If you’re familiar with Unity and video game development then you are likely familiar with the Unity Asset Store. I recently came back to Unity after taking what I thought was going to be a short hiatus but ended up being over a year long (an eternity in Internet years) and found that I could not download a particular template from the Asset Store. Indeed, after adding the template to My Assets, I could not open the asset in Unity since the Download button was not clickable while the message below it stated:
Needs Unity upgrade to version xxxx.x.x
Sounds simple, right? It is and the issue can easily be resolved by simply upgrading your version of Unity. Here’s what happened and why:
How to keep Unity up to date and avoid embarrassment
When I first fired up Unity after my lengthy hiatus, I upgraded it to version 5.4.5p5. However, this was only an upgrade for the version 5.0.0 branch. The newer versions of Unity actually use the xxxx.x.x format, which is a date based format like 2019.1.10 for example. Clearly my time away had really kept me out of the loop, since not only had the Unity versioning numbers changed but Unity had also released the Unity Hub which is a desktop app to act as a centralized place to manage your Unity projects and to access all things Unity.
Note to self: subscribe to the Unity Blog to prevent even further embarrassment.
Long story short
In summary: If you run into this issue when trying to download assets from the Asset Store, you’re probably running a dusty old version of Unity. Your best bet is to install the Unity Hub and upgrade Unity to the latest version:
Download and install the Unity Hub
You can also find all Unity versions here:
Unity Download Archive