Unity Asset Store (Search for Assets) Sucks, Needs Improvement.

Its kind of hard to find assets the way the store is set up.

For instance when you select a category like for example 3d models-Characters it shows on the top of the page sort by Name, Popularity, Rating, Release date, which is awesome but if you type in search for a specific thing like "grass textures", this VERY useful sorting (Name, Popularity, Rating, Release date) is not there anymore because you used a keyword to search, and makes it really hard to find (Name, Popularity, Rating, Release date) "Grass Textures" or whatever you are searching for so you end up typing something in get no sorting and have to look through a 100 pages of assets.

Also when you search a keyword it literally finds assets on that keyword but not by category. I could be looking for say, 3d models of a human character male and end up with search results that include human character male voice sounds, or human character RPG starter kit, when I was only looking for 3d models to buy not other things plus most that are shown are low quality assets because the lack of sorting when you search.

I really wish unity would work on their asset store search, its very hard to find what I want a lot of times. They are literally losing sales because I can't find things I need without looking through a billion pages.

 

Totally agree. It's very difficult and frustrating to find things to buy, and I want things to buy!

I've even had times where I've searched for something that I knew was in the store and it just simply did not come up in the results. I had to find it by going through categories. If I'm not mistaken, search only shows the first 100 results and culls the rest. Not very good.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I'll pass this over to the AS dev team.

 

Yeah it would be nice if it was easier to work with.

But I've dealt with it and found ways to find what I needed.

 

It could be much more intuitive. I was able to find what I needed, but it wasn't as straight forward as it could have been.

 

Couldn't it have been addressed by now or is this the first complaint re: searching the asset store?

 

Google usually returns better results than the asset store search for me.

[Edit]
They might have recently modded their robots.txt, config etc. since not long ago I couldn't get Google to return any results with search term site:www.assetstore.unity3d.com

 

The other day I was looking for some disco music and while I knew the store wouldn't let me search the way I wanted ("Music > disco"), I thought at least typing "disco" would give me a range of results using the word disco.

Not really. It pops up "Unicorn" and "Tropical Nature Pack" and "Skyscrapers" and about a dozen tank models.

So I found what I was looking for offsite.

 

What you should have done was make a game called Unicorns vs. Tanks that takes place on a tropical island with skyscrapers.

 

... WITH DISCO.

 

I have wanting maturity and stricter genre ratings for a long time. While I appreciate some folks have made a lot of money with zombies and war need I wade though those every time I visit the asset store if I absolutely have no interest?

It's a slap in the face to your customers.

And although Unity is a few years off I can easily imagine it's being used in the future to create interactive school work and homework lessons but it will be a 'no-go' with that type of unfiltered content thrown up before the eyes of children.

 

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it -Mark Twain.

I have never seen anything on the asset store that is too offensive for children.

 

You out of touch with most households internationally.

 

I wasn't aware that the Amish represented most households internationally.

 

I also get another suggestion for 3d model. It will be better to show the polycount, or classify the assets into two group: "for mobile/ for computer"

 

I really wish there was an easy way to see what's on sale in the store. I've been wanting Amplify Color and Amplify Motion for a while now but at the price each of them are normally at I wasn't quite ready to spring (budget for this current game has gone elsewhere). So today I just happen to click on Amplify Motion and see that it's on sale for 50% off for the holidays. The thing is, the sale says it lasts only until Dec. 31, and it's now Jan.1. But it's still on sale. And so is Amplify Color! So I bought them both, before the sale goes off.

If I hadn't have randomly clicked on it in the store today I would have never known they were on sale and might have never purchased either of them. Can we please have a "currently on sale" button on the store page? I'd be all over that every day if there was one.

 

Of course, if people could put an official "on sale" tag on their assets, they'd likely arrange it so their normal price is super high and then have it always on sale so it would get a featured spot in the store.

 

Google's first non-advertisement result for "sale" produced a useful link. The Asset Store's search gave nothing that was actually on sale.

 

I didn't do that, no, but I just tried it. I get a bunch of results that aren't actually on sale along with those that are. And there's no real indication of what percent I'm saving or when the sale is finished unless I click on each one to see.

I will sometimes buy an asset that's on sale if there's a chance that I might need it later, and it's at a really good discount that I don't want to pass up. I've done so several times now. I check the daily sale religiously and have bought several things through that.

Show me the sales! Make them exciting! There's money being left on the table!

 

I was saying that unity should add an email to anything thats on your wishlist if it goes on "sale" (IE drops price), like what steam does.

 

+1

I think since unity asset store puts something on sale every day, you really should be able to sign up to be notified by email the daily deal. It should email me every single day what the current deal of the day is, if i sign my email up.

 

It's easy to add but I think they have not done it so far cause it would lead in to less sales in general. There are always some buyers who need assets asap in their projects and can't wait but then there are a lot buyers who can wait and then they would tag everything they like and just wait. It would be easy to have a placeholder art/sound/etc. while waiting for the sale mail to come. For code it's harder but also possible in some cases. Asset store is a lot smaller with limited audience compared to Steam and not sure if they can afford that strategy.

I know over half of my friends never buy anything from Steam if its not having a massive discount which is almost guaranteed to come for all popular games as they have so many seasonal sale weeks.

 

I only got the email 1 time since i never almost never add anything to my wishlist. I dont think kids would add everything on sale, because there are over 15k things in the asset store (and price changes happen every day) so if you just did everything your list would be useless and you would constantly get emails.

take someone like Ony who wanted to buy those $50 assets, and she waited until it went on sale to buy them (but only happened to go there by chance on a day that it was on sale). If she hadnt bothered to go there for a day then he wouldnt have to do it. Now that dev had to actually put his thing on sale for a few days (probably because most devs dont bother to visit the asset store every day anyway).

 

I did not mean they would wish list the whole asset store but only the assets they would most likely buy or need. High profile assets are most likely get discounts several times a year just like games do on Steam. I'm not against the "on sale" mails but I can see that those could mean trouble for some asset creators.

Asset store forum section has people "asking when is the next" in various threads and some assets never get to be part of daily deals or any mass sales. I'm not sure how much control asset store admins have over asset sales meaning do they need to approve em to get the sale tag on your asset or etc.

 

The search results could really use a filter, to filter by category or something, so you don't just get everything from the entire store showing up.

 

Afraid of loosing sales are you?

I'm not Amish or even particularly religious. I know what I know and I am what I am. I simply rather not look at a pile of sh*t when given the choice. One thing you can be pretty sure of is you won't see store fronts like the Unity Asset Store along the streets of Manhattan or Bahnoffstrasse. The ideal of making money by shocking your viewers is Hollywood and is passé. You or I simply can't compete with their money, their marketing, or their know how.

You've never used Google or Bing search engines have you? They have a feature called 'Strict Search Filtering'? It's easy to turn on and off.

As if search engines regurgitating zombie and war assets is going to convince one with no interests in those to buy them from you. No, if a search from the Asset browser doesn't turn up an asset for me I close the asset browser rather than wade through pages of irrelevant material.

 

I think the store needs to implement a tag/meta tag system it is the best way for searching. So much better than just scanning the description, because usually something gets named totally random that has nothing to do with the need of what people are even searching for.

I also think there needs to be a new category by unity added. It would contain unity fan favorites and unity staff favorites.

The joomla extension store had both of these and it was really really awesome. At the joomla extension store you could also apply tons of filters on searching.

 

There is nothing shocking in the unity asset store as far as I can tell. If there is, it certainly isn't in anyone's face. Example please.

Those search engines actually have mandatory safe search implemented even when you turn all safe search settings off. It has hindered my ability to find stuff on occasion. You wouldn't have noticed this as you are some kind of puritan apparently.

 

They need a wish list feature also. Some way I can save the assets for later to buy.

 

There is a wish list feature. Just click the "Add to Wishlist" button.

Now... for some reason, even on the web-based store, that button takes forever to actually update that the item has been added to my list. This store, I tell ya.

 

They have one. Check for a heart symbol with the words "Add to Wishlist".

 

Hey, his words were

He didn't say the store was lacking a wish list feature - he just said they need one - which is true.

 

They need to change that. Try to search for "NGUI" for example, it'll bring tons of assets.. Just add some "sort by" options at least..
I can't believe they still didn't "fix" the search for about 2 years..

 

Bump. Search by [release date, name, rating, popularity] +/- search keywords.
C'mon Assetstore guys, this isn't rocket science

 

I also think the asset store search function sucks. Please fix.

 

Meta tags would fix a lot of it

 

Another annoying thing is that once you click on one of the found assets and then go back to the search result list, the scroll position is reset to the top! Then it is up to you to scroll down again and start where you left off.

 

The weirdest thing is that it was perfect before the new "intelligent" search engine in late 2013

 

Since Unity 5 it has gotten worse. Now my bought asset folder when organized by purchase date lists free assets with it also. This is forcing me to make 13 free assets (I previously rated) have fake 4 star rating just to keep my bought assets organized (I set my bought assets to 5 stars). Once you accidentally rate a free asset you cant do a no rate. Some of my free assets which are pretty good i would normally rate a 5 I have been forced to 4 star them max because I'd rather have my bought assets listed separate from free ones. This also causes me to not even rate any more free assets because of the lack of organization.

Also now I have some assets that have depreciated which are stuck in my 5 star rating. There really should be a way to organize your bought assets by tags/groups or anything besides. Its starting to get annoying I feel like I'm being punished for buying a lot of assets because of the lack of organization possible in the asset window.

You should be able to hide depreciated assets if you want to and give them no rating.

 

Really?? Please don't rate things with one star just because you're trying to organize your assets.

That helps no one and frankly is about as irritating to witness as those people who rate items one star on Amazon because the package took a day longer than they'd hoped for. That's not what ratings are for and if you do this then you don't deserve the free assets people took their time to make. Come on.

 

What I do is rate my bought assets and not rate the free ones, I rate the bought assets usually 5 because most of them I love. But some free assets that I had rated previously (which are few that i accidentally rated or rated previously, 13 in total out of about 150) I had to give 1 or 2 stars because of the lack of organization in the asset menu, its a really big problem.

This currently is the only way of organizing your assets from bought to free ( I have no idea why they put free assets inside of the purchased by date tab, you don't purchase free assets, it was not this way before unity 5, the reason I'm posting this is because I kind of feel bad for low rating those 13 free ones i accidentally rated before, but my hand is forced). Unity should fix this.

 

@cj31387 - I don't understand the organizational problem. Why do you need to distinguish between bought and free?

 

Quoted for emphasis. You're messing with peoples' reputations, here. And you're doing it specifically to people who give you stuff for free, which they worked on. Not cool!

 

Choosing to damage someone's asset ratings solely because you're temporarily inconvenienced? How would you like it if I did something similar to your assets and/or games solely because someone completely unrelated to you did something that annoyed me?

Nonsense. You choose to do this. The rest of us simply live with the minor inconvenience.

 

The Asset Store would need :

1 ) Not totally asynchronus or threaded.
When you import big models or textures, it freezes and freezes the editor also, and sometimes it crashes if we click anywhere. It should not freeze and we should be able to put it in background and cancel a download or import at any time without crashing Unity.

2) Modern interface
It is old, and it would have some graphic revamp (Steam like interface), and a lightweight interface would be welcome.
Be able to see our items in categories : models, extensions, scripts etc ...

3) We should be able to hide/show items for example to hide items we don't want to see no more until some future need. Or put them in some special category named "Not used" that would not appear in our items main list

 

Yeah.. it really lacks organization for the owned assets. A complete mess.. But the topic is about the search problem, right...

 

Protecting children from certain types of content so that Unity can be used for teaching in schools has nothing to do with puritanism or censorship.

 

My beef with the store is that it REQUIRES you to have a certain version of Unity. Now I can understand that a package uploaded with...say version 5.3, may not work with an earlier version but that should be for me to decide. I bought a package that said it requires 5.2 - nothing more than a bunch of FBX files that I wanted to use and will work in any version. But it probably had some coding or other components that would prevent the entire package from working in my version of unity but I didn't care, I just wanted the FBX files. So the store had no problem taking my money but when I went to download it wouldn't let me. I am too far into the project to mess around with an upgrade. Last time I did it broke too many things. If you pay for something you should be able to get it. I mean if I go buy a motorcycle helmet , the cashier ( after taking my money) can't refuse to give me the helmet because he finds out I don't have a motorcycle. To state that it requires a certain version should be no more than a disclaimer stating that if it doesn't work because you don't have a certain version it's not their fault - you were warned. But to just outright prevent you from downloading the package is just wrong. I see a lot of packages that interest me - if not as a whole then at least for many of it's components like art assets or even bits of code. Luckily, in this case, I was able to contact the seller directly and within 5 minutes he emailed the FBX files. So that was really cool