Asset Store developers: be honest.

Prepare yourself for a rant because I'm seeing this repeatedly in the asset store and it's very frustrating.

Let me preface by saying that the asset I'm "complaining" about is direct competition to one of mine. I'm not complaining because it's competition, I like competition. I think it motivates developers to continue to improve their products and keep them updated and competitive. I would like to see the best assets become the most popular because of the hard work and effort that the developers have put into them. If you are taking shortcuts or using shady methods to promote your products, you have issues.

I browse the asset store very frequently, to get an idea of what's out there, what people like, what the competition is like, etc.

So I was looking at a competitor today. This weapon system pack went live on the asset store not long ago (maybe a week?):
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/21871

Now it's a nifty pack and all, but not very popular so it never had any ratings or reviews until recently. So I'm looking around this evening and I see that it now has 3 ratings, enough to show up on the description. So I thought that's neat, I wonder if there are any reviews now. I scroll down and see that there are in fact 3 reviews. Now that's odd. So I check the user profiles of the reviewers, and find some interesting things. Here are the user profiles:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/user/3227607
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/user/1611484
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/user/3270820

Each of these users has rated and reviewed the same pack today. Two of them rated the pack 6 hours ago, as of the time of this writing. Up until this point, this pack had received no reviews. Now also conveniently, this is happening right after the pack price has been reduced to $5. (Less money the developer has to give to UT?) I will be especially mad if the price goes back up after this. And don't tell me that the reviews happened because of the sudden price drop. Trust me, these assets don't get that kind of volume unless they're free.

Not convinced yet? Look at all the assets these users have rated. They are all free except for this weapon pack. That is true for all three users. So the developer downloaded a few other packs to hide the fact that he made the accounts just to rate his own product, but didn't want to spend extra money.

Still not conviced? I invite you to take a look at the user numbers of these users. You can see them at the end of the url in the links I provided above. Notice specifically the first and third users, which have VERY similar numbers, indicating that they were created around the same time. Again, these users' reviews were all written today, mostly around the same time. As for the second user, I suspect that was an account that the developer already had since he has reviews dating back several months.


Again, I'm not complaining because this is a competing product, but I want to see something done about this. This is not the first time I've seen a developer register accounts just to write raving reviews of his own product. I'm not sure what the Asset Store people can do about it, but there has got to be some way to track where accounts were created from?

By the way I've got screenshots of the account profiles in case the developer tries to go and change something.

A response from @caitlyn or the asset store team would be great, this is getting really disgusting. I'm wondering if there are any ideas for how to solve stuff like this.

 

Maybe he just has lots of friends ...

 

Well it is very common indeed. Hope this person get punished..

 

Maybe they asked a few friends to review it... most people have three friends who will do them a favour ... even Unity developers ...

 

Personally I deal with this by giving little weight to reviews that are too full of hyperbole or excessive praise. Reviews that acknowledge limitations, problems and dev responses/fixes to issues, along with lengthy forum posts about an asset, are what I tend to use to inform myself.

 

Have you contacted assetstore@unity3d.com ? I'll let them know anyway and see if they can check the accounts.

 

For those of you suggesting that he has friends, that doesn't explain why some of the users were created at the same time. And if they were created at the same time just to help their friend out, they wouldn't have also rated other (free) assets to make it look like they were normal user accounts.

@Aurore, thanks. I haven't contacted them via email because it seems they rarely if ever reply, but I'll try that later.

 

That's a good way to go about it. I have gotten in the habit of occasionally checking user profiles if something smells fishy at all.

 

Some times it's better to ask dircetly on forums to people directly if they have used some asset and how they found it.
There is good and bad assets, you have to deal with it point.

 

who cares... anyone would half a clue would look at the pack and /next

the models are average, the textures are crap, the reviews are obviously fake/friends (no one would 5 star this rubbish)

 

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. However, in the long run this likely will not do much in their favor. Reviews like these may give a slight boost in appeal but their work will have to speak for itself when it comes down to it.

If users are abusing the review system for destructive purposes, such as a competitor leaving you a one star with an unreasonably scathing review, we are absolutely dedicated to investigating those when reported.

Cheers,
Ian Dunlap
Asset Store Specialist

 

I realize that it will likely not make that much of a difference. Yet it's frustrating because most of the people that read those reviews will never know the difference.

 

With all due respect, if that would actually happen, my previously freely available assets would still be in the asset store. The reviews might be removed, but the ratings stay there.

 

Its very rare that devs actually rate something let alone actually leave a review. But most of the top grossing assets are the top quality assets anyway, so if you just keep working on your gun project

 

^ This. I mean if tons of people endorsed a piece of crap, I'd still wouldn't buy, knowing it's a piece of crap.

 

How do you know if it's a piece of crap if the reviews say it's not a piece of crap?

 

Don't buy it without looking and asking around then. Do some homework.

 

This is all fine and dandy but it doesn't allow for new assets. Just because no one knows whether or not something is any good doesn't mean it isn't any good...

 

Yep but you know, it's the same for everything. You don't know if that can of beans will suck or not til you buy it.

 

That's pretty much what it comes down to.

Maybe so...
But all the same I could point out other much more popular assets whose publishers have done the same thing (or at least I have pretty good reason to believe so). I won't give a link or anything because I don't want this thread to turn into a slander fest. In the end I suppose it doesn't have much impact on sales but it's still disturbing.

 

It's usually pretty obvious when the reviews are fake... especially when you have a bunch in an extremely short period of time. From experience, only a small number of purchases will leave a review... in my case I've had single digit percentages of purchasers leaving reviews and/or star ratings. Occasionally there will be a couple within a short span of time but they're generally spread out. Then again I don't go around just asking all my customers to review my asset either.

 

I don't agree with that. We usually get a whole bunch of Master Audio reviews in spurts, with relative dry spells between. Of course that usually happens after we have a featured sale and 600-800 new customers pick it up in one day. It's all a numbers game. Your numbers I agree with though. I estimate that something like 7-10% of users leave a review or rate the product, based on knowledge of how many copies we've sold.

 

This is same problem with food, hardware, clothes, until you buy and try, nothing guaranties the reviews to be good. Even for games reviews can be twisted depending on who done them, or if the company negociated something with the reviewer site in the background etc ...

You should turn your spirit to positive things and constructives ones, instead of loosing your time trying to chase things that don't matter at all, only your product will matter : make it better, concentrate on that

What make me laught are the reviews LOL, it feels so fake kilomters around

Or a reviewer talking about price , as pricing dicsount it's not it's matter , ahaha

Well at least they propose a Web Demo, so it's a minimum honest as you can test the package and see if that suites you.

 

Capitalism my friend, Capitalism.

I used to make and sell, something called ChatBots. I know no one wants to hear about this, but 95% of my clients, were people that owned porn companies. ..... (not my intended clientele, but that is what happened).

I wrote software that would reply in chat rooms, namely, Yahoo, AOL chat rooms, back in late 1900 and early 2k.

It's the business.

You get what people want.

If you think about my post.... I wrote Artificial Intelligence. Many times, my software, unbeknownst to the user, would go out to the internet and rate itself. It was mandatory for me.

Although I have not been in that business for more than 5 years, I still remember it like a beast. While you were working at McDonalds, I was trying to figure out a way to get the most people voting for my software as possible.

Being only one guy, I did the obvious thing...... I wrote software that votes for itself.

I think that about sums it up, even if the software is not voting for itself.


But if you think you are in a competing software business, realize, you are writing software, where in a few days time, I can write a HTML scrubber, to constantly write positive reviews about my own company.

Yes it sucks, but that is the world we live in and that is the world I lived. I'm thankful I can now make solid video games people play instead of retorting to marketing tactics, because I was born without any desire to be either marketable or let alone wanting people to know about me and my activities.

 

And to top things off.... I remember writing some software back in 2004, where we were top of the search engine market...... all we wanted to do was sell our 'auto chat reply-engine'. We did a fine job. BTW, I say we, but I'm the owner, I made a S*** ton o money from this. We had bots auto-posting comments in chat rooms, 24/7. This was not a , hey comment on a webpage, it will be there for 2 years, we had to post stuff, 24/7, and pretend like we were other users.
It's easily accomplished with even simple software.

don't be alarmed when a company from China, with a 1,000 man team, comes to compete against your product, it's............... well,...... it's going to happen.

It's an online business, and these low cost f***ers will come to compete with you every time... even in the newest market.

Best of luck to you in this online world. It's now up to you to outsmart all of them. =D

 

Well you look at UFPS -- its selling at $95 a pop now, even though there are cheaper FPS products out there no one buys them and unitys not going to promote them. Unity could even stop a cheap rival product from entering the store -- they did deny some assets already because there was already enough of them. Imagine spending a year working on another FPS kit and unitys like "nah bro we already have enough"

Besides most of the assets arent worth cloning because they hardly make any money anyway, the profit margins are razor-thin, and if you had to pay someone else forget about it.

I already saw 1 company in there, and there products are okay but guess what, they will start losing out once competitors start putting out better and cheaper versions. Unless your doing it yourself theres no way -- long term -- not even at third worlder rates. The more popular an asset is the more likely someones going to clone it, and that means they are going to have to pour more time into (or in that case money) it to keep it on-top or they will get knocked out.

 

Well I guess it may be because I myself don't trust anybody, so I do research, extensive thought before purchasing anything. I do this with everything I buy

 

This is what worries me. I recently submitted a free M4 model that was turned down because they already had enough guns. Which is true, but what happens when they start doing that for large scale editor extensions and complete projects?

 

Basically that. It always comes down to that. We need a new system.

 

It's always capitalism's fault isn't it?
Honestly I don't see how that's related to publishers reviewing their own assets.

 

How can there ever be enough or too many quality assets such as models, props and characters? That makes no sense. If they are saying too similar to existing content that makes much more sense. But the more art assets the better. People want their game to look different. 100 different trees is better than 15 trees. Now, if there are 500 different trees then yeah maybe another tree is not needed.

 

BTW, why the hell the Wish List of a user is visible by the others?!!!
Seriously Asset Store Manager. It's private thing !!!!
Ok, i clean mine now, and of course, there is no way to do it in one 'shot'

Edit :
To Asset Store Manager.
Can you PLEASE clean my wish list for me, please, because it's very difficult to do this one by one.

 

It's all about the money. If there was nothing to earn, he wouldn't bother to cheat.
Same as the job of realghetto: if it wasn't about the money he hadn't used those cheat programs.

By that you could claim capitalism produces innovation... well, let me get this straight: it produces innovation using the destructive way. Often kinda sick innovations. But there would also be innovation without capitalism, only with slower pace. And it produces innovation using the constructive way.

All these cheating, exploiting, self-rating (and a whole lot of other things in this world) are symptoms of the destructive way, which is hugely supported by capitalism.

 

I'm not going to argue no matter how much I disagree with you.
Let's try to keep this on topic.

 

This is on topic. What you request in this topic is that the developers should be honest. They are not. Topic done. Nothing to discuss anymore.

...unless you ask for the reasons *why* they are being dishonest.

 

Really? Too bad they can't gift a purchase to you (kinda like steam) cause I'll gladly let people buy me stuff I want

 

Let's see, what do we have? Communism. Socialism. Maybe we need a new ism ...

Long story short, people will believe reviews because it's easier than trying it out yourself. So we trust what others say, for better or for worse. I guess you could call it laziness, but it's more about efficiency.

 

Reviews exist to assist you in making an informed decision rather than simply throwing money at a random solution in hopes that it works. They shouldn't be blindly followed any more than they should be blindly ignored.

Sometimes you simply cannot afford to try every solution yourself.

 

Sure. Unfortunately, you have to put time (and sometimes money) into evaluating the recommended one. At that point, you might have a product that's not necessarily the best for you, but that you'll stick with anyway because it's not worth the time / money to try the other one.

 

About that Pro Weapons kit :
- price is cheap : 5$
- It has basic shooting for many weapons
- could help many non coders to make a game using FPS weapons for a really small price

Why bashing this kit , because of fake reviews and notations ? As this can help some people for low money ?
I baught Ultimate FPS when it was 15 $, but it has become popular and improved , the price is 90$ now.If i had to baught it today, i would just go for a cheaper solution around 5-15$ no more.
Little price kits are valuable.

And there are other people encouraging good rating on their product, where they offer something in counter part, isn't that cheating somewhat the real review of a product ?

The best thing to do is to ask to users of a product using it on a project what they think of it instead of reading reviews and notations.

 

The issue here, as I stated, is not the quality of the pack. I haven't downloaded it and I don't know what it's like, and I'm not going to make a case for why mine is better.

The point here is that the developer has created new accounts to write fake reviews to deceive people about his kit. There is nothing wrong with encouraging real customers to write reviews on what they think about the product, but that's not what this developer did.

So no one is bashing the product.

Edit: Are you the publisher of this ProWeapons?

 

ahhaaha , i never made or sold any asset store thing lol, ( some little paranoia ? )
I'm someone objective when i writte things, instead of just following this thread like a zombie, i took the time to look and test that webplayer kit. It seems not so bad, it could help non coders, so even if the maker made fake reviews, people can test the webplayer and buy it if they feel it is good, so i'm sure people really don't car about fake reviews caus they can test it.

I'm objective , i don't like people bashing someone without good reasons and prefer to become a defender sometimes.
So i'm not harsh against the guy that made the kit and used fake reviews yes a bad point, but the kit has webplayer and :
- I'm not sure he is the only one
- Why attacking this guy particulary ? because the kit enters in competition with your personnal work ? (you'll always have competition in what you do or in life)

What i would find harsh would be some expensive asset promising many things, without any webplayer to test it and with fake reviews, then buying it you find it's totally bad compared from what was announced.

I would say, like many other stated, you can't stop fake reviews, don't loose your time, forget it and concentrate on your product instead

 

I would also offer a word of caution. Not matter how obvious it seems we should never outright accuse without absolute proof because there is the possibility that the reviews are real. There's also the possibility that someone did it because they thought they were doing the publisher a favor without his or her knowledge. It's easy for us to all jump on the bandwagon here but we need to be careful. It's certainly ok to speculate bit we need to choose our words a bit more carefully and make sure we're talking about what "may" but going on instead of stating it as an absolute fact. That's not really fair to the publisher who isn't here to present his side of the discussion.

 

Well it will sort it ourselves out soon enough because if someone pays full price for it and its junk they will downrate it anyway.

 

This is the problem with zombie followers lol.
This thread is attacking one particular person for fake reviews ,something lot of others have done. And like you said, perhaps some reviews are real.
And if it was fake review, it's just a fake review, this is very common practice in the real life also.
For example i sell cakes , they are good but not the best and i tell my friends : " hey guys, talk to people about my cakes how best and good they are" Or i could directly go to people selling my cakes and say : "buy my cakes they are the best"
So the author of that small kit , IF he would have wrote these reviews, he does just like all vendors of the hearth saying their product are the best, in a not so cool way but at the end that the same goal : "mine is the best"

Yes, only good product get good reputation and other people recommendation

This thread should be closed simply.

 

I wouldn't agree with closing the thread. Discussing the problem of fake reviews is certainly appropriate and a good topic, just have to be careful not to make too many assertions that can't be absolutely proven.

 

Not paranoia, it's just that I was very surprised anyone would actually defend this guy. Believe me I wouldn't be concerned about offending the publisher.

I'm glad there's competition out there. As I explained in the OP, that's not why I'm complaining. No one should be doing this, competition or otherwise.

Yes, it's possible that someone else wrote the reviews. Which is why I presented the facts and showed you why I think the publisher did it. So while we don't have absolute proof, anyone who thinks these reviews are honest is either delusional or just doesn't know the asset store. Sorry.

I'm not attacking a person. I'm not attacking anyone. I'm pointing out that the publisher has posted deceptive reviews. And if the asset store peeps can't do anything about it, at the very least people will see what's going on.

BS. It's one thing to promote your product and say it's awesome; that's what the description is for. It's another thing to pose as real customers and pretend that your customers think your product is awesome.

Why?

 

By the way, I just checked the pack again. As you might expect, several days later, no reviews have been posted since the first 3 that were posted the same time.

 

The problem is that you exposed this asset and it's auhtor. Why him ? why not denouncing all others having used same practice ? why this one should be pointed out particulary ?
You should have talked about that in a general way, and perhaps point some cases in a private message at Unity Asset store people instead.

It seems you are not able to forget that kit and it's author, why such tiny example is making you so troubled ? You are right some reviews and nothing , but ..
No one see the things in the same way, for you it seems it was fake reviews, but ..
perhpaps they were friends doing reviews for the author, perhaps some friends that worked with him on the project, or some friends that baught the kit to encourage him ? or family ?
Possibilities could be hundred , Keep objective


If i make some assets models or kit some day , indeed i will ask some friends to test it and put some reviews , why not ? It will make it a bit more attractive having some good reviews.
I will not call it faking if i know my product is a minimum good for a ready good honest price ,if i know it will benefit buyers , i will call that a bit of help from friends instead


I will conclude saying there is no system on earth able to discover if reviews will be honest or not. Even if some author will make fake reviews not all the same day , let's say five in three months, how will you be able to know ?
Or if he just asks to lot of friends at college for example to review it's asset , nothing can prevent that also.
(This why i see the thread is useless)

 

This issue happens every time with rating systems. People (quite often using alias/different names) do buy competitor stuff to make bad reviews or they buy their own stuff to make good reviews. Is nothing new.
The sad thing is that, most people browsing an overcrowded market such as the AssetStore, don't have the time to check in every single asset (specially when there's multiples ones). They tend to look at the icon and stars, if there's something rated 5 stars, they will check in, otherwise move out (without even checking the product details).
My take on this situation is to remove the stars rating on the asset icon and leave it only in the asset page, that will force people to check out the product details and make a better comparison when there's more than similar asset. It will also improve asset store overall quality, as people will tend to buy real good products instead of 5 stars icon products.