How much protection can a game design have, built on marketplace assets? (avoiding clones)

Distribution UE Marketplace
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Hello everyone, I am producing my first video game and have some questions

My game is built using about 95% marketplace assets and 5% original assets.
Including in that mix of assets, that is available on the marketplace, is the character for the game and the map environments.

As the marketplace assets are still available for public sale I understand that other people are allowed to continue to purchase these assets and also use them for their games.

So that leaves me wondering what degree of protection do I have for the design of my game, if any?
What is the highest form of protection I can get for my game based around marketplace assets or is there none and I would it be just releasing the game and hoping for the best?

Can people simply rebuy all of the same assets that I used to make my game and essentially recreate a game that is 95% the same and launch the game under a different title?

(Using the same character, same map environment, same ability assets, ect)
They may need to make about 30 asset purchases in order to gather up the collection

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I guess the idea of the Marketplace is that the star of your game is your own game idea and not the assets contained in it. Your game can be designed and customized the way you want, even if you only use Marketplace assets. Also, the assets themselves can be edited too and even small changes in color or shape or sound can make them feel different. If you don’t want to use external software like Blender, etc., Unreal has tools inside that can usually do all or almost all you’ll need.

But on the other hand, if all you do is purchase and put assets together, then I guess the “level of protection” of your game would probably be zero…

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The mostly likely problem is people pirating your game, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Why would anyone bother to build it from scratch if they can just pirate it?

Also, for relatively unknown games, piracy is actually a sort of free promotion.

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I’m not referring to a casual user pirating the game so they can play the game for free.

I am referring to other developers cloning the game so they can release 95% the same game under a different title and sell it themselves.

The context of this question is that the game is high quality and sells well.

This is inferring despite the game being built on 95% market assets, I consider it to be a very good game with potential to become a popular game.
While their may be a sort of notion that building a game with a high degree of marketplace assets automatically means your game is low quality and not deserving of popularity, my opinion is if you showed the game to a regular person who doesn’t know anything about marketplace assets they would be extremely happy with the game and it would not come across as a low quality game.

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It’s all to do with what you have added to the assets.

If you made some sort of ingeneous multiplayer outer-universe comic detective book, they’re not going to copy it. Because of the hassle of trying to figure out how on earth you did everything. ( this equates to your ‘high quality’ )

If you make a game where you run around collecting cubes, they might copy it ( extreme example ).

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That is still a lot of effort. I don’t think you should worry about making a game so great that someone tries to pirate or clone it.

There is little protection for video game piracy, no matter what assets you use. Look at games like wow, Tibia, FFXIV… people just steal the client and make their own game out of it, no point stressing over it though.

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The game is third person online multiplayer shooter.

I consider high quality meaning that a regular video game player sees the game and enjoys the game a lot and would give it a high rating and recommend the game to their friends.

This to me means that high quality doesn’t automatically have to mean that the game needs to be significantly difficult to reverse engineer and recreate from a technical standpoint.

The value is in the quality, enjoyability of the design more so than the technical difficulty in creating the game.

If a game is enjoyable enough that millions of people want to play the game, that is considered high quality enough to me, regardless of how little or much time it will take another company to recreate the same game.

What took a significant amount of effort to create the first time around could no doubt be reverse engineered and recreated in much less time, effort then it took the first time around.

If my game is making a large amount of sales and gaining polarity, that is the incentive for other people/companies to clone the game.

For the sake of this question let’s say my game is a massive succuss and makes $40 million in revenue in the first 2 weeks

Is it realistic to expect that other companies can and will clone my game and is doing so completely legal?

In theory Nintendo made Super Smash Bros using all assets from the public marketplace and it was just as big of a succuss and it is currently, can another company release essentially the same game using the same assets and call it Terffic Brawl Brothers?

Currently there are other companies that make games similar to Super Smash Bros but they can’t legally use the same assets because of Nintendo property rights.
What if Nintendo didn’t have the property rights though?

Would there legally be multiple games like Super Smash Brothers with the same game design using the same same characters, the same map environments, the same power ups , the same sound effects, ect?

Even if another company couldn’t produce a better game because the game is already so refined, could they make a game that is 95% the same and sell it under a different name for 50% of the price of the orginal game?

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I’m aiming for the stars with this one.
I would absolutely like my game to be so great that other people would wish to pirate or clone it. And that’s the context of this question.

Though this question is specifically about another company cloning the game and publishing the game rather than a casual user pirating the game for personal use.

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If you can show you had a significantly unique idea, and someone else stole it, then at least legal action is possible.

I think you’ll find, when you release it, that nothing much happens apart from the usual sados breaking it and putting on pirate bay ( or whatever ).

Good luck though :slight_smile:

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