There is nothing wrong with taking a marketplace asset and tailoring it to your own project’s needs and there is nothing wrong with using them as-is. That’s the point of the marketplace assets, but you’re still missing the point… I’m talking about market place asset flipping where people constantly steal other people’s work and release them as their own (I’m not naming them, but some of the more popular names on the market do a lot of this). Times like when some nobody will put something free on the market, then some well known person will take that free asset, tweak it around enough to circumvent the reviewing process, and sell that asset for money now.
If you make some fancy AAA quality shader and release it for free, it should stay free and people shouldn’t be able to find round-about ways to monetize it. Instead, you have asset flippers, like predators, that take that material shader, rearrange/rename things around to make it look like it’s theirs, change a few settings to make it less obvious, swap out a few textures(usually with textures they didn’t make), make a few presets, and then they release it as something like “Super totally amazing awesome skin shaders volume III.” Oh and again, don’t forget the typical Daz3d female character for the marketplace pictures. So they took something that was once free, messed around with a few things and then asset flip it to make money. Without the base shader, it would likely be something that few would care for.
This behaviour, to me, is wrong…