It is still annoying as publisher to six reviews of which three have five stars and the rest is one star, because they obviously didn't take the time to get in touch with me. I improved a few aspects, but I don't even know if that would have helped. One of the reviewers even wrote that he had to reinstall Unity because of my package. I mean, come on!

@mokko6: Yes that is true. I am aware that it is not easy to find it out for Unity. It is one story for paid assets, it's another for free assets. The customers want an asset that is working when they paid for it. But when it's free, they often just download it and actually don't really care to take the time to try it out, but some still write a review. As it is about a free asset, I could easily write some terrific reviews for myself. I could argue, if they don't give a S***, I won't either. There should be a way to product publishers of free assets from unqualified and unfair reviews.

I would like to make this point clear: I don't have a productive solution for that because I understand that this would be really hard to achieve!

PS Sorry for hijacking the thread!

 

Sure that would mostly resolve the issue, but I think it is not practical. Unity would probably need a full time reviewer and there would still be discussions. Further the support for the assets would need to be made on a Unity server, such that they could keep track of what is going on. But several publisher have support on their sites. It would complicate many things as well.

In my opinion, the way it works for paid assets is good enough. But a few selective improvements for the review of free assets would be welcome. It needs to be simple and manageable for Unity.

 

Hardly,

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/194783-Buyers-Beware-All-Sales-Are-Final

 

The author cannot remove a bad review. The only avenue for that is for them to flag a review as abuse under one of the 5 categories that qualify and wait for a response from the Asset Store. We did that for one review on Master Audio, which was abuse because it was blaming "not knowing how to use prefabs" on our plugin and gave us a low rating because of it. It did get successfully removed from the text review section, however the star rating still averages into the average rating unfortunately. I'm not sure if the Asset Store folks are aware of that or not.

I must say though, that people that go ahead and post a bad review on the Asset Store without having tried to contact the author at all - there is just no excuse for that. That's a terrible place to ask for technical assistance or complain, because the author of the plugin gets no notification when a review is left. Worse than that is the fact that if the plugin author replies and offers assistance, the review author may never know there was a reply.

 

@jerotas

happy thanksgiving/holidays

sounds like they need to add notifications to review section

 

It would be nice, but that's really not the place to ask questions. Happy turkey day.