How do you feel about projects made from only using marketplace asset?

So I have a project I’m currently working on. Which only uses marketplace assests from character, enviroment, sound, music and weapons. My issue is I feel like I’m cheating myself out of my own originality, but at the same time its the most efficient way to get my project done with high quality.

I’d like to know how others feel about this? Or is it just me.

Almost the entirety of my project’s art content is just a patchwork assembly of marketplace, unity asset store, turbosquid, cgtrader, etc. It won’t always be that way, but for now it’s the absolute best and most cost-effective way of building a game that reaches the intended fidelity level without making me go poor.

Even large software houses either have their own artists and programmers creating everything or buy assets created by other usually smaller software houses or can buy assets created by freelancers too.
You bought the assets along with the rights to use them to create your own products being either games or apps. There is nothing to be afraid of.
I’ve just started assembling my first game using assets bought from the marketplace and I will add some free assets found on gumroad and cgtrader probably with some modifications I will do on my own. What I didn’t buy is main characters, weapons, monsters/enemies. That is something I need to do myself because they must be unique to my own game. While some background characters and animals I could use some free assets or buy something from the marketplace because they won’t be the focus for what I planned to create. But the main ones must not be in any other game, they must be original as much as I can create so that customers/players won’t be able to find anything like that in other products and won’t tell that is a copy of some famous character or weapon and so on. Probably is impossible to create anything fully original with no resemblance of something else but one has to try. Then I will probably try creating some buildings too although I bought modular packages to create many types and there are some free models available too still I have some ideas I would like to create and add.
So if you want to be original you should create your own main assets while you can use what is available for everything else and background stuff. This means if your game doesn’t have animals as its main characters but there just can be some then you won’t need to create your own unique models to do that, save time and focus on your main characters and elements that make your game unique instead.

I make 95% of my assets myself. I only use marketplace assets for foliage (and even so I end up replacing foliage with my own). I don’t mind games using assets but it becomes problematic when people are using pre-made levels. How many times did I see this bunker with these huge spinning fans in indie horror games. It’s really just an asset flip.

If it looks the way you want then that’s fine, but if you’re making a compromise for something that might be the right subject but doesn’t match the style then that will make a difference in how people will perceive your game.

There is no cheating unless you pirated someone else content. But the thing is usually, there will be personal touches here and there that are clearly visible in the games. But if you are using only marketplace asset and feel you can sell the games, then it is all your right to do it.

if you would create/design things the exact same, the 3rd party assets basically build upon your visual idea of the game. so who cares. but i cannot imagine a game that is “high quality” build from marketplace assets tbh.
team up with somebody, if you cannot do it yourself?

Games that do this are always incredibly easy to spot. The lack of artistic consistency in games that only use premade art assets is always a dead giveaway, and it looks bad. If you’re really serious about making a game, don’t rely on marketplace assets, they are meant to supplement original work, not replace it.

As long as the result is consistent, you can do whatever you want really. A same 3D asset under different lightning/scene conditions can look radically different.
Not even speaking of color grading, material tweaking, etc… there’s a lot of room to personalize and give a unique look to a UV-ed 3D shape.

This. Seriously.

It’s perfectly fine to use only marketplace assets to ‘kickstart’ your game and build a working prototype, so you can test things out and get a feeling of what the end product may be like, or in general if it’s the right way to go.
But after that prototyping phase, you should definitely stay away from marketplace assets and create your own style. It’s a lot of work, yes, but as Selentic said, games that rely overly or even solely on premade assets are easy to spot and they always feel of poor quality. Even if the individual asset quality is really high, it’s about the whole projects consistency.

The difference are stuff like rocks, grass, … if consistent with the rest of your games art style. And technical marketplace assets, those that provide certain functions, for example outlines, health / temperature, etc. But even with these it’s easy to spot if you’re not changing the look or buildin UI / effects.

The thing is, there are thousands of games out there and people can’t buy them all, nor do we want to. Plus after all that Steam Greenlight disaster in the last two years, we’re fed up with all these cheap indie titles that look and play exactly the same.

So you really want to make the effort to develope your own art style, and perhaps gameplay style. Not only to stand out, but also for yourself. So at the end you can say you became successful with something you really created yourself, with your own sweat and imagination. :slight_smile:

Incoherent Frankensteins. Dont get me wrong there are great sets of assets that are made by same author and feel like they all are from same game. But most assets in marketplace do not fit together. Sometimes you have huge differences in polycount texture sizes or art style. Yes different people produce different style assets. But imo single artists should focus more on making series of assets that all can fit in same game.

For eg making sound library that has single sound for each effect from medieval rpg to scifi and then 3 different horror screams is pointless. There is not enough sounds that can fit same game. It would be much better to have packages that focus on single type of game and cover all possible sounds needed.

I think the most important question for a game should be: Does it make fun? I’ve played chess and monopoly and lots of other board games for many hours as well as card games and never thought: Oh noes… those pawns look too similar to those of that other board game! Those good old “paper-games” are no graphic demo and did not try to sell me a half finished world but a real game that just had it’s right to exist because …it’s fun. If the only difference of my “chess v2.0” would be that my pawns are red and my start positions are slightly different then the problem is not the art of the pawn. Because in that case my game is no new game but just like a new icon-set for an existing one. The same is true if I create a FPS. If my game is the same like all those other games then a non-exclusive asset set does not make it better. However I never found a thrilling storyline in the marketplace or a game idea where everybody that hears it just smiles.

I LOVE THEM. I personally want to see more ‘Incoherent Frankensteins’. These games deserve their own Steam distribution. The Future Game Dev Marketplaces will support Asset Modding also known as Community-Driven Mass Customization of Game Assets!

My thought is that using MP assets is fine if you modify or re-texture them in your own way to keep them consistent and unique. But I also believe that players don’t really know what developers know and honestly don’t care about developers opinions, so if the game is good it doesn’t matter.

A greater majority of people who rag on games that use MP content on steam are probably part time developers themselves and just bringing attention to something that might not affect a player.

I think it’s ok for use assets but as mentioned here don’t use premade level, create your own, use premade only for testing then create everything from asset on your own.

Throwing it here, but Player Unknown Battleground use Marketplace assets everywhere.

Is this true? I didn’t notice that in the screenshots, I guess I have to take another look again.

I use mixamo fuse and their store. So the assets are custom and the animations are stock.
You can always use a modeling program to tweak the animation if you want.
My belief, try to make what you can for the foreground and use stock for the background and make your game fun.
If someone is nit picking the fact that your clouds are stock assets, I don’t think that person has much of a life. :smiley:

Weapons, weapons anims, in-house props, weapon ballistic plugin and C++ FPS template with custom loco and replication: all marketplace.

The character outfit customization and clothes are done with a thirdparty which offers this features out of the box.

They’ve made lots of clothes for sure, that’s why they show it on advertisement. Also probably made 4 or 5 house/building template.

Their biggest value is probably things you don’t see, as a proper back-end of their own, working worldwide, cheat detection…