Rampant piracy of your asset
Oh, that. Do you have any figure on this? Doesn't Unity send you some data about it?
Do they have a policy to block illicit developers from publishing with pirated assets?
Source Code plagiarism
I haven't seen any copy, at least in the US/EU market.
Strong Asset Store Competitors
Well, the main one which wasn't even a lookalike got integrated into Unity and that's not going to change much.
There have been discussions about how the Asset Store can change to help with making publishing a product more feasible because as it stands it is extremely difficult to make a single product which never charges upgrade fees. Inevitably sales will slow down once you have saturated your target demographic which leaves you in a position where income is now minimal and unsustainable and offering no capital for you to pursue maintenance.
I would not find it scandalous to have a small paid upgrade for Playmaker 1.9x LTS version and a larger price for the major push of Playmaker 2.
So if you paid for PM 1, you will not have to pay unless you want to upgrade to the LTS version, so the money will cover the costs of updates to make sure it remains afloat.
PM 2 would therefore be a new product, with a new UID on the Asset Store; a new item in other words.
I don't know when PM really hit its peak market but it's somehow of a niche product, only a portion of Unity's market share and PM 1 has been out for many many years now. There is just that much money one can run with before hitting a wall.
I agree that the tool could be seen as somehow underpriced considered the time it's been supported. Yes, it is not a standalone tool and remains dependent on Unity (although I wonder if it could be made cross-tool, including OS engines like Godot), but it is a colossal tool nevertheless which, perhaps for budgetary reasons, has not been able to produce enough communication in proportion to its high technical value.
I also agree that you could consider some supplementary functions to become priced as extra items. A few ones though because it's obvious PM wouldn't work so well without the support from a few generous people from the community who did all of it for free.
That circumstance leads to either A) Annual version upgrades or B) Subscriptions. The general publisher community favors option A which means they try to publish a major update every year and will stop adding new features to older versions. This makes the old versions stable, but doesn't include new features. It's essentially passive subscription if you are a vested user.
'A' was the basic model used by all companies before they decided a subscription would be better to make more money and cover all costs, including support of some older versions if the company started to have a large catalog of old versions to maintain.
Playmaker is not there yet so 'A' seems classic and fair and the Asset Store's lack of subscription model blocks publishers anyway.
But it also forced users who would usually skip one or two yearly versions to pay every year then and the extra costs could be felt.
There was also the number creep: version 2, 3... 15, 16. But this isn't exactly bad, especially if a new version is released every 1.5-2 years. Not everybody plays Google's Chrome insane version-numbering game.
The reality is that with a subscription, one never owns anything. Some people might not like this at all.
It however obviously has the advantage mentioned above, namely the low entry fee.
But a student version with limited functions would be nice too, again, available as another separate item. Perhaps it's about time HG deploy a full catalog of several products?
Since the Asset Store doesn't even support a subscription system at this point is unlikely that PM2 - if it's even a separate product - would go with a subscription method since it would have to be entirely off-store and that really just doesn't make sense. Some publishers have done that, but it's not a great approach unless you have a bunch of enterprise customers or something.
In terms of subscription vs one-time-fee licensing, most asset store users that have been surveyed expressed that they prefer the latter but there were a non-trivial number that prefer subscription. Sometimes we don't realize it but the Subscription model is basically industry standard at this point. Autodesk, Adobe, Microsoft, Unity, Substance, etc are all doing subscription models. Almost everything else is subscription based too, everything from streaming music, movies, shopping, grocery store memberships - all subscription model.
Basically the point is that there's no support on the asset store for regular assets doing subscriptions, but there is interest in adding it at scale in the future. Whether it is a new asset or an update is up to Alex and whether or not there are any technical issues with making it an update versus a new product.
It's pushed to appliances, to TVs, to cars.
So you never own anything. It's the end of private property which has been a staple of our civilizational model for eons. Which is therefore very surprising that it became so widely accepted in the US (as per Jean's remark, which the same could be said about pay-and-forget spirit too which I think many people are still clinging to). But it's not like Silicon Valley giants really cared and unless a political power forces companies to provide paid versions of their SaaS too, this will not change anytime soon. So you better get used to subscription.
It's also the model used by Unity. Which means that outside of non-commercial, personal or scholarly projects that can work in a totally free Unity environment, even if you owned a paid version of PM, without a Unity subscription you would not get anywhere, meaning that I wouldn't even be surprised if a full subscription system were to become enforced in 4-5 years from now.
