What's with the daily 25% sales?

Unity, as a frequent buyer of assets and daily checker of the 24 hour sale, it has become apparent that your New Year Resolution was to make all 24 hour sales 25% off only.

Bring back generous deductions on the 24 sale. 50% is usually too good a bargain for me to refuse. A 25% discount I will usually walk away from. Maybe it's not your call? Anyway, just letting you know that I've stopped spending.

Kind regards.

 

I agree with you that it is unfortunate that not more of the 24 hour sales are of a significant discount, such as 50%. However, most developers who have "unofficial" sales of their own give a good bargain on their assets. We provide a service to help find these "unofficial" sales at AssetStoreDeals.com. If you click to Sort By "Discount", they will be in order of percent discount from largest to smallest; and as you will see, most of the assets are discounted 50% or more.

 

Yeah, I do use your thread, which is useful.

The trend continues, however. 25, 26, 27 and 28% discounts all this week....all this year.

It looks to me like a new policy given how often it rolls in.

Take today's asset:
Native File Browser

It's a ripper and I'd love to have it. I'd buy it for $20, but the discount only brings it to $30.

My point here is to highlight to Unity that people like me love buying assets (I own over a hundred), but only buy them on sale, and a 25% discount is not enough to induce me to spend.

 

Yes, I have also noticed this trend. Last year i bought 1 or 2 assets almost every week from the "Deal of the Day".
This year i haven't bought any yet.

 

For me its good somehow, cause i'm also in the addicted asset buyer club and now i don't buy unless i really need it.
I have so much assets which i never have touched one time, some of them are now depreciated, others don't get further notice from the developers, and for some i already had bought an upgrade to the new version, even when i have never used the old one. So for me it will be cheaper when i just buy something when i need it even without a discount. Then to be serious this discounts right now as you have already said are not really attractive.

I guess, in the end Unity will spend allot of time analyzing the sweetest spot to get the most money out of it, regardless what we think or believe.

 

I'm as guilty as the next person of going to the 24 Hour Sale every day and buying assets on impulse.

But I can give a little perspective from the publisher side, too. Publishers, not Unity, generally set the discount price. And it's not about squeezing money out of customers. Extreme discounts in the 24 Hour Sale accustom people to ignore the other worthy assets on the store. Given the number of assets on the store, an asset is lucky to be in a 24 Hour Sale once every 2-3 years. This means the asset may need to make the majority of its lifetime income in a single day every 2-3 years. This can be an unsustainable situation for publishers who want to provide a professional product with professional support. They may have to abandon the store to make a living elsewhere, leaving a vacuum for lower quality assets that can be slapped together with less time investment and less support. (If you review publisher postmortems, it seems a vast number of publishers make far less than minimum wage and could make a better living flipping burgers if it weren't for their passion for game dev.)

Most assets on the store are steals even at their regular prices. A recent thread asked how much a custom RPG framework would cost, with realistic estimates in the tens of thousands of dollars and up. Yet you can buy something like ORK Framework for only $100, and it's been battle-tested by hundreds of devs and gamers to boot. So even a 25% discount (which is still substantial) is a nice incentive on top of this.

 

I rather like the 25% discount. In the past, I bought all this stuff at a higher discount because who could refuse a 50% or more discount? So I have all this stuff in my download section, many of it which I can't use because it has since become deprecated or stuff has come out that does the same thing better!

At 25%, unless it is a normally very expensive asset, I can just pass it by and wait until I actually need it right that minute. Yes, I pay a bit more, but in most cases it is not much more.

I would guess that most of those super duper asset discounts that I fell for will sit forever in my downloads without ever making it to my project. I wasted a lot of money that could have been used to buy a full price expensive asset that I really need.

Now I only buy what is in my wish list and I buy it when I need it, regardless of sale.

 

Thanks everyone for the perspective. It's nice to read well considered thought. Maybe I'll just have to get used to not spending. Maybe that's, ah, good?

 

Well, I've become used to not spending.

And it's a new big sale and pretty much across the board is 25% off.

I don't think I'll be spending a cent.

For a big sale normally, with 50% reductions, I'd buy anything on the list that I think I need or may need in the future. At 25% I don't enter the mindset of 'I'll get this just in case'.

I get that you're looking after me, but I'm a hobbyist dev, not a gambler. Let me start spending again. 25% doesn't cut it.

 

My goodness, 50% sales takes money out of the mouths of the developers who created these things and are providing support plus possibly their families, not from Unity.

I am sure there are enough of us who appreciate the 25% that they can do without your sale.

 

I'm sure you're right. Although I'm not sure I feel like I'm taking food from the mouths of their children

My point is not that I don't wish to support devs.

I do, and have done so, abundantly. I've spent thousands on assets.

My point is simply that someone like me, a typical bargain-hunter, does not spend *at all* without a significant enough saving. You can call me a cheap-skate. I buy on sale. I wait for sales. I'm here long-term. I can't be the only one like this.

If I am, sorry to offend. All I'm relaying is that, despite my wish to support the devs and continue to buy assets, the new 25% strategy is not triggering the 'buy' impulse.

Call is market research. No doubt sales figures tell a more accurate picture, but from my end, so far this year, the purse strings have tightened considerably.

 

I don't know how much the developers still get even with a discount like 50% in the past and if Unity is reducing this all of the developers income or in parts of their own cuts, but with those discounts I even bought stuff which was nice to try and I even supported the developers with lots of bugreports.
But I am not using many of those in the long run, they just sit inside my licence list, so now I only buy what I really need

I feel like those bigger discounts got even some people of those illegal CG-boards to buy assets for their indie use instead of just ripping them.

In the end I don't care that we only have 25% discounts, because I saved time and money for assets I don't really use.

 

I feel the same way. The huge discounts tempted me to buy stuff that I never used or later was depracated. I prefer less of a discount to keep me from collecting too much stuff. lol If I need it, the 25% is great. If I don't, then even 50% is a waste of money.

Actually, you are wrong. I am friends with two very popular developers here on the asset store. Both have children and both get the bulk of their own income from asset store sales.

I also know there are several others who count on sales for their income.

You may be a hobbyiest, but they are not. This is their job.

 

Yes, I understand. If an asset is discounted the dev receives less money.

If an asset is not discounted sufficiently, the dev will receive no money at all. Not from buyers like me, at least. I hope that doesn't qualify me as depriving merchants' children of food. It is not hard to get me to spend money.

Anyway, I've had my say and then some. Thanks for the indulgence.

 

I am in the same boat. Thankfully, I don't feel as likely to spend as I did in the past. I'll only get assets I think I will actually use, so, it really works out in the end for me.

 

You can tell people are not buying with these discounts because none of the assets in sale are moving to the top paid positions.

 

That's an insightful observation. Rewired and the Dialogue System are at the top of their respective top paid lists, and Shader Forge and Behavior Designer are 2 and 3 on their list, but it's always hard to displace PlayMaker in that category. Looking at it optimistically for the health of the Asset Store as a whole, maybe views are getting spread across a greater number of assets. Then again, I have to confess that I've previously bought many of the assets in the Wishlist Sale when they were in earlier, deeply-discounted 24 Hour Sales.

 

Same here. I have every asset on sale with the exception of a few that we do not need and will never buy. Most of the ones I have I bought at release or soon after at full price. I have talked to many with the same experience. Many of these are assets that came out a while ago so many of us have them already. Plus a bunch of are saving our money for a few big expensive assets in review right now!

This really is a great sale for newcomers to Unity.

 

A little re-jigging of history.

Some thoughts are best left unsaid.