Let's talk ASSETS FLIPPERS , should Asset store publishers stop including Demo scenes ?

Hi unity devs especially Asset Store publishers

Can I request something ? a lil bit crazy ? tell me how practical is this ..
Don't include example scenes ! If anyone is playing indie games will understand what I'm saying , I suggest using sketchfab for demonstration ..I'm requesting this from every asset store publisher , its so sad ppl are abusing these examples I know legally they have the right to use it but what ppl are doing is hurting the reputation of indie devs especially unity devs .
And you who flip assets to create these games ...why don't you take a moment and realize you can be original even with using these prefabs ? Just don't use the example scene , create your own its not hard you have the tools . especially for a game you're selling for $15 ( ori and the blind forest was released for $20 ) .
Watch this ..at least the first 7 minutes

just a thought guys , as someone who constantly play indei games this become very bad ! and it tuen off gamers whenever they see unity logo .

No offence to the asset creator Mr Lonly , your assets are awesome and quality .
Its these lazy devs put us on shame .

 

An example of a good use of pre made assets is a game called "Good bye My King "
they are using for thier interiors levels a pack called "Alchemist's house ".
but they actually use them to dress the levels as they change every time .

 

and this what i'm exactly talking about !

 

If we don't provide a demo scene or practical examples of how to use the stuff then it significantly reduces the quality and value of our product and that is an unacceptable adjustment.

The deal is the customer gives us money and we give them stuff. What they legally do with that stuff is really none of our business.

 

Asset flips are a complete non-issue. Of the literal thousands of games released on Steam, maybe a dozen actually qualify as "asset flips" and nobody would even know they exist if it wasn't for the fact that a bunch of youtubers point at them and scream as if they're an epidemic, when in reality they're a minor case of the sniffles your cousin Jimmy caught.

 

How about a no?

Only developers care about asset flippers, and only some of the developers.

If I were buying anything from asset store, I'd need demo scene to see how it is supposed to be used. If there's no demo scene, that's an auto-fail on developer's side. If there's no demo scene because developer is afraid of asset flipping, then I'd be very tempted to never buy anything from them again, because they apparently do not understand how the store product is supposed to be done.

Asset flipping is a non-issue, and when you publish anything on the store, you permit it by default.

 

^ Agree.

Of all the things in the world that are terrible, people spamming Steam with demo scenes rates about a 0.01 on the terriblosity scale.

 

If someone is stupid enough to remove a game from their selection because of the engine it was developed with, then they weren't worth having as a customer to begin with. People like that won't just stop at the choice of engine when looking for something to complain about.

 

No. Who cares I bet if someone made a good game no would care if it was made with unity. If someones going to be an eltist I wouldnt want there money anyway

 

I say who cares about the asset flippers. They are insignificant. However, having a demo to see how an asset is used is priceless.

 

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of people who claim to hate Unity and refuse to play any games made with Unity have already enjoyed playing games made in Unity. I talked to a person recently who said he would never play a game made in Unity. When I asked the guy for examples of good games that he enjoys playing, at least half of his favorite games were made in Unity. The truth is there are good and bad games made in every engine.

 

This too. I get the feeling that 90% of internet randos who say they hate Unity say it because they're children and just copying what some youtuber they idolize said. None of them actually know or care how game engines work. If you're really worried, just tell them your game was made with CryUnrealTek 2019 Ultimate Power Edition, and they will never know the difference.

 

Hells no.

Assets should include more demo scenes, not less. The best assets I've used have three or four demos.

Like mentioned before, asset flips are an imaginary problem conjoured up by YouTubers to get views.

 

Agree with all the previous comments. Demo scenes are a must. Don't care at all about flippers. Worry about what you make, not what others make. It's a non issue.

 

True. We must think bigger.
We must remove the computers. If only we remove everyone's computers from their homes, online stores wouldn't have to filter asset flipped games.

 

Demo scenes with assets are a must. The demo scene is an important part of the documentation for the asset.

Asset flipping, such as somebody posting games built directly from the UnitZ demo scene, does not directly hurt people. A bunch of games posted using the UnitZ asset does not ruin anybody's gaming experience. For the most part, Steam's algorithms tend to hide that stuff from most people. Steam has never recommended any UnitZ games to me. If Steam does show me a UnitZ game in the future, I can simply click "Not Interested", and then Steam's algorithms should automatically hide UnitZ games.

Some YouTubers see a lot of recommendations for UnitZ games because those YouTubers are literally buying those games and reviewing them to create hilarious content about the topic. Steam's algorithms continue to recommend UnitZ games to those YouTubers because those YouTubers are buying those games.

If any person buys a UnitZ game, Steam's refund system can be used to undo the purchase.

 

Asset flipping is much less concerning to me than some dolt putting together 20 minutes of inane rambling about a house model. Flippers are excellent human beings compared to YouTube tools like that.

 

Actually, lets not? I see the point of view of where the term "Asset Flip" came from, but it's a misleading term as to what the problem actually is.

The problem with a so-called "Asset Flip" isn't that it uses assets, it's that it's a poor product. There will always be people making poor products, and thanks to the Internet there will always be people calling them out on it.

That said, if people are going to get called out then they should at least get called out on the right thing. Developers should not be encouraged to avoid 3rd party assets. That just arbitrarily makes game dev even harder than it already is. Why would anyone want that?

What they maybe should get called out on is trying to sell stuff that's not of commercial quality. And if all you can do is buy other people's stuff and jam it together, then chances are you're not making stuff of commercial quality, just because you haven't built that level of skill yet. Nobody wants to make low quality stuff, they do it because they don't know any better yet. (This goes back to my battered and worn example of not charging for concert tickets while you're still learning to play your guitar.)

The message should not be "stop using 3rd party assets", it should be "keep honing your craft before you try to charge for your work".

- - -

For what it's worth, even good games get "called out" on using pre-made assets from time to time. Anyone remember the crate/barrel "scandal" with Half Life 2, when someone recognised an asset from another game and assumed Valve had stolen it? Of course what had actually happened was that both Valve and some other developer had purchased 3rd party stuff from the same place.

 

If i dont see a demo scene i dont buy the assest.

 

This may be slightly off topic, but I've always wondered why a lot of the things under "completed projects" are being sold as assets as opposed to being sold as games. Like, if I had something that was THAT polished and completed, why would I decide to sell it as a template? Idk. I mean I guess you can't stop someone from "flipping" it, but the original developer could have sold it once on Steam as opposed to 20 lazy copy cats that never turn a profit and subsequently tarnish their reputation...

 

Because tools and services required to develop games are often more successful than the games themselves. You may often find it likened to selling shovels for the gold rushes that have occurred through history. Only a few prospectors made their money digging up gold. Most of them made it by selling shovels and other supplies.

One example was Samuel Brannan who, after having a customer make a purchase from him in gold, bought up all the mining supplies in his area and sold them for a profit. According to Wikipedia he sold them for $15 each which would have been the equivalent of about $460 now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
http://www.in2013dollars.com/1849-dollars-in-2017

Unity Technologies is a more recent example of this. They started off as a game developer but shifted focus to a game engine developer after they noticed an absense of affordable quality game engines on the market.

 

Hells to the no!

Asset = PlatformerPro, Query = t:scene
​

 

Probably only true for starving artists and indies, but regardless, that makes me sad.

 

The assets are typically just frameworks, not polished games. They can form a good base to build a game, but they normally aren't a good game just on their own.

 

I think you give humanity too much credit.

 

I need to upvote this without liking it. Where's the Vodka button?

 

If you want to be depressed Gamasutra does an excellent job of it. About 57% of all indie game developers made under $500 in game sales according to their 2014 salary survey. Solo indie developer salary averaged $11,000. Being part of a team brought the average salary way up though.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_the_2014_Indie_Salary_Report.php

 

Almost certain professionalism is also way higher for team developers, who actually finish a game to achieve a salary. Someone must be twice as professional to work with other people (successfully).

Silly lone developers who release their first buggy game in their own sweet time bring down the statistics.

 

Wouldn't surprise me if the soloists were almost entirely hobbyists.

 

Well, soloists willingly doing something that brings them no apparent salary or income, not being accountable to anyone else for it ... by default they're hobbyist.

 

But are we talking about models assets or game templates?

 

why not simply use a license agreement, deny any use of models, textures, etc. (except code) in commercial projects? so everybody still has example scenes "??"

 

Doing that will make said asset pretty much useless.

 

Why?

No one has yet demonstrated that 'asset flipping' is actually a problem. Much less that it is one worth solving.

Let's not go fixing things that aren't broken.

 

I sometimes think of it as an opportunity. There's a fair few games set in say the "Star Wars" universe. It's only a little twist on marketing for asset flips to become something set in "My awesome assets" universe where the familiar would be welcomed..

 

Look at this guy, calls himself Ubisoft or something, somehow got a hold of AC: Black Flag's source code and flipped the assets, probably took him 5 minutes!

 

So basically take commercial products and make them non-commercial for the sole reason that they're easy to use - but still charge for them.

Okay.

This thread is full of surprises. I'm not entirely sure it's a good idea for me to continue opening it.

 

Well, it could reduce your faith in humanity to a negative number. It is fun when it happens.

I don't understand the fuss abotu asset flipping, though. Asset provider sells stuff to customers, and what customer does with the stuff is not provider's problem, as long as the customer adheres to EULA. So "asset flipping" is permitted by default.

 

Any gamer complaining about "asset flipping" doesn't have a clue what it takes to actually make a game.

And I'd wager that any developer complaining about it... probably doesn't, either.

 

That would make all of those art assets useless.

 

I though the whole asset flipping thing was mostly just something for some people to get animated on youtube about.

 

He should remove Inside from his gaming collection then. This means he is talking about things he does not understand.


Asset store publishers can and should use all unity content available to demonstrate the asset providing that they're very clear that they aren't selling the Unity assets. I think by this point everyone recognises Unity assets on the asset store and understands the purpose of them is to provide a demonstration scene.

This isn't anything to do with steam at all. There isn't any such concept as "flipping" for asset store. People know they aren't buying the Unity demo scenes.

How I rate assets

However I will send a message to asset developers that I'm very unlikely to rate an asset 5 stars. I will if it meets the following criteria though, with one star awarded for each:

1. The asset is well documented with written docs +1
2. The asset installs to Plugins +1
3. The demo scenes can be omitted with one single click when importing +1
4. The asset doesn't do allocations after Startup +1
5. The asset performs well, and does what it says on the tin +1

As you can see I pretty much stopped rating assets at all. They are simply not up to my standards. I suppose I am too demanding.

 

Perhaps not - but your preferred layout is different from mine. Most assets which fail for you will fail for me by MY criteria, though, so we are probably both miserable gits.

I'll subtract up to two stars for bad/missing documentation. My preferred file layout is to have everything I need to use an asset in its own folder of any obvious name, and everything demo-related either in a separate folder at the same level or a package (also with a nice folder layout).

But allocations after startup? I can think of a number of asset types where this is impossible to get rid of

Flippage:
I wouldn't know about it if people didn't keep posting the same videos by the same annoying talking head going on about a limited number of attempts at this crap. This is right up there with worrying about piracy of the game you haven't even started on.

 

What is essentially

Nice info!

2. Does this mean compiling scripts into a dll file? What if someone wants to look at the code?

4. What does this mean? :-\

 

Reflecting on my rather limited memories of youtube rants about this stuff a few years ago, I guess it was fair enough to draw attention to specific instances of this stuff when it helped people to recognise what projects on crowdsourcing platforms were actually half-baked rubbish with little chance of turning into a meaningful game.

 

If you install to a plugin folder, the asset won't be part of the recompile process when you change the contents of one of your scripts, I think. Plugins are part of a separate compile process but as I recall, this is only useful for editor plugins as the contents of the plugins directory aren't compiled in builds.

I could be completely wrong about this, it's been ages since I messed around with assets in this capacity.

 

Although the folder named Plugins will be searched by Unity for dll's, dll's are not the only thing you can put in there.

Putting stuff in there does affect script compilation order, but I'm assuming hippocoder wants his assets to live in there for reasons of personal project organisation standards that he follows. I'm not sure I agree that it should be a standard all assets should strive to follow, since I personally only want stuff that needs to be in that folder to be there, and I organise my projects file structure differently.

 

I'm rusty on this subject too but I think you are probably a mix of right and wrong with some of those details. Plugins directory stuff can certainly work in builds and there are also some per-project settings in the editor where you can tell it which dlls belong to which different build platform targets (eg 64 bit windows).

As for avoiding recompilation of everything every time you change one script file, there is some new stuff in 2017.2 which offers a new way to address this issue:

Assembly Definition Files

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bykxs2qcd6PSUTJhYkJySS1hazA/view

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/example-project-assembly-definition-files.482313/

 

Huh, I seem to remember some caveat about the plugins folder but I guess I must be misremembering then.

 

Unity compiles in two passes. Scripts in Plugins are compiled in the first pass. Scripts outside of Plugins are compiled in the second pass. Unity will not recompile the first pass unless you modify a script in the first pass. This really speeds up compile times. (This post goes into deep detail.)