The asset store as a concept is great, and as bigzer said it’s one of Unity’s big successes. From a consumer perspective there IS a lot of junk on the store, but there is a lot of great stuff as well which adds a lot of equity to using Unity as a system. They were very smart to open up access to their users and to provide not just a marketplace, but a way for their users to actually make money with Unity!
Everyone dreams of making it big with the next biggest game. It’s unlikely, but not impossible. But what is extremely unlikely is to make the next biggest game without a seriously huge investment of your time and resources. The asset store allows people to make some money without the same investment of time and resources. It’s allowed me and many other people to focus on specific aspects of gaming and design and supply solutions to the community, and make money doing it.
the Utopian idea of providing useful tools to the community for free is awesome and I can support it as an idea… but for me in my situation I would not be able to contribute my time and resources to building these things if there was no money incentive to do it. Unity realized this earlier than most, and made it possible, which is one reason that they became as popular as they have. I hope UE4 takes this idea to heart.