A little backstory about this- the most popular 2D plugin for Unity was NGUI (now I would say 2D Toolkit and NGUI are equally popular, but 2D Toolkit has more momentum).
The guy who created NGUI was hired by Unity about a year ago to work on their new built in UI / 2D system. And, this is what he's created. It's still massively lacking in features compared to the 3rd party 2D plugins but I think this is just a start and we should expect to see a lot of great improvements over time.
These are the 3 most popular 2D plugins for Unity, and they're all less than $100:
Personally I use 2D Toolkit and I know for a fact he has plans to make his plugin use the new built in 2D Physics system and I'm sure he's looking at any other ways he can squeeze better performance and useability out of the new Unity 2D features.
I would love to stop using a 3rd party 2D plugin but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
The guy who created NGUI was hired by Unity about a year ago to work on their new built in UI / 2D system. And, this is what he's created. It's still massively lacking in features compared to the 3rd party 2D plugins but I think this is just a start and we should expect to see a lot of great improvements over time.
These are the 3 most popular 2D plugins for Unity, and they're all less than $100:
2D Toolkit - $65 (http://u3d.as/content/unikron-software-ltd/2d-toolkit/1Wi)
NGUI - $95 (http://u3d.as/content/tasharen-entertainment/ngui-next-gen-u...)
Uni2d - $90 (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3826)
Personally I use 2D Toolkit and I know for a fact he has plans to make his plugin use the new built in 2D Physics system and I'm sure he's looking at any other ways he can squeeze better performance and useability out of the new Unity 2D features.
I would love to stop using a 3rd party 2D plugin but I don't see it happening anytime soon.