Hi! After googling my assets to see if there’s any mentions or feedback, I found my assets uploaded to a content piracy site.(I probably shouldn’t spread the link)
It looks like someone is just downloading everything of interest from the unity and unreal marketplace and just reuploads them to their own site.
Is there anything that can be done about it?
Finding my content packs uploaded for free on some random website where people can just click a link to download it after spending months of hard work on them is so disheartening and really makes it hard to motivate myself to keep making content in the future, especially since I barely make any money on it in the first place. It’s a punch in the gut. You aren’t sticking it to the big man by pirating this kind of stuff, you’re ruining the livelyhood of passionate individual artists that want to make game development and game art into their living.
These thieves host sites on Russia and China.
They really don’t care what is going to happen to creators, they are here to steal.
The only thing you can do is do NOT rely on marketplace as your only source of income, get a job and do your asset packs as side projects.
Some pirates go as far as requesting me for support and when I ask them about their invoice number they shy away.
They do this because many grew up thinking there’s no consequences, they do it because they can.
I understand your feelings, I have a big project I been working on for almost a year already, and I would hate to see it on a piracy site.
Honestly, I don’t have any guarantee that my asset will be protected in any way.
Yeah, it appears to be a site of russian origin. I gave them the beneifit of the doubt and filled out a contact form to ask if they could please consider taking down the asset pack, just in case they didn’t know better, someone else uploaded it or similar, but their response was to block my IP off their site. So, yeah, not exactly the most upstanding people.
If all developers just stopped producing assets then game developers would have nothing to buy on any marketplace anymore and all online shops would collapse. And less games would be produced by solo and small indie groups. Those illegal websites won’t be the one damaged but developers buying the legal licenses would.
Yes, I am not preaching on anything, I’m just expressing what I observe. Creators can only go so far for so long, eventually they are forced to drop it and look for something else to feed their families.
We all deal with this dilemma.
Remember that game engines are also pirated, not just assets.
Music, movies, animations, comics, painting softwares, dcc tools in general, if it can be downloaded it’s going to be pirated online.
Every company or individual artist end up looking for alternative source of income…
Media, often rely on merchandise products to turn a profit (action figures, t-shirts, live shows, limited dvd, posters, etc).
There’s not much a small Unreal creator can do in that direction to recoup losses and damage caused by pirates.
So, many simply give up.