Direct freelance ecosystem inside Unity

So I was looking at the 3ds max subscription plans and got really frustrated. What used to cost ~3k Eur "own forever" now costs ~5k for 3 years. And I was like, man, I'm sure they can make 3ds max free and still make money on it if only they would put some more attention into their 3d marketplace.
And then suddenly another idea hit me on how autodesk could make money out of a supposedly free 3ds max: incorporated freelance bidding ecosystem.

But since autosuck would never do either, and while Unity has done a good job with the assetstore, I though to myself it might actually happen in Unity some day.

So here goes the idea: let's suppose you need a character, or some environment assets or maybe a script for your project. There is the assetstore, of course, but maybe you cannot find it there. Or perhaps you just bought a character, but can't quite make him/her animate the way you want to. You could easily find a freelancer online, but for anyone who has tried, you'd know it could be quite a hassle. With a direct freelance bidding you place an anonymous bid right inside Unity. Freelance Unity users review your "job" and place their hours and desired pay. So you select one, cloud upload your dummy scene or prefab, the freelancer works on it and shares it back once done. You review it right inside Unity and if you're happy pay; Unity makes their 10% or whatever, and everybody is happy. Could this actually work?

 

That would be pretty cool. I'd probably use it weekly and daily at times.

 

It's been suggested before. Problem is it becomes a minefield of legalities and community management issues. I don't see Unity taking it on any time soon.

 

There is a company that does something similar with programmers. Only instead of the client picking a freelancer they have the client place the request and the payment and the programmers that are proven to be good at that specific field of programming would get a notification, then whoever wants could do the job and the client would chose who's work to use.
I don't know if you're required to pay before getting the product, but there probably is a system to help ensure the clients don't scam freelancers.

The problem with that system, at least in my eyes, is that this way freelancers can easily end up working without getting paid, which in terrible if it was a bigger task in question and if you're just starting to work you're likely not going to get paid on many of the jobs you take on.
And with a big number of clients and freelancers there will be really low prices which would be great for clients but will turn down a lot of good freelancers.

Back to your suggestion, searching for a freelancer through this system every time you need something done would probably be tedious and you'd probably end up hiring the same person anyway because you'd know they can do it, so instead it would be easier to just go through profiles of freelancers eg. on linkedin or here in the job section and chose someone to be your artist or programmer.
Also that 10% fee you suggested is probably going to be a deal-breaker for most people, so this wont be a viable business plan.

 

The Job Offers forum seems a lot easier.

A serial-entrepreneur I once knew relied heavily on short-term offshore devs back before anybody called it "offshore" and he ordered them up through some website he found. It worked a lot like what zoran404 just described. He listed the work (I believe he paid to join the site initially), various devs bid on the job, he could review their credentials, he'd select one and pay up front, 50% of the pay went to the dev when the work was done, the other 50% was released when he indicated satisfaction. There was plenty of history data available so you really couldn't screw somebody more than once or twice.

Oh and the last step of that process was that he'd call me to fix the garbage code he'd just bought, lol.

 

Those are some really good points. In fact, I now realize why it's not such a good idea tbh..

Lol. Precisely. The problem we've actually had in the past is sharing assets. I.e. fixing a halfway job to me is nowhere as bad as leaking art / code to someone you don't know. That's why I was just thinking of a way around it.