@djaydinoUnity uses this concept and with the standard you will still find all the actions. Subscription based will Actually extend the life on an asset.
Many assets die after a few years, and the reason is that after a year or so only a few people will still buy that asset.
I agree that the AssetStore isn't that great of a business model for the creators of assets, but as Jean wonderfully said:
the Unity community being made out 90% + of indie developers, it's difficult to provide any other model without getting complains.
which also means that most AssetStore customers are on a tight budget, thus the store is more aimed towards those, plus the users are accustomed to the pay-once-get-everything kind of deal.
It's definitely not ideal for the creators, that's why it's more common to see higher priced assets, so that it's still worth for the creators to create and push assets onto the store, but it also means that more and more assets are being shut down (as you said).
If you can't fight a broken system or are dependant on it, you have to comply.
The Ecosytem is a 3th party addon (Made by Jean) for Playmaker it is not from Playmaker.
So actually Jean did not earn anything from this addon.
Yeah but you can't deny the usefulness of the Ecosystem. Without it you would "only" have the built-in actions (or would have to scatter around the internet/forums and implement them manually), which suffice for most intents & purposes but don't give you that plethora of specialized actions for all needs. So it might have given the impression of a more full-flegded system, leaving you with more happy customers and an increase in sales and reputation, that maybe indirectly made up for the extra effort.
@tcmericI think the same, that there's a lot room for improvement on the Ecosystem. It seems to have become more bloated than what it was build for (which is still better than it containing barely any user-contributed actions, but still).
Additionally the lack of documentation (only a small amount of actions provide a preview picture, you have to open the action in the browser or download it to actually see what it does or if it's for you; especially on packages where you have no information about them and have to download & import them before knowing if they are the thing you need) or as you hinted at, a rating system, where users could rate the actions for usefulness or legitimacy.
Anoter idea I had (that is probably less feasible), is that the Ecosystem is to be integrated into the Action Browser, so that it first checks if you have internet enabled, what Unity-Version you have and then offers all possible & matching actions, already in the categories they would be downloaded into (even though I love the cool Ecosystem-Design, that would be an alternative that could help organize custom actions).
It might require a whole forum-section about it or something similar to gather all the suggestions that could make the Ecosystem more awesome.
@jeanfabreYou could of course also open up the Ecosystem for everyone to sell actions on it (not just other asset creators), so that it gets treated like a market in and of itself (and you get a fair share for every purchase). It might catch on, it might doesn't. Benefits of such endeavor are: There could be more users interested in sharing or creating more custom actions that haven't been contributed yet, when they get something out of it; other assets that already contain PlayMaker support could exclude those actions from their assets and put them as a package onto this Ecosystem-Market, where only the ones that use PlayMaker can pay extra for the cross-over support. It would be a win-win-win situation (there would be more actions available, you would have a somewhat constant source of income and other Asset-Creators could make additional money out of supporting PlayMaker or putting their current support onto the Ecosystem, thus making their actual package smaller). There would still be most actions for free (at least I wouldn't charge for my actions because I create them out of pure fun and necessity and like to help others with them).
That's at least one alternative to the current dillema.
P.S.:
I'm certainly missing all the inside information required to talk about your interna, your general & financial situation. I can only assume and observe from an outside perspective and hope that you find a way that satisfies your customers and makes you keep working on this amazing asset.
Deek