Do you usually rate assets you purchase on asset store??

I ask because I'm on the store since 1.5 years, i have sold a lot of items but i have received very very few comments and a very low number of ratings ... is it normal or is it just me?? :-/
another question.
I remember several months ago i saw a 5-star rating on one of my assets, and after some time it disappeared. is it correct???

 

Very few people seem to rate, or especially review assets...for example, Vectrosity has a rather below 1% reviews-to-sales ratio. (On the plus side, I like all of what few reviews there are and I certainly can't complain about the average rating. )

--Eric

 

I rate about 10% of the ones I purchase. I choose to rate things that I want to comment on (ie, the author should fix something) or if it is particularly good and I think it deserves a boost, or if I really hate it. Most things I've bought I don't rate because I feel I haven't used them enough - I like to buy assets for "future" use, which is generally a bad plan, but good for a "pick me up" sometimes.

 

I rate things I really like. Or things I try to make others avoid.

I don't really rate things in the middle.

 

I always rate after using for 1 month (not 1 month from time of purchase, 1 month of actual usage). If I choose to discontinue usage then I don't vote as I don't feel I gave it a fair chance. Often I buy an asset and end up not needing it for my current project, but doesn't make it bad.

 

I make a comment and rate all assets I use.

 

I hate to admit it, but I only use the rating stars as a way to sort them in my store downloads list. 5 for editor tools, 4 for scripting stuff, 3 for shaders and 2 other libraries/assets that I use regularly and 1 for things that looked cool, but haven't really checked out yet. That way I can easily sort them in the list.

 

Same here. I'll often buy something that looks cool just to play with it.

 

That is atrocious. I must say I am completely appalled.

 

thanks for your coments...
it seems actually that a low number or rates/comments is ok for my situation!

@zombiegorilla: that is terrible!!!!!!!!!!! :-/

 

Wow, that is so self centered, why don't you care about the devs?

 

Meh... The system is pretty broken. Most stuff isn't voted on, and has little to no valuable comments. It is largely a crap shoot. Moreover the combination of abysmal sorting/grouping options and the extremely poor choices that creators use when naming a product makes finding something you just bought a complete pain in the ass. If a majority of creators don't care about about the choices they make affect affect the end user, poorly package their product and make baffling choices largely aimed at self-marketing over quality, I see no issue in leveraging the tools provided to streamline my usage until the system is in better shape. (Note: don't include/rate models, as I almost never use them).

Though honestly, if there is a tool/utility/shader that I like and/or use regularly, I usually just gut it/fix it and create my own clean .unitypackages for them. So I only do that for a handful of packages.

 

Additionally, I have on occasion provided both positive and negative comments and ratings which never appear because of "not enough votes" or bugs when posting. So feedback seem to have value in the assetstore unless it is a top seller, which breaks the whole system anyway. If the system worked, I would put effort into using it, since it doesn't I'll leverage it to make up for its short-comings.

 

I sometimes do. For my assets maybe only 5% of customers have gone back to give a review or rating. In terms of ecommerce the asset store falls greatly short here in terms of being able to `run a business` from it... since we have a) no idea who our customers are, b) no way to contact them, c) no way to prompt them to return and leave a review after a period of time, d) no way to send them mass emails periodically, d) no statistics on who visits our assets or what their background is or what assets they looked at or what the bounce rate is for your asset page or what issues people had on your page, etc.... in terms of an `online store`, which is what ecommerce is about, the asset store is an extremely simplified and very basic system. The search is very basic, all you can do is bring up a product page and see some stuff about the item and a few screenshots, no video or webplayer, no demo version, no official discussion forum, very very very limited space to describe what the product does, very limited ability to look at/sample the individual elements of the asset (images, sounds, etc), it very almost couldn't be more basic. If Unity were to come up with a PROPER ecommerce site to act as the asset store I bet you conversion rates would skyrocket, there would be tonnes more sales, far more people would actually have a chance of running a real business based on it, there would be much greater customer satisfaction and interaction and communication, and everyone would win. As it is it is nothing more than a simple brochure, which is like an ecommerce strategy from 15 years ago. It really isn't a proper store, just a small basic catalog with limited information. SO much room for improvement here that could only facilitated far greater sales for Unity and for all developers. I bet the asset store `economy` could at least double or triple if they would implement a proper store. I say this because I work at a company that sells product online and the website I work on is in a totally different league to the basic workings of the asset store. They really need to get some experienced ecommerce professionals to design and implement a proper ecommerce website experience - think amazon for Unity. I can see no drawbacks to that whatsoever.

 

I will usually rate things if its good or if its bad but if its middle of the road there doesnt seem to be a point. I think if its not rated its probably not downloaded that much but its probably okay otherwise someone would have put a negative comment.

 

I don't rate consistently enough, tending to rate if I *like* the product only. I take a products ratings into consideration when purchasing, so I'm going to be a bit more diligent about it.

 

I rate mainly if its ether a very good experience or a poor one.

Some dev's will reply to every email and will actually help you out( the NGUI guy is amazing) . Other ones( one i will not mention ) will tell you theirs no documentation , learn by reading the source code , you didn't pay enough for me to help you with this , etc .

Do not be a jerk to your customers . Keep in mind theirs a very wide range of skill sets here , if your not willing to help a customer offer a refund .

 

I agree, but consider that most stock sites does not have the link customer -> seller, so the seller never knows who actually purchased. that's seem pretty common. I was told that usually buyers do not want to "reveal" themselves for some reason.

I agree that some stats could be very useful, such as knowing how they found some asset (research, keyword, link, etc) and how traffic is there.

the asset store is also the only marketplace without the * SOOO BORING* tags... (boring from the seller point of view). probably the only things indexed by the search engine is the description. any hint on this point??

I still wonder how my assets are found, and how many people are lurking/using the (music part of) asset store!
In january I had about 200 download of my free pack. that's really a lot! the actual sales were 3 items. I would like to know how many had a look at my assets, which are the most viewed, searched, and so on....

also the limited description space is really boring sometimes... and I would like an integrated player so that i could not link the demo on other sites.

ok, we're going slightly off topic here! )

 

Seems to be the case!

Every month I'm currently getting over one thousand dloads for the free bodybuilder model and I've got four comments. But they're very flattering comments, so i'm thankful!!

 

As an author, I appreciate when people use the support channels I offer (forum thread, email, Skype for cases that need "hands on support") for reporting issues. The first thing you need to know is that we don't get notifications when people write reviews. And since very few people do write reviews, there's not much point in checking the reviews on the asset store every day. Because most of the time, you see exactly the same thing you saw the day before, even if your package sells comparatively well (i.e. is in one of the top ten lists ... which ... btw, doesn't mean you'll get rich, at least not in Scripting / GUI, and I was up to spot 4 on that list for a little while ;-) ).

So, if you need something fixed, you might easily run into the situation that the author just doesn't find out about it until many days, or even weeks later. With email / forum postings, you can usually expect a reply within a few hours. I've only had a delay of 2 or 3 days one time - and that was because the forum notifications failed (I have set up that forum thread to send me immediate notifications - but that time, I didn't get a notification at all; neither from the forum thread, nor from my private messages).

Besides, I'm reading a lot of reviews on other people's packages that are outdated for exactly that reason: Someone wanted to have something fixed, the author fixed it, but the person with the request didn't update their review. Fortunately, we can now reply to reviews to prevent some of the confusion that this may cause.

Actually, your rating helps getting over that "not enough votes" thing. It takes a little while but unless the package is dead, eventually the rating will appear when enough people do rate it. It's not like the store forgets your rating just because there's not enough ratings, yet. Eventually, it will show up.

 

I agree with you, and always try to pursue other support options. However, the number of asset authors who neglect to give you any way of contact is staggeringly high. No website. No email. No thread link. And a "Studio Name" that doesn't even correlate to a unity user name. It's almost like they don't want sales.

 

That's rude man.

 

Unity Asset Store doesn't encourage consumers to rate assets. Besides, an asset store consumer is likely to spend tme making games, forgetting to review/rate it or just doesn't bother at all.

 

I wished they would encourage it, like give them some benefit for honest ratings, not constantly 1 star ratings to get something, but good honest reviews. Say, hey for every review you do, we'll give you 50 cents instore credit or something.

 

I rate all assets I buy and rely quite heavily on the ratings provided by others. I find it a very useful tool to decide between similar assets and would thus tend to trust that ratings are given for the right reason. I do not write a lot of reviews (compared to my actual purchases!), but if I find an asset exceptional, I take the time to do so.

 

People would find a way to exploit this system

 

Oh I know. But there's got to be something Unity could do to benefit somebodies 2 seconds of time to give it a star rating lol.

 

They could do what other shop companies would: constantly remind a person to rate asset they have bought.

 

I rate and write a review if I use it but don't bother just reviewing them for the sake of vetting the quality. Assets I buy that don't get any use will never get rated or reviewed.

The purchase to review ratio is abysmally low like Eric pointed out, but I would hate to see more idiots posting reviews that are clearly not constructive. If I post a negative review I always try to make it constructive but typically I don't have a lot of those because I strongly filter the assets that I buy and avoid less than exemplary ones.

 

I typically do rate my purchases. I do also wish other people would do this more. When you are an asset developer it is hard to communicate with your customers and to get people to review or rate things.... you could sell hundreds of copies and only get 10 reviews. So when you see an asset with like 20 ratings, you know it probably has at least a few hundred users.

 

That's pretty disgusting. You really should go back through and rate them properly.

 

From experience the low number of ratings to purchases/downloads is indicative to how few assets are actually used by the customer.

I do rate the few that I use and also have a few that I have yet to use but looked good and/or were functional in my testing.

There are a few assets I've rated that I should go back and take stars away from, mostly art assets that re-use someone else's code that clobbers a namespace(s) on import.

 

I think it would be cool if Unity followed what Amazon does. Maybe at the end of the month just send out an email saying "Hey you bought these assets, would you like to review them?" and give them a link to review them.

 

I rate probably ~3% of the assets I buy.

Why? I buy too many assets.... So, I only feel comfortable rating the ones that I really spend time with. I'm also much more apt to rate an asset that is broken unfortunately, this is especially true when it seems to be the only way to reach the developer.

 

Staggeringly high? You must be exaggerating. Greatly. Show me just one. If there's no contact info on the plugin page, at least you can click on the Publisher name, and on the publisher page there MUST BE a contact email, or Unity will not approve any packages by you.

I agree that the Asset Store should automatically show a Unity forum user name for communication purposes.

 

Unfortunately I find very very little comparison in written reviews of Assets. For example, it's an extremely rare day indeed when some mentions how Master Audio compares with any other plugin in the same category. That is the #1 think I would want to know when browsing the store. Which products in the same category do the most of what I really want? And that's really hard to discern just be reading what the publisher writes as marketing hype.

 

I rate about 30% of the assets we use. There's lots more I bought that I've never used yet (sale that I couldn't say no to).

We get about 10% of customers who leave a rating, and slightly more than 1% that leave an actual text review.

Personally, I feel that non-text reviews are mostly useless and would like Unity to not allow them (require text). One reason why: sometime customers may leave a 1 star review but not bother contacting the author about the issue they have. That's a lose - lose situation. The customer doesn't get the issue resolved and the author doesn't even know about it!

 

Again, click on the publisher name, and on that page there will be a contact email. If there is not, that's against Asset Store policy. Tell Asset Store folks and they should remove the asset from the store.

 

@jerotas I was specifically referring to unanswered inquiries, etc. A harsh review seems to spur some of them into action. I don't think it necessary warrants removal from the asset store. Unless of course, the developer refuses to answer any and all inquiries.

 

100% Agree. I've got almost entirely 5-Star reviews, but recently got a lower review and the purchases just said he had "problems" without being specific. He never contacted me about it, just left a review. I was able to find his forum account but when I messaged him to find out what issues he had I never got a reply. It's frustrating as a publisher because if someone is having an issue I want to know what it is and fix it. Even if I've lost him as a customer, I'd want to make sure other current or future users don't run into the same problem.

 

Pro Tip: READ THE DATE BEFORE RESPONDING.

 

This again...we already know one must not open a forum account to use Unity or to publish to the asset store so if email is what is required, then that is required.

I think Unity creating a 'mini-forum' in the Unity Asset Store for each publisher's Kiosk with sub-forums being the individual products is OK and more desirable for the publishers.

 

It is on their roadmap for the asset store. Well, something about sub-forums for plugins is. I don't really care since we have our own forum already.

 

I'll like that because it's will be easy to find the help and it will make the Asset Store more professional looking.

 

Necro-attack!
Gigi

 

You must realize that you quoted a TWO AND A HALF YEAR OLD message - from before the asset store required website links and contact emails to be listed.

 

I thought they required that the whole time. I remember when the asset store launched, and we submitted a plugin shortly thereafter and needed an email. Could be wrong though.

Does the Asset Store plan on removing plugins with no contact info? I would think they should.

 

Hahahah like it.

But far more damage is done by noobs rating assets 1 star, then the author replies and fixes the issue, but the original reviewer doesn't bother to amend the review.

So everyone thinking of attacking zombie over this, ie one man, is being stupid since there possibly hundreds doing far more damage with lazy reviews that don't get updated.

 

Yea, that post was over two years ago. Since then, I have pretty much stopped using the asset store altogether, our company forbids using assets obtained from the asset store, and personally I don't find much need for anything there (with a couple of notable exceptions). I download the freebies from Level 11, but virtually nothing else. Besides, if I need a package I have bought or downloaded, it is much faster to find it via spotlight than opening the asset store window.

 

Insane. How do you get anything done? Unless your games are super simple.