Worst Level 11 yet...

Of the four free assets this month, two of them are just demo versions that require you to pay full price to update to the real version. One of them has licensing issues, including hidden bundled licenses with extra requirements that are not visible until after you've purchased the asset. (Sure, it's free for this month, but this is still a big problem for paid assets). Several of the on sale items have hidden licenses as well which I haven't managed to read yet since I won't be paying for them to find out what the terms are, but just the fact that you can see several different license text files in them is now a major red flag for me. One of the sales is a $5 asset that now costs $1... charging $1 instead of free when we're already paying $1500 for Level 11 seems... I don't know... like nickel and diming your customers. I feel like Level 11 started out as a pretty good deal, but it seems to be getting more useless each month.

 

I keep hoping that the items available for "pro" users would be aimed at "pro" users, and in some way make us feel like valued customers. But it's getting worse every month. Some of it even seems like rubbish that's obsolete now we have 5.

Not gettin' that valued feelin'

 

Totally agree. Would really like to get my money's worth every month. And you want people to sign up just to get Level 11? So far you haven't shown that it is even worth it for the people already on it.

 

It's frustrating more than anything, as I'm a fan of Unity. I don't want to be put in a position where I have to say negative things

 

For free users subscribing will be more fun as I think it was said earlier that cherry picking will be possible aka subscribe for the month you like and cancel after downloading, repeat when next good set is available.

 

Disappointing to say the least Level 11 started off quiet nice but got worse and worse every month. Always thinking it must get better next month just to get disappointed again.

 

This is assuming they ever manage to get Level 11 subscription support for free users. I've given up holding out hope and from the looks of things I'm not actually losing much of anything worthwhile either.

 

Meh, sometimes there is fun stuff, sometimes not. It's just a nice little free perk for pro users. That's about it. Can't really complain about that.

Not sure about the subscription thing though. It seems like practical users will just cherry pick monthly. I would. Which seems to make the subscription thing unneeded overhead. Monthly sales we achieve the seem results.

 

Probably needs to go up to level 12 to really satisfy.

 

Nothing is a "free perk" if you're paying for it. Pro isn't supposed to JUST be a fee you have to pay when you go over $100K; it's supposed to also have extra benefits, and right now most of those benefits are pretty crappy. Of the pro features here: http://unity3d.com/get-unity half of them are just access to beta software that feel more like I'm being used as a free tester rather than paying for a service, some of them don't actually exist yet, and the other two are the Dark Skin and Level 11. And yeah I love me my dark skin, but it's not worth $1500; I could probably just wear a $5 pair of shades while looking at the window and get mostly the same effect.

 

You're neglecting to mention the splash screen as well as any of Unity's services that are freely accessible for a period of time to those who have bought Unity Pro. Contrary to the way you make it sound there are some services online now such as Unity Cloud Build.

 

I was including the services as beta software. Cloud Build is recently out of beta, but now that it is, it's available to Free users as well. Pro users just get extra logins and a bigger size limit for the next six months, and then we either have to pay yet another tacked on subscription or get dropped down to the same level as Free users.

*Though I did forget the splash screen, you're right. Still, not a particularly exciting value for my $1500 compared to what is advertised.

 

Twelve months. It does feel odd though that the tier isn't permanent. At the very least it should be permanent for those who are subscribed to Unity rather than buying it outright.

 

I updated my license to Unity 5 when it first came out, so my countdown started on the day Cloud Build exited beta, which was six months ago. But I guess people who are just buying a new license now will get the full twelve. I'm thinking more about all the people who decided to keep their license when 5 came out instead of requesting a refund, because we were told that there would be lots of exciting perks to keeping the Pro license. It was mostly a matter of trusting Unity that they'd make holding on to the Pro license more worthwhile than $1500 cash per developer, and that's kind of questionable. I could have bought a lot of donuts with that money...

 

The primary reason to buy pro (now) is remove revenue cap. The other features are nice, but you can't possibly expect them to expect them be equal to the cost of the software. Level 11 is just a perk. You can't practically put a value its worth since the sale/free items vary. It is at best a lottery, at worst, free stuff to play with.

No one with half a brain buying pro because of Level 11. You can't know what is coming, so expecting to save on things you actually need would just be luck. And if you "need" $1500+ of assets to build a game, its probably not going be very well done. I don't even think there are $1500 worth of assets that would be practical.

---

The sublicense thing... though, I didn't really see anything with anything unusual, (there was a font one, but that is just content, and iTween, which is a dependency, but is free)., I may have missed them, but I wouldn't be surprised, it has happened before. I would say that if you encounter an extra or extended license in a bundle that is not clearly described on the store page, and is critical to functioning of the asset (unlike font or sample art, etc..) just ignore it. When you purchase an asset, you are agreeing to the asset store terms and/or what is defined in the listing. It would be like buying a car, and after paying for it, the salesman says "Oh, by the way, you aren't allowed to drive this car on Thursdays."

 

Understandable, they definitely tried to make the extras sound good. And in fairness, I don't see it from that perspective, as pro is (and never has been) an option for me, so my view is skewed in that way. I do believe however that all the value in Unity is in the engine/editor. Virtually everything on that list other than the revenue part is either not critical to making a game or achievable by other means.

It's a tough perspective shift for users, especially people who have been using it pre 5. Back then the split was a big deal, huge features were unavailable. Those features could easily justify the price. (heck, profiler alone). Now not so much. The reason now is just the revenue cap, but that doesn't impact the usage.

 

I'd disagree that I only have half a brain; in fact, I have the MRI scans to prove that there is at least 80% or so of a brain up there. I also think Unity is advertising Pro as more than just a fee you have to pay if you're managing an existing $100K corporation. It's advertised as a thing that will help devs during development (that's why there's a subscription model). I'd guess that there are actually quite a lot of indie devs who kept their Pro license when 5 released despite not needing to by law. I didn't just keep it for Level 11; I kept mine because I had faith that Unity would do something special for Pro users and would get around to actually doing the things they said they would do within the year.

 

This analogy unfortunately doesn't apply when it comes to copyright or software. It's more like a guy selling you the rights to a book so you can publish it, and then saying "Oh by the way, I didn't actually write that book and you can't publish it." You're still going to get sued if you publish that book, regardless of the fact that you got duped. And with software, there's a long history of not being able to read a EULA until after you've already bought the software, and that's been upheld in court as generally ok, as long as there is some kind of remote chance that you might be able to get a refund if you don't like the terms.

 

Don't worry, you'll evetually get over having faith in software vendors, it just takes time.

 

I agree, this level 11 month is really bad, I have no use for any of the assets whatsoever. At least the previous ones had some decent assets, I feel a bit disappointed this month.

 

Sure, in that case (not having the rights), that is a problem, but that is fail on the asset store, and the asset should be pulled and refunded.

I meant like additional restrictions after purchase. While software EULAs are after purchase, they don't typically alter expressed usage. As an example one of the early level 11 asset clearly claimed unlimited conversions with the tool. After purchase a dialog popped up saying there was a limit and they could only be used non-commercially. (Unless you bought another product). Clearly that won't fly. Eeventually they changed it.

 

The extra licenses in these ones are all things telling you you need to add an included text file with copyright info in your game, you need to add people and their corporations to the credits of your game, you need to publish the original link etc in your game. Things that are relatively benign as long as you sift through all the crap and read all the instructions, but which could actually get you sued if you fail to jump through one of the hoops. That's why the majority of big software companies avoid any licenses like that, and some avoid open source altogether, because no one wants to risk getting sued. And originally, Unity had a policy where you couldn't include extra license requirements in paid assets and had to abide by the standard Asset Store EULA; they seem to have changed that now and it's quite a pain.

 

Yeah, lest I sound like I just hate everything, I do think Level 11 started off really well. The first two months were good. Then it started going downhill. It started as assets that help show off the new features of Unity 5 or which filled common requests from Unity users. Now half of it seems like it was just picked randomly out of a hat.

 

Indeed. In fact we aren't allowed to use any content from the asset store.

 

I didn't see any off the assets that had those. If there is additional/alternate licensing, there will be a link on the asset store page near where the version number is. If not, it governed by the default EULA in the asset store. They could ask for those kind of things, but that is all it would be, a request, not a requirement.

 

The asset store probably needs an overhaul at this point. There's been strong feedback for years and very little has changed. Level 11 is not working as intended.

 

Well I've heard a lot of criticism it's not satisfying for people. But would people mind adding constructive criticism? ie what would fix it for you?

I'll start:

Community Choice Vote: vote for the assets you'd like free - just register your interest for the assets you want and unity will provide it the following month.

If the author hasn't added it to the pool, Unity reaches out to the author. If the author says no, then the second choice is chosen. This is limited to one free asset per month and encourages engagement, increases data and encourages author interaction.

 

Maybe like UG or club benefits, where rather than specifying items, there is a fixed discount across the board, or scaling based on purchases. Maybe one random freebie just to keep it interesting. Having select random items means that there is no way to evaluate whether it is worthwhile or not to a user. If you are a heavy user of assets, you might get lucky, or you might just keep seeing stuff you already bought. It feels a little like gambling right now.

As I said, for users like me, (required to use Pro, and don't rely on the asset store for production, and don't really need the stuff being offered) it is a fun thing. I get to play with stuff that I wouldn't have bought otherwise. But like @makeshiftwings pointed out, people who are considering Pro, it is been billed as a value added feature, it just doesn't play out that way. It should be targeted more to people like that.

 

Unity should just ditch Level 11 and instead just give a 30% discount to Pro users on all assets; i.e. pass on their 30% cut. It’s simple to administer and it's a real benefit for Pro customers.

 

Really, that's a cool idea!

 

There are a lot of things that can be done, but one would be a set of standards that assets should fulfill in order to be picked, for example:

1) Should be usable in a commercial game without needing to fulfill any hidden license agreements. Or even better, they should all be assets that ONLY use the Standard Asset Store EULA, which used to be a requirement for paid assets.
2) Should be the full-featured version of an asset, not a demo/starter version containing ads to buy the full version.
3) Must work correctly in the current release of Unity (whatever is current when the asset goes up). Assets that only work in Unity 4 are especially stupid.
4) Models that get picked should be PBR ready, not still using the old bumped specular shader.
5) For script-heavy assets, lean towards source code included rather than closed source DLL's
6) Art assets should try to be things that are usable in popular genres (fantasy, sci-fi, modern, cartoony puzzle, etc.) rather than things that are overly specific and wouldn't fit in most games (bumped specular native american totem pole, I'm looking at you)
7) Try to avoid doing a variation of the same thing three months in a row... like Explosion Particle Effects. Variety is the spice of the asset store.

 

LOL!

 

Disclaimer: I'm not a level 11 user.

My general thought is the model long term won't be able to make people happy. For example many of the most popular assets have had their level 11 month. If I started today, I'd love to see something like PlayMaker come up. That of course will disgruntle users who have been on level 11 from the start.

To make it worse, if an asset is repeatedly on offer for free, the value of that asset will be permenantly devalued. If assets don't recur, the value of level 11 drops.

In hindsight a flat rate discount for pro users might have been more sensible. But who knows, I don't actually have Unity's sale data to back anything up.

 

I think there is a key piece that nobody seems to be discussing here, which is that asset owners have to agree to be on sale. While that's not a problem for the discount part on level 11 (I'm sure many asset owner's myself included have opted to sign up for that at 50% or maybe a little higher). The free section is another matter though. This data may be old but last I saw the terms for the free assets are $250/month OR the average of the last 3-months of sales for that asset, whichever is higher.

This will tend to encourage the type of assets that trend under $250 a month or assets where sales are decreasing (meaning they've been out for awhile). This is a tough sell for any of the top tier assets to opt in for. My informal feeling is that if your asset is good and was just released it would get steadily rising sales for quite some time (and perhaps a spike if its featured on the daily sale or other sale). I don't think there is a time where the sales would be trending down on a top tier asset until long into it's release (probably at least a year maybe even longer). While at this point that probably does include some nice assets because they've been out awhile (edy's and playmaker come to mind) the bulk of the good assets that people would want are newer and under that payout scheme don't have much of an incentive to make their asset eligible unless they're earning under $250 a month which is probably not a set of assets that intersects much with top tier assets.

Also, after level 11 subscription is opened up to non Pro users there is actually an incentive to not make it eligible for free because that download spike would be huge which increases support requests for very little incentive monetarily. Right now that's mitigated a little bit by it being pro only.

 

I agree that this month's Level 11 is just uninteresting. uScript should be the Pro version if it's included, though I wouldn't care either way as I have bought a uScript Pro license years ago and never really used it.
As of now, I would also rather have a voting list for Level11 assets as Hippocoder proposed. Even if some items aren't included (or denied Level11 by the developer) in the end it still shows interest to them and they can decided better whether they do think it's worth it.
The 30% general discount - I am not so sure about. But that's probably just me because I don't spend much money on the Asset Store.

 

Sadly, I've been diagnosed with CABD (Compulsive Asset Buying Disorder)... After consulting with specialists in three continents I've come to the conclusion that it's incurable. So that's it. I buy assets. All the time. Sometimes because I need them, sometimes to support the developer, sometimes because it had a pretty icon.

Today I woke up ready to get my fix and after clicking on Level 11... I cried. I'm not even getting the free ones.

 

I'm not a level 11 user personally (though I guess my work license gives me access to the assets for work purposes), but I'll have a go. For me, Level 11 just doesn't look interesting. Why? It seems to be modelled off things like PlayStation Plus - the subscription gives you a few premium services which some game titles might take advantage of and, the selling point for me, access to a handful of downloadable games for free each month.

Now, a tasting plate of games I wouldn't have selected myself each month is rad. I can check each one out for a bit and it doesn't matter if I never touch them again. On the other hand, what use is that in an asset? Assets are there for one reason only, and that's helping you get a project finished more quickly. And with that in mind, any decent asset is already easily worth its asking price. I wouldn't delay a project to see if an asset became available for free, and I wouldn't make decisions based on what was available for free, so what problem is Level 11 solving for me? None. It only really gives me value if it happens to be giving me something for free which I was about to happily go and pay for anyway. And doing some math on that, if that was the only thing I was interested in I'm pretty sure the money would perform better by sitting in my bank account until I needed to buy an asset, rather than constantly trickling away growing a collection of stuff I'm mostly not going to use.

Which brings it right back to being a "perk". And there's nothing at all wrong with that, it's just not something I'd pay for in and of itself. As a bonus when I buy the engine anyway, though, it's pretty sweet - one or more assets might be useful later, and in that case I genuinely got them for free.

Could it be turned into something I'd pay for in and of itself? Perhaps. One (flawed) idea springs to mind is having more free/discount stuff on offer, but only letting users pick one. That way you could maybe do stuff like have the popular, high-demand stuff (PlayMaker) on there more often, or multiple high-profile items up there at once in competition with one another. That might also encourage more sales, because Unity are then endorsing more products than they're giving away. Another (half-baked) idea is to give "credits" instead of the assets directly, and let sellers opt in and out of selling their goods via Level 11 Credits. This would end up with giving away less "free" stuff, but if people can select stuff that's more useful to them then that's still more beneficial on the whole.

 

I had no idea the payout was so low for the Level 11 free tier.

Where's Taylor Swift when you need her?

 

Oh yeah, I just wanted to quote this for emphasis. If you had an asset that was already bringing in more than that $250/month what would you get out of going free in Level 11?

It doesn't increase income. It does increase potential support liability. You're essentially being endorsed and spruiked by Unity themselves, which is rad, though that has to be balanced against the number of potential customers who are getting your stuff for free.

So if you're under the $250 minimum then it could be a great way to get the ball rolling. For those who are above that, though, it would have to be a pretty calculated move. (Eg: call lots of attention to one already successful asset just as you release another, so that more people are paying attention.)

 

Here's what I need to see on level 11 to not think it sucks:

One top tier asset free every month.

That's pretty much it. Even if it's something I already have or can't use. We all know what top tier assets look like. Here's an example: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/publisher/585/page/1/sortby/popularity

The 30% discount is more practical and more useful, but let's be honest, it's less fun. Getting a 'deal' on something feels good, especially as a perk, you want the feel goodness of a sale or free give away.

It doesn't matter if everything else is crap or super specific. If there's one really top quality item on that page (on the free side), then people will think of it positively.

 

Users. You can charge for upgrades. You can get them to buy your other assets. But that only matters for smart people/doing it as a business.

Case in point: uScript. The lite version for free, but you know without reflection it's pretty limiting.

 

So what is the point of level 11 exactly? Exposure for popular assets that are already popular and exposed? Is it a discount or is it supposed to be free? Having free access to to something I need to pay to upgrade makes the asset store sound like it should be a mobile game in itself

 

Those are definitely top tier environment assets. However, many of those don't work well in Unity 5. The author is extremely talented but was slow to embrace Unity 5. The Level 11 assets should require excellent Unity 5 support, especially since the only people with access to Level 11 are Unity 5 Pro users.

 

I think it is obvious at this point that the primary goal of Level 11 is exposure for assets, not as a perk for Pro users.

 

Well, unity should be able to get money from asset store, but I agree it'd make good idea. Maybe half their cut? So you'd get 15% off?

 

It doesn't increase income? I thought I read a lvl 11 publisher said recently that Unity pays you based on your previous purchases, not the downloads you'll get multiplied with price tag or something. So technically if that's true, you should get your normal monthly pay, plus a % from lvl 11.

 

$250/month OR the average of the last 3-months of sales for that asset, whichever is higher. So no everything I've seen is that it is not the case that it's normal revenue + %.

If you're making greater than $250/month which the top 500 or so assets would be and your sales aren't decreasing (which unless you have been out for a long while they aren't) there is not much incentive to go on the free portion of level 11. @hippocoder did mention one additional possibility like those assets with a lite or free version but most assets can't fit this model (especially 3d models, animations, etc.). Also, the getting ready for an upgrade of an asset is also a possibility but again this would fit for older assets like Edy's or Playmaker and exclude much of the newer top tier assets that most people seem to expressing a desire to be featured.

When you exclude those 3 cases it's easy to see why the free section in level 11 has been decreasing in quality.

 

Good to know. I'd prefer getting on sales. But alas, we haven't been selected yet.

 

Same here, the discount portion of level 11 or the daily sales/or special sales make total sense. Each creator on the sign up form picks what % off they're willing to go up to and it makes sense as an exchange of revenue in exchange for the marketing of being featured. It's understood that the better the product the more likely to be selected for the sale and also the higher the % off your willing to go probably doesn't hurt your chances either. Hopefully one of these days it can go on sale since it's a generally well reviewed and decent selling product but obviously that is up to Unity.

However, the free portion doesn't make a whole lot of sense. My asset tends to trend right around the $250/month mark already (slowly rising) and it's by no means at the top of the charts. Probably not even top 1000. If I were to submit sure I'd get a TON of downloads but no additional revenue. Also, my support requests would go through the roof it's just the nature from going from a hundred users to thousands and I'm sure a few sales would be sacrificed (those that would have purchased later but got it free). Also, there have been enough generous asset store developers publishing their sales data and most of their graphs show that sales return to normal rate quickly after the feature is over so there isn't any incentive to make the asset eligible. In fact there is an incentive not to unless you meet the 3 criteria in previous posts which is a set that doesn't intersect much with top tier assets.

 

At the risk of going off topic a bit, how long did it take you to reach that $250/month mark? I don't see when was your asset published first.
We started about 6 months ago, making 3D models, and first few months were very unstable and small sales, but the last four have been increasing. I'm assuming making money out of art pays less than script assets like yours, at least on the asset store. Our total from all our assets was close to $500 this month, only thanks to being featured on the front page. Previous month was around $200. Curiously being featured on category pages doesn't seem to increase sales all that much, but I still like seeing our assets there. Makes us feel really good finally getting noticed.

I decided to try making script assets, while my girlfriend continues with 3D art, to see how will the sales differ. I assume script assets sell better, and I vaguely remember Unity saying that too somewhere. I'm working on a Turret System asset. Used for making custom turrets for shooters or tower defense games, or whatever the user wants, since its suppose to be very customizable. Its almost done, but I didn't make a thread for it yet, I want to make and prettify the turret models that will go with it first.