does marketplace assets ruining the gaming industry ?

watch this videohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=5svAoQ7D38k
i want to know the views and opinions especially from Epic games

I don’t think they’re ruining the game industry, there are plenty of bigger issues that are doing that already.
But I do think it’s teaching developers that it’s okay to be lazy. If a junk game made mostly from marketplace stuff does well, it tells everybody that they might as well go the lazy route for a few easy bucks.
Most of these games won’t do well and will just be forgotten as soon as they leave the newest games list on Steam so I guess mostly we’ll just have even more ****** games no one cared about. Just wish Valve would at least remove greenlights of this kind of junk.
Mostly the marketplace is a good thing but there’s always going to be lazy people that “exploit it”.

This isn’t about the Marketplace or Asset Store.

For years, I posted free code examples and tutorials on my blog. On several occasions, I found the sample projects from my tutorials being sold on the app store, sometimes with nothing more than the copyright notice changed. I’ve also seen apps I’ve worked on, and apps that friends and acquaintances have worked on, flat out copied, or in some cases pirated and re-sold on the App Store or Marketplace.

Any time you give people useful information or assets, there’s a small percentage of people who will look at is as an opportunity not to learn, but to try and make money off of your work.

But, what’s the solution? Stop letting people sell assets? Stop creating tutorials? Stop sharing information? Have some gatekeeper who gets to decide who is “good enough” to sell their game?

In my mind, any solution is going to be potentially far worse than the problem it’s trying to solve.

Hopefully, Steam’s new refund policy will make it unprofitable for people to continue this practice and make money.

In my oppinion the thing with marketplace/asset stoes and the quality of games is:
If a small set of marketplace items is adopted by a large group of game developers, these assets will show up ubiquitously in almost every game released.
This does not necesaarily mean that the game is “bad” per se. It will just feel as if all the game were a “mod” of each other.
They will play nicely and each may have an individual note, but sooner or later you will know how a room labeled “mess hall” looks like because you already have seen the typical mess hall items in countless games before…
So, the problems/danger with games becoming repetitive in design is not tied to the quality of the assets used, but their usage frequency.

What is important is the motivation of the developer to use marketplace assets over self made items.
If the game developer decides to use marketplace assets in order to have more time to spend on game logic, it could be a reasonable decission, IF the gameply is really polished. On the other hand, if the author just uses bought assets because they look “cool” and mask gameply shortcommings, we have the worst of bold worlds: Repetitive design and boring gameplay…

I occasionally purchase market place assets (and other online services) for my games and am happy to use free assets too, however I tend to customise these as much as I can. For example, the new mannequin in 4.8. I decided to give him a fresh coat of paint in Substance Painter and am reasonably happy with the results. I can control the emissive channels too to turn on/off/fade lights. I will probably customise him further before I use it in a game but I still feel this is a unique asset that won’t be seen in another game. My point is that I don’t really see the value of hiring someone to make a particular asset if I can obtain said asset from a store for much less money or even for free as long as it is somewhat customisable.

There’s also the various game logic and systems that can be purchased from the market place. Personally I don’t use these but I can definitely see their value, I mean why re-invent the wheel?

A game is a big undertaking for a single person development team and without these shortcuts I’d never be able to do it on my own, I am still putting a great deal of effort into my game and I would find it insulting if someone called me lazy for purchasing assets or tools that assist in the development process.

Do you consider yourself lazy for using a ready made game engine such as UE4? Would all games that all use the same ready made engine be repetitive or feel like a mod? I expect the answer to both is no, so what is the difference with using a market place tool/system/asset?

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I totally get you and you have a good point. Some people have no respect on how much time it takes to dish out content that is free.

I made my first commercial game with almost no bought assets. The result was that the 3D graphics quality was consistently low, but it was a mobile game back in 2011ish. So overall the expectations where quite low and it was okay.

My second game kind of falls into the category of games criticised here. Over half of the required assets are purchased. Unlike the developers shown in the video I worked on the game for 1 1/2 years so it’s not quite the same thing.
Curiously the backlash on the 3D graphics of that game was quite huge. Which in theory is irrational, since the overall quality and quantity of the used assets is much higher than what I could have done alone.

However what I learned from this is, that players don’t mind overall lower quality as much as “fluctuations” in the quality of the assets.
So what happened is that the game got criticised for the lowest quality assets that I used (mostly animations&AI framework in this case).
Fun fact: the game got greenlit anyways, but I decided not to put it on Steam, to avoid even more backlash.

So with my third game I decided to do almost everything myself again. So far the feedback has been very positive about this move.
I think in some ways it is quite tragic that the backlash caused by bought assets is forcing me and other devs to reduce the scope of our games to be able to do almost everything ourselves.
Tough I believe now that Indie Game players “want” the kind of authenticity that comes from making everything yourself and my conclusion is that it is better to avoid asset stores when possible.

Long story short: I whish it was different, but Jim Sterling has a point. So it is better to make smaller games that have (almost) only original content than larger productions that rely on purchased assets.

It’s certainly not ruining the game industry, just an ugly byproduct of the market. People will try and make a buck in whatever way they can, and with the prices of assets being so low there’s not much stopping people from trying.

I’m also curious of the average age of these ‘developers’ myself, because it seems like a very juvenile thing to do. I’ve usually just assumed it was naive children dreaming of being game developers and making it rich. Dream up an idea, start a ‘studio’, make several forum posts recruiting other kids, inevitably download a bunch of pre-made assets (because making games is way harder and time-consuming than expected), throw them together and try and sell it to people. It’s like the modern-day version of a lemonade stand, only masked behind a wall of anonymity.

I do think now that most online game marketplaces offer refunds we’ll see this behavior curbing on the PC platform. Once people can buy a game, realize it’s just a tutorial asset, and return it for a full refund - we’ll see less of them being added, and possibly start seeing Steam de-list them from the market.

I think the use of assets like these are fine, as long as you use them as a starting point and modify them to match overall art direction and quality. I think the last part is where things go wrong. On the whole though if you can master it, you’ll save a lot of time when it comes to generic assets.

It’s a free world, everyone can do whatever they want. After all IMO it’s just a phase of the game industry, it won’t be long until the users will develop immunity to not so quality games. Just a new phenomena with engines being so freely accessible, but won’t stay for long.

Even better, it’s a step in the right direction. Higher demands will come in no time.

I say don’t buy a game. If you don’t want to support that kind of game.
However, if it’s fun, even with the stock assets, buy it and play it.

I see no reason to harp about what other devs are doing and not doing because concentrating on other people takes away from your own productivity. If EPIC, a company who develops games as well as game engines, do not see the harm in using their assets commercially, I think I’ll listen to them over the everyday guy who… hasn’t.

P.S. Jim Sterling is not a game developer, so he can keep his opinion to himself. (I want to use other words, but not here) :smiley:

Yes and No. If people reuse the same assets over and over. yes, it hurts the game market. But if used right… It works well!

At the moment it’s raising the bottom level of content creation, which is a good thing for those who don’t have the resources & / or skills on their team, whatever the size) to match their ambitions.

However, we’re seeing culture moving to be at the forefront of modern consumerism and creative skills becoming an increasing focus during education I can easily imagine a sad future in which more and more people’s only career choice is to are aggressive cycle of competing to make large volumes of easy to produce, high quality content across all mediums, all of which is tied to a boom & bust of funds.

Simultaneously, as hardware becomes more powerful, we’ll probably see Engines reach some kind of feature plateau as we’ve achieved good enough world simulation in all areas so provide some kind of Second Life style backbone to all the content that is being made.

Or worse, we’ll have analytic data captured from all our electronic gizmos fed to automated content generators, spewing out bespoke games, movies, music & books tailored to individuals, and enough content generators exclusively focusing on unexpected or unpopular ideas in order to creator counter points and alternative avenues to popular ideas on both an individual and mass scale.

That’s when I get a time machine, go back to the 1980s and become a C64 Coder.

Too expensive. I use VICE for that :cool:

I don’t think it matters to much I have got some assets trees to be specific its not hard to modify them but some of them they are exactly what I wanted so why fix. I think its fine but it also depends on what assets you are using. It could be like the hospital assets now those are going to start being recognizable to people. But assets don’t fully create levels/games it is up to the level designer/game designer to create something and there is still time spent doing that its not really a walk in the park even with them unless you are experienced. Which leads me to thinking this offers more types of people to try and make games you don’t have to be a college grad who studied this in schooling instead you could be someone who studied for the joy and love of it while at home now able to make a game also. Of course there are always young kids who want to be a “game dev” but I can deal with that. If it was a fun game so be it.

Well for a few bucks what do you expect.

What makes me laugh is the “if it bleeds it leads” approach that video bloggers like Mister Jim takes in an effort to over hype for hits (aka views) that reminds me of big mouth shows that I suspect, well not really, are not really based on any kind of pressing issues.

Granted done in an interesting way it’s all worth a bit of a chuckle as entertainment but as an issue I give it about as much relevance as I would reading it as an article in the National Enquirer.

After all #gamergate would have ended in a day if the hit squad did not jump all over it.

honestly i don’t think you should be using 3d models and music assets as is for anything but placeholders for your own models and music - as they are immediately recognizable

if you can’t model or make music the internet is full of people who are still at a phase where they are getting good at it but cannot really charge a lot of money for their services, maybe team up with them instead of spending hundreds of dollars on assets

i am working on my first game and am doing everything for myself as i feel it will be important and invaluable to have this kind of knowledge in the future even if i won’t master any of the needed skills

> Hopefully, Steam’s new refund policy will make it unprofitable for people to continue this practice and make money.

Yeah this wont be abused at all /s

:stuck_out_tongue:

You know? besides the asset knock offs that were retooled for Unreal from the unity market (which I got suckered into buying (which is the bunker pack) due to not knowing about the UNITY store which is a blight… Wait Unity itself is a blight and as long as money isn’t involved I feel no distaste with pirating the assets seeing as how unity is well unity… And not everyone is a graphics developer.) However he is a bit hazy when it comes to the UNREAL marketplace, what he doesn’t mention is the standard and the submission process that the submitter goes through the maintain quality.

You know?.. every single asset I use (that me or my team didn’t create) I have been forced to re-work. Either the textures, actual models or whatever. I do use mixamo mainly because I am a not an animator. But I have learned now that me and two other people making games makes marketplace assets very valuable. It is just really important getting an asset pack cuts off about half the work. But… using most of these assets being free 3d models from websites or assets from marketplaces [for these] engines are very important if you have 3 people with full time jobs working on a project.

That said… What this guy is really talking about is not marketplaces he is talking about: Greed, Con Men/Women and the sick lazy copy everything that is SOOOOOOOO much a standard in the gaming industry. He is also talking about the flaws in Free Markets which lets face it you don’t really want that **** regulated do you… You wouldn’t be able to find that Ninja pygmie sex vid if we didn’t have a free market online…

Most of the UE games I see coming across the gaming industry are quit innovative, sure there maybe a few stolen assets or purchased ones… But there is a reason that the independent gaming industry is just now beginning to see the light of day… A large studio could have everything from 60 to 400 people working on a title and it takes them years. One guy… That is 10 to 20 different careers depending on the game.

I guess what I am saying is people in cars kill people way more than any other murder. Should we ban cars? Are Cars ruining society?

If you’re actually making a quality game, none of this is a problem, you’re not going after the same type of audience.

And that guy’s video is pretty terrible.