The Asset Flip (The Jimquisition)

You know I've realized that a lot of people cannot see that. I think for some reason if a game is simply in 3D instead of 2D they are unable to actually see the game itself or believe the game has more depth than if they saw the same thing in 2D. To me I see basically a mix of Space Harrier and Battlezone. It is an interesting phenomenon. On the plus side I do appreciate the greater than normal degree of interaction being able to level the buildings. It's always nice to be able to change the world

 

I will buy because I like the artwork, well most of it.

 

I guess I spent too much time on the asset store as I directly spotted a new asset flip on the greenlight page without even clicking the game submission page....

Here we go with Turbo Snake:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=530415736

Directly taken from Hungry Snake:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/25109

At least, there have been some small changes (background color, font color and increased speed of the snake) but well, hum.... My next (free) game is vaguely inspired by Snake, maybe I should put it on Greenlight afterall....

EDIT: Oh My God.... I just checked the profile of the "dev" and it's in fact the guy who made "Journey Of The Light" aka "the broken game with only one level" scam...

 

Well to be honest a lot of these assets in the asset store are PD asset flipping in themselves so well if they can profit off such behavior well then why not? If they don't profit and still learn and enjoy that's good too. The PD asset flippers in the asset store presumably have the skill it takes to create an asset that can be easily flipped to the app stores. If not then those asset creators need out of the asset store more than the asset flippers need out of the app stores.

So I'm not going get myself upset because amateur game makers are using Unity and the Asset Store to publish games to the app stores. That experience is important in & of itself because they can make games and learn what work about those games and not but never need to publish to an app store but the only way they will learn to publish, advertise, IAP, press releases, salesmanship, and all those things is to do those things. If these rank amateurs must learn those salesmanship skills it's time those indies that imagine these rank amateurs are hurting their income learn to do the same thing.

 

Sorry, English is not my first language: by "PD" do you mean "Project Demo" or does this acronym means something else?

 

PD means public domain and it's a type of modern legalese in the USA and on the internet at least - similar to the new CC0, but CC0 was expressly created as a way to make the artist's intent clear. Public domain is a legal term that basically says businesses can't add to their portfolio all types of past performances and art works that are and will be in the public domain in order to prevent free access to those performances and art works by other private and public entities. So all those old European folksongs and classical compositions are public domain for example.

 

Yeah, I have noticed some Flip the flippers

Someone does a short tutorial series on Youtube on how to make a game
A week later someone sells it on the asset store
2 weeks later, 10 people add it to steam based on the asset store.

i think Steam will take care of itself because of the $100 fee. Some of these garbage games are going to have a really hard time recouping that cost, especially if they are competing against 5 other people who flipped the same asset at nearly the same time. Or do they really make money that easily with these garbage games?

 

I was impressed with Jim's singing voice.

 

Thought Jim's hair was the best.

 

So, using assets that are sold in the assetstore automatic qualities a dev as a ASSET FLIPPER? I understand that UNCHANGED assets consider a flip, but that game you mentioned used different assets. Changed weapons, models etc.

 

If it's not mechanically different from the demo of the asset then it's a flip. If it's not visually changed from the asset packs and they aren't cohesive, it's 'cobbled'.

 

hmm then why purchase complete unity projects? Where is the reason? Like this Hammer2 game. If i change 100% artwork but mechanic is the same, its a flip? What if I program hammer2 by myself, identical mechanic - is that consider a clone? And if I use the hammer2 artwork but my code. Than its a cloned asset flip?

 

As jim puts it, those aren't complete projects. No project on there should be thought of as 'complete'. If you change all of the artwork, it's still going to play the exact same as the demo, just look different. And those demos are very lacking in features to be considered complete.

Yes It's very hard to mimic something exactly without knowing the source code. Making it yourself introduces quirks unique to your game and developing it from the ground up makes it increasingly likely that features will turn out different or that you'll have additional mechanics. If it's recognizable but different, it's called a clone, which can be a compliment.

This is probably the least likely reason someone would buy it, but if you created a unique experience then this example you've given would be totally passable as a game.

To rank them...

Changing just the art - lowest, people are used to buying DLC that reskins certain elements. There is no need for another build of the complete game for a reskin.

Making a clone - If it's trying to be hammer 2, it won't get a lot of respect, but it will be more positively received than a recompile of the actual project. This is a negative sort of clone.

Using the art assets to make something else - Sometimes people dislike seeing assets reused in a lot of games, but if the game is good, it will grow at least a minor following.

A game inspired by a game - if you are inspired by the concepts from hammer2 instead of trying to clone each mechanic, it will do wondrously. Check out cities skylines. That's an indie attempt at the concepts of SimCity - and it did even better than SimCity! Speaking of this option, I believe it's stated that hammer2 is an indie clone of GTA.

--edit

To clarify, the best reason to buy a 'complete' project is if you like a lot of the features there and would like to see how they're coded to work together in the same environment. It's like a themed tutorial you would otherwise have to find multiple unrelated tutorials for and then figure out how to combine them. It is helpful to people who learn by picking through examples.

 

No, because that statement then makes any entity using the built-in input/output controller scenes from Unity as asset flippers and clearly then the target of the derision is people publishing games that's aren't appreciably different from a complete project in game play mechanics that aren't big famous studios.

How do you want to control that game? With the only game mechanics controllers Unity provides? Well, you asset flipper.

You say even the HW game controllers requires such SW game controllers? Well, who would of thought. Now excuse me while I write a game controller that uses the mic to listen to the surrounds so I can use the vapors to control my game and avoid being made fun of as an asset flipper.

I don't care if they call me an asset flipper. It's logically weak and implicitly a slap at the businesses the blogger likely uses to make their own games. That's their marketing angle for their blog.

 

Well I don't think very many people consider being able to control a character a feature that is unique to each game

As a jester I respect your taking my slightly ambiguous point to that extreme. To clarify - if your feature set includes nothing other than the premade / purchased ones, you probably don't have a very feature rich or interesting game. I mean you could combine several or in the future unity might have walking, running, swimming, flying, climbing etc out of the box and then it'll be a different story. But games USUALLY don't do very well if their one and only feature is moving.

Beginner's Guide and other walking simulators with narratives can do well, but you have to know how to pull that off. I would include telltale on that category but I still classify them as glitchy media player that randomly pauses and requires you to press a button to resume.

 

I disagree - plenty of music singles released the 1st time fail but become wildly successful when discovered by the right social group. It happens quite frequently to say nothing of remixes, re-releases of already once before popular music, new performances. This is all a fact of the business world. The Jimquistion is going to look silly when a flipped game becomes a success if that hasn't already happened. Why yes it has because that's been the complaint about Zynga and numerous other publishers of games.

It's a topic as flipped as the games that are flipped that are being complained about.

Flippers flipping to flip flippers.

 

I thought this thread was about doing the right thing If you flip a completed project under another name, that is totally not cool to the original author.

 

Nothing wrong with flipping as the business world thrives on middle men. Avon, Amway, and scores of businesses pass down unaltered products usually under house brand and other brand names with price markups depending on the niche consumers the products are targeting. These flipped games do the same and don't charge. Not a big deal.

 

The demo of the original asset is free
The flipped game is available for $2-$20

They do charge, and they take advantage of people who don't know the free version exists.

 

Not only do they charge money, but once they get greenlit and released early access they never follow through an implement any of the promised features nor fix any bugs, they merely release build of the demo that comes with the asset and then sit back collecting thousands of dollars from people who do not know any better, banning anyone from the game forums that complains...

 

That is the worst. If you're going to sell people garbage you should at least let them enjoy themselves ridiculing your product on your forums... like many of us do with diablo 3

 

I'm auto-quoting myself as the same guy just put a new entry:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540134461

Which is in fact "X-Racer" which is half-priced this month for level11/pro users:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540134461

Main difference is going from 3rd-person view to 1st-person view. As this asset has already been submitted unsuccesfully at least 2 times before on greenlight (to my knowledge), it's kind of red-flagged.

PS: Gotta love the "Playable Demo After 500 Votes!" as the demo of the original is already online:
http://www.deercatgames.com/xracer

 

I think this is the second link you wanted to list in that post:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/35344

Good catch, though. I did not recognize the X-Racer asset until you mentioned it.

 

The words some of the Steam commenters use (the ones complaining) are kind of overboard. Things like "stolen from the Unity asset store" "scamming us again with another asset flip" and generally just out of their way attacking.

It's possible the dev may have hacked in to the Unity asset store and stole the asset but I doubt it. In fact I think the odds are very high they didn't steal it and actually paid for it. Maybe these devs are out to scam people. I don't know about that part. I am sure some are scammers just because a % of people anywhere and everywhere are scammers.

The sensationalism the commenters are using with their words "thief" "stolen" makes it seem like these are quite possibly other devs jumping in every time they see an asset being sold.

Maybe they miss the part of these assets being created to be used for the dev's games. Unless the asset creators explicitly state "not to be resold as a game unless significant changes are made" these asset flippers are doing no wrong in throwing them out there other than helping to flood the market. It would be good to get some of these asset creators in here to hear their views on it. Like I am thinking the UnitZ asset developer doesn't care what or how a person is using the asset after they've paid their $50. In fact some of these asset creators I think are making these things with the whole idea of it being a sort of turn key instant game kit.

 

I agree those comments are going too far, but I'm not sure how I feel about what jim said recently. He found a game using the same monster asset pack that the slaughtering grounds used and said the game, whether or not it is competently developed, is a joke because the assets are famous for being in a terrible game.

On 1 hand I disagree because I could probably make a decent game out of those assets. On the other hand, the screenshots cluttered with those assets invoke strong memories of the slaughtering grounds.

So, a question for you all. Would you prefer 2 games with identical assets but different gameplay... or the same base game with different models? I can't really decide which is worse. For me personally of course gameplay trumps all, but from a marketing perspective I can see how a reskin would do better than 2 games that looked like the slaughtering grounds.

 

If people are flipping anyway, then why not do it... just do it properly. You're not going to stop it. Haters gonna hate.

 

Imho that is a prime example of why I think the whole art-asset-pack concept is flawed. If I'm being honest I think I'd rather have 2 mechanically identical games with different art assets and music than see the same assets in two different games. It kills the immersion for me to recognize something from somewhere else and if that something else was a S***ty game I think it would diminish my experience even further.

 

I think artists should be involved for anything that's going to be sold commercially. The monster pack featured in the aforementioned games aren't the greatest quality but I'm sure the artist is not proud to have their work featured in them.

Critics gonna criticize
consumers gonna consume... and then refund

 

Have you never heard of the idea of digital actors (from d2) you wouldnt say oh bruce willis stared in that S***ty movie any movie he's in is going to suck (well Im sure some people do). As long as it looks like a cohesive design why should someone spend hundreds of dollars reskinning there assets, although I guess maybe its not a bad idea. I guess we will wait and see what happens the next time jim lampoons someone for reskinning assets from the asset store.

 

A bit unrelated to your whole message but I just discovered(through a Positech tweet) that Uncrowded (UnitZ carbon copy) currently achieved to be the cheapest game on Steam (apart from F2P obviously) at just 0.02€
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=ut2#sort_by=Price_ASC&filter=ut2&page=1

2 games with identical assets: depends what the assets are like if those are assets like trees or abstract backgrounds it doesn't matter but when the prefab is "right in your face", it really takes you "out of the game" IMO (in the Jim Sterling video, I remember clearly the zombie with the prisoner outfit, that's the kind of thing to avoid rather than using the same textures of crackled floor)

2 games with the same base but different assets are way more interesting simply because a determined audio-visual aspect won't necessarly reach/appeal to the same public. To take my own example....
Here's the base template from the store (playable demo):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2093472/ShootingBubbleStarterKit/ShootingBubbleStarterKit.html
Here's my version:
http://alainfrancke.itch.io/dreaming-the-sky

If you had to take the same template asset as a freelance and the company ask you to target an audience of 10-year old girls you would likely have to make a product that would be very much different than my version even if it's the same game.

It's actually an interesting question because the game I'm currently working will come in 2 different audio-visual styles to appeal to 2 different public and yet the game will still be the same. In some ways, it's kind of like when people like to fully customize their character in a MMO so they can fit the game more to their liking (I always prefer playing as girl/woman in games so I'm glad when there's the option)

 

I saw that I don't even have an opinion on that game... because it's not even worth giving my 2 cents.

Yea I meant 1:1 for both scenery (things that stand out like a row of buildings) and entities wandering around the game world.

I was talking more about unitz clones in which nothing is changed Templates are fine - a lot of unreal games depend on them

What sets you apart from the examples I refer to is...

Effort

 

We are waaaaay outside the norm. I also can look at new Steam games and pick out Unity assets right away. In fact, when I see new stuff appear on the Unity store, I can almost predict how long it will take before someone makes a Steam game using nothing but that asset.

But the average player is not that knowledgeable about the Unity store.

This is my quote ´ if someone is playing my game, and they recognize my ´ferns´ from some other game, then my game has gameplay issues far beyond artwork´. Your game should be interesting enough, and unique enough that using a village-building pack, or a plant pack, or a UI pack should not even register with your players. These games go way past that though... and that is the games Jim picks on. Those games have no gameplay, or very redundant and simply gameplay to the point where the ONLY thing even noticeable about them is the re-used artwork.

 

It looks like jim actually does some good. He did a vid on halloween games today, and already halloween forever is on the front page of itch.io so people are actually paying for a game on itch.

 

The guys that post those games (technically) use asset store for its intended purpose: buy assets, put them into games, and sell those games. I'm not sure why Jim is freaking out because of that. When you give gamemaking tools to everybody, of course there will be a lot of junk.

I didn't like the video, because jim pretty much criticized the idea of using assets from store in games.

Creators got paid, they agreed to possibility of something like that happening when they submitted the assets, so everything is good.

What matters is RESULT, not Effort.

You can dig a pond with teaspoon. There will be a lot of effort involved, but results won't be good.

 

Stealing this expression.

 

That pond would look a lot more unique than two guys who used the same backhoe to dig one ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Sorry to have ruined it a moment later then, sir.

--edit

Unitz is putting results above effort. The results weren't big but the result : effort ratio is off the charts.

 

Sure. And when some yahoo put a coconut shell on a stick and said, "We can dig faster with this..." someone probably objected.

Here's my thought... if I wanted to make a first person shooter game, even in the slightest, and you told me I could download a working game for $50 and start in the second half of development (after the groundwork has been laid) a.k.a. "the fun part" (before polish and testing) where I am just making up enemies and levels and weapons and adding a hilarious story... and you told me I could sell this thing for actual money... that's what I would do.

And if you would criticize me for that, well... haters gon' hate.

 

I'm just glad this is my hobby so $ isn't making 50-90% of my decisions.

Jim himself says it's not bad to start with a template. It's selling a template that is being frowned upon.

 

And the result of selling something for which there are a dozen other literally identical versions, some of which are free, is that you make no money while lowering consumer confidence in the store that allowed you to sell it. The fact that one of those UnitZ clones has now lowered its price to $0.02 should be proof of that.

The people Jim is criticizing don't do the second part of your scenario. And that is the point of the criticism. I'm not sure why so many people are willfully ignoring that and getting butt hurt over what Jim complains about. I do understand the backlash against the backlash. It's not fair that a few bad apples are ruining the entire reputation of the asset store and assets in general. But that is not Jim's fault, and its not Unity's fault. It is the fault of the people who continue to do the first part of what you said without bothering to do the second. It is the fault of Steam for allowing it.

 

Which is why anyone with any sense at this point should be considering an alternative to the current "everything, by everyone" (to rip the line from Newgrounds) marketplace concept. You are in the same boat as everyone else (or same airplane) and it's going down. Nothing lasts forever, Steam and the app marketplaces were all the rage a few years ago but human stupidity has caught up to us. It's not impossible for good stuff to be seen but it is certainly harder than it needs to be because of all the noise.

Curation costs money. They probably make the bulk of their money from the top games, anyhow. So in the end... the Indie scene is just pocket change to them. Truthfully we're lucky you can still throw $1 games on Steam. I can forsee a day when they get sick of this negative PR and just shut it down.

 

Well there was a time where only few games got greenlit and steam curated the marketplace. Back then people were complaining about the walled-garden/monopoly. Now that they have opened the floodgates we start complaining about the masses of S***ty games that are released. I agree that the barrier to entry should be raised on steam or else we will end up with something like the mobile marketplaces. But I don't know if going back to the old model is the best solution and I'm pretty sure valve won't do that anyway. Maybe it is just a matter of raising the marketplace submission fee and tweaking the algorithms behind the voting to make it harder for games to get greenlit again.

And for the record: I think using game templates is a smart move and when I was working on an iOS game I did so myself. But I think you should still put in the same effort as if you had done it from scratch, only the 1-2 years of dev time on top of the template should get you farther than 1-2 years starting from scratch. In the end it should not be possible to tell which template you used when someone plays your game. If that is not the case you are doing it wrong imho. I bought a linedrawing starterkit for iOS where you land planes and helicopters on landing strips (like in "Flight Control"). I replaced every single art asset and about 99% of code to end up with a space shooter where you move fleets of spaceships, that automatically fire on targets in front of them, to battle fleets of opposing ships. Using the template just helped me get started as a beginner and I'd do it again.

Making a game 100% from assets is not immoral, it just isn't smart in my opinion. Telling your customers your game is something else than it is, is immoral though. Telling them "this game is just the start of a long development journey where we will get leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now" when in truth the have just released a game template with minor tweaks and don't intend to develop it further is NOT ok.
Whether or not releasing loads of crap games on steam is immoral is debatable, but that is an issue that has nothing to do with assets themselves, they just make it a lot easier to do so.

 

Yeah, a quick thing they could do is change the $100 fee to be per title and not per developer. But even still, if you have the mental capacity to take a screenshot, you will be able to easily sell 100 copies of a $1 game.

I also like the idea of an anti-hero if that could be done. Someone who purposefully takes all these templates from the asset store, and then sells them for $.01 Any time a ´competitor´ shows up, they use similiar screenshots from their own ´game´ that the other person is trying to use...and then has a legion of followers that post in those other games pointing out that the same game can be had for $.01. If that isn´t clear, just a person who takes any possible profits away from people who do nothing but flip a tutorial or demo from the asset store.

 

It won't change anything to tweak algorithms as it's still a popularity contest in itself. Like "Nuclear Shot" which got apparently much support from the Turkish community: just a quick and decent rise of "yes" votes would tick every box of any algorithms as long as there's no human-involved curation procedure.

And raising the fee would be quite a joke as it would be the equivalent of a 500$ lottery ticket (at 500$ you can be sure the number of entries will fall down). At least on console, when you had to buy a 1.500$ devkit, it had at least some technical purposes (that reminds me I should get a dev version of the Oculus).

That would be pretty pointless as most of the entries are a first-time for the devs if you follow Greenlight submissions regularly.

 

not really. Most of the really annoying ´developers´ who flip every tutorial or demo scene do it regularly. The clowns that Jim has so much fun with released 19 games in the past year. So instead of $100, that would be $1900 they would have to spend. The problem now is that once you paid that $100, it is like a green-light to spam whatever garbage you can throw together for games 2 to x

 

That was be hilarious.

 

How is that an issue? Let the market handle that.

Steam has refund policy, so anybody who doesn't like the game can ask for refund, leave negative review, and that'll be a big red warning flag for anybody who's investigating the "new" game currently.

As I said, people are criticize use of the asset store in the intended way. The goal of engines and toolkits like unity is to make game development EASY. And it is fairly common thing when people earn some money with little effort in the real world. Hard effort does not always pay off, and years of hard effort may be, in the end, unrewarded. There's also people that really get lucky by being in the right place at the right time with the right skills asking right questions and doing the right thing. Those can earn a lot. It is like winning a jackpot.

Jim specifically criticized "the very same zombie as in another game". And that's the part I didn't like. People reuse a lot of stuff in gamedev, you could just look at cgtextures, mocap libraries, etc. And guys like jim only criticize parts they notice, because all the other instances of massive reuse can be quite subtle.

Unitz guys got negative consequences for their decision. They could've earned MORE if they made better game. Instead they got peanuts and loads of negative rep.

I didn't like jim's video because he sounded like he believes that "game development MUST be hard, and anything that was done with little effort is junk". I don't agree with that idea. People should cooperate, reuse stuff, and tools should be available for anybody to try to implement their vision, and it should be easy. And if someone will go for a cash grab, let them do that too. Market will handle that, and if there's at least one person who bought their junk game and is happy with it, it was worth it. Everyone else can request a refund.

The whole criticizm thing reminds "arguments" you can occasionally hear on artistic forums. "Using grid is cheating". "Using wooden manniquins is cheating". "Digital art is cheating". "Photo manipulation is not real art". Also one guy said "Everything must be always drawn from imagination with no references, otherwise it is cheating". In case of art all that matters is the end result. No matter how many corners you cut, how many "cheating" techniques you used, if the result instills awe in your viewers, you did what had to be done. Unitz guys used the tools in the intended way. The result are junk, but there's no issue. No eula has been breached, and artists gave their permission. It is not even plagiarism, because they have permission - from unity store and original creator - to do what they did.

I don't remember who, but someone mentioned in the last thread that "developer" is literally a 13 years old teen. If that's true, then it is literally a kid making his first life mistakes. Leave the dude be. After stepping on couple of landmines, he might learn something eventually, and perhaps he'll be doing something more interesting than digital panhandling using unity's assets.

 

What people who say this don't understand is that stores like Steam saying, "No, this doesn't meet our standards" is one of the ways that the market does handle it. There is nothing in free market theory that says every store should sell every product. The market didn't handle it during the video game crash of the 80s. The market didn't handle it when Google Play became a cesspool of junk so bad that it is barely worth a developer's time to publish there. This story has played out over and over. Consumers need a place to go where they are assured of some level of quality. That's why Macy's exists alongside Dollar General. Having refunds may help a little, but if consumers are constantly refunding stuff even after spending more time than wanted sorting through crap, then eventually they stop buying altogether. Sure, the AAA guys will survive, and they'll probably keep Steam afloat, but it isn't going to be good for the indie developers that actually put out decent products and rely on those sales to meet payroll.

You are confusing 'make game development easy' with 'make selling games easy' Those two things are not the same. And Unity themselves have weighed in on the issue: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/07/16/asset-store-a-force-for-creative-goodness/

Here's a line from the blog post: "If you spot someone from the Dark Side misusing Asset Store content, or if you spot an example project “flipped” and uploaded as a game on an online marketplace, call them out & let the vendor know." You are getting upset and Jim for doing exactly what Unity themselves say should be done.

That's not what he said. He said that it used the same zombie as a notoriously bad game. The notion that you shouldn't associate your brand with something that has left a negative taste in the mouth of a substantial portion of your audience is not unique to Jim Sterling, it is not even unique to game development. It is sound advice across all commercial endeavors. In his latest Jimquisition, he does mention how all horror games use the exact same monster assets and how that degrades the horror experience because horror is supposed to be about the unknown. This is also true. If you've seen the same monster a thousand times before, it isn't going to scare you anymore.

Again, you are confusing it being easy to make games with it being easy to sell games. Jim is pretty lenient on the itch.io games he covers because those people aren't charging money for what they put out there. If you want to put something out there for money, if you want to sell that thing, you need some level of originality. You need some indication that you have put at least a bit of effort into making your product. Failing that, you will get trashed by reviews. One again, this transcends gaming and covers all commercial endeavors. Just like Unity doesn't have a "Make MMO" button, they don't have a "Make Money" button either. You can't expect to throw out unoriginal crap and be shielded from criticism simply because the tool you used to do so made it easy. Earning a living from game development is hard, and nobody is entitled to it.

It is not the responsibility of critics to research the age of developers. It doesn't matter how old the kid is. Once he decided that he was going to put something up on a store and charge money for it, he put his big boy pants on. If he wanted immunity because of his age, then he should have put it up for free on Kongregate or Itch.io.

 

I think he is more upset with the fact that people whom use things like the hospital asset from the store; also use the demo scene included in the asset AS IS in their own game. They do not take the time to construct their own hospital level with the asset pieces because that would take time and effort and asset flippers do not want to put in any effort in order to get their game out there.

 

That has no connection whatsoever to my previous post. Why do you even talk about "earning a living" and "entitlement" here?

Problems with your argument overall:
You appear to be confusing "specific electronic store" with "market". That's not the same thing. Video game crash of the 80s is market's way of "handling it". If you don't want it to happen, keep innovating. Also, the sure fire way to create a market crash is not "asset flips" (those are rare), but truckloads of minecraft clones and zombie games. Another way is if we keep raising the visual standards too high to the point where even big studios will be unable to handle them. So, we're heading towards next market crash anyway - due to large number of people trying to ride "me too" train. Basically, by concentrating on asset-flips, you lock your attention on minor non-issue, while there's actually big problem right next to you.

There are quite a lot of stores that try to sell every kind of product. Those are called supermarkets.

At this point it is quite safe to assume, that people will NOT stop buying games. If the market gets overflooded with junk, they'll be looking for reviews, and other means to figure out which is good purchase.

There will be no place where consumers will be guaranteed quality. All software is provided "as is, without warranty of any kind". It was always this way, and even big budget games can have ridiculous bugs on release. Also, it is not store's job to ensure quality. Consumer is the one voting with his wallet. However, it is store's job to assist the customer in finding the kind of item he would like. That's why we have suggestion systems in stores those days.

Being unable to make previously seen monster scary indicates problem with your team, not with the asset. Aliens: Isolation managed to handle overused Xenomorph beautifully.

It doesn't matter what unity blog says, because EULA takes precedence over it and blog posts are pretty much PR. Since "asset flipped" games exist in stores, it means there was no action taken against them.

You don't need originality to sell stuff. You need people who are willing to buy it. You also don't need any indication of effort either, because effort does not matter, only results.

Throwing garbage at people and expecting them to buy it is, apparently, a viable strategy in games with microtransactions and also in F2P titles.

Once again, the issue here is that Jim subscribes to "making games must be HARD!" philosophy AND he's criticizing services like asset store. Not sure if he even realizes that himself. Result matters more than effort (see teaspoon example), and it was not about "being shielded from criticism" either.

Frankly, the criticism of asset flips smells of envy, at least that's the impression I get. "This guy put less effort into his project and managed to sell 5 copies on steam!" kind of thing. I think the best course of action in this case is to ignore the guy, make better game, and live happily ever after.

 

I get that same impression from reading the Steam comments. I often wonder how many of the comments are actually from other devs rather than non-dev gamers.

We saw the same kind of thing happen with Flappy Bird. Loads of people said the guy was a fraud using bots to do fake downloads and so forth somehow "gaming the system". He actually received death threats due to the popularity of his very simple game. That was definitely game dev envy big time.

You are absolutely right that amount of effort does not determine success or lack of it. I've seen that my entire life. Often it is the person who actually does the bare minimum that gets the most success. It is basically working smarter vs working harder. I can understand why people get frustrated. You figure a lot of people are agonizing trying to make near AAA quality graphics and pouring just tons of time into their game projects for many months and even years in some cases. And often they are met with lackluster results as far as making money. Then they look out and see something like Flappy Bird raking in $50k per day. Or look at Steam and see people flipping assets and some of those people may be making as much money as the people who are busting their behinds for many months.

It's just the way it is though. It's life. The only thing hard work is guaranteed to do is make you tired. Lots of hard work can make you stronger over time. And more skilled. Those are the real benefits of it. But it won't automatically bring you more success than something who is taking very shortcut they can find.