New major releases announced! Important upgrade fee discussions

[Kronnect]

Hi everyone,

Unity is growing fast in terms of features. As LWRP and HDRP get traction and stability, complex Unity assets like our maps face an important dilemma. Either they stick to one pipeline or embrace several of them.

Supporting the new pipelines along the well-known standard/builting pipeline is not an easy task. The development, testing and support costs grow threefold as it's not enough to test new features or changes in one pipeline. I think all our assets, when possible, must evolve to support LWRP and HDRP (or even the just announced UniversalRP - new name for LWRP).
In fact this is a daunting task I've been carrying on for several months: Beautify, Dynamic Fog & Mist, new assets like Highlight Plus 2D, the grid assets (Grids 2D, TGS and Hexasphere) and now the maps. By supporting several pipelines by the same asset you get a lot of flexibility because you can switch between pipelines depending on your need while reusing your investment.

On the other hand, many of our assets, including maps, have been available since 2016. For 3 years we have been working on them and releasing new versions for absolutely free. The assets have grown quite a lot and now, looking to the future, I think it's time to release major versions for the 3 map assets which will require a small upgrade fee. Support for existing versions and Unity standard pipeline will continue for free on the existing versions. However, new features and support for all pipelines will be guaranteed only in the new major releases.

There will be a grace period of course. If you have purchased the asset this year (after January 1st 2019), you will be able to upgrade for free to the new major versions. However, if you purchased the asset in 2018 or earlier and want to upgrade, there'll be a small fee.
The upgrade will entitle you to use and continue using the new major versions and its updates for a full year (ie. til August 2020).

I hope you understand the need for this upgrade fee. In any case if you have any concern or suggestion please post it below. Your feedback will be seriously taken into account for the final decision.
Thanks very much for your feedback!

[Kronnect]

Update: the upgrade fee won't be baed on annual releases - the upgrade fee will be required only if you want to use the very latest version and keep receiving new features. That's why the new asset will be suffixed "2" and not "2019". You can keep the previous version as well as it will still receive fixes. And there won't be a "3" version until there's enough new features that justify another major upgrade (which can take another 2 years perhaps).

[JDSweetMeat]

Update: the upgrade fee won't be baed on annual releases - the upgrade fee will be required only if you want to use the very latest version and keep receiving new features. That's why the new asset will be suffixed "2" and not "2019". You can keep the previous version as well as it will still receive fixes. And there won't be a "3" version until there's enough new features that justify another major upgrade (which can take another 2 years perhaps).

So, you'll still be fixing reported bugs in the current assets, and the upgrade is basically for people who'd like you to add major new features to the asset, and who need URP/HDRP features?

When can we anticipate the new system going into effect?

[Kronnect]

The "active" assets will be those dubbed "2" (World Map Globe Edition 2 is already avaiilable on the Asset Store, followed shortly by WMSK 2 and World Map 2D Edition 2). Those will be the assets that will be used by the majority of active projects. They will receive fixes, improvements, new features and it will be ensured they work with latest Unity versions, including the new rendering pipelines.
A fix reported for "2" won't be backported to "1". Only fixes specifically reported by users of "1" will be addressed.

LWRP is out of preview but honestly it's not production ready - it lacks many of the features from standard/builtin, some of them being developed around the clock because they realized LWRP was released to early. I'll wait for Unity 2019.4 (LTS) before picking LWRP for anything. And HDRP is not expected until 2020 so no ETA yet.
In any case, for what I'm seeing so far, LWRP/HDRP are just templates for those who want to take control of SRP architecture itself and you're brave enough to dive into it and tweak the rendering pipeline to match your exact needs. That's the whole point of SRP. For most users (especially if you depend on the Asset Store), keep using the standard/builtin pipeline. In fact, LWRP is quite limited vs built-in in terms of what you can do with it out-of-the-box.