I guess it comes down to how you define a ‘bad person’. If this thread shows one thing it’s that everyone draws their moral line in a slightly different place, and no-one thinks of themselves as doing anything wrong. It’s pretty scary to me that people will post in a thread admitting to downloading pirated content at the same time as asking what is going to be done to stop the people who happen to draw their line a little bit further along.
Some general thoughts…
If you download pirated material you legitimize the act of making that content available for download. Regardless of what you do with the content and how you view that, you are creating demand for pirated material, which causes more pirating.
If you download something to ‘see if it’s worth buying’ and decide that you’re not willing to pay the price, are you always going to remove it entirely even if it might be useful to you? Even if you do, what about things you learnt whilst browsing through a blueprint? Can you erase that knowledge from your mind? Will you contact the creator and send them a payment for the knowledge you gained?
When it comes to blueprints and code (given that UE4-dependent source code must be included), people are not only selling a solution, they’re selling a complete explanation of the solution. You could say that the value of this content derives primarily from the knowledge contained in them. So there’s no reason to expect to pay less for something just because you only want it as a learning resource. Whatever your reasons for wanting it, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the price.
And if you can’t tell from the information available whether or not it’s worth it, don’t buy it. If the creator lost a sale, it’s their fault for not providing enough detail - or maybe it was their choice to limit the amount of detail they wanted to provide up front. It’s hardly a justification for downloading the material without their consent.
You made more than just good points and for the most part I agree with you.
If you think about it, the entire reason I have come up with would be resolved as soon as the marketplace provides enough information. I don’t expect the author to tell us how everything works, but prove that it works.
The Unity-Assetstore has a package browser in which you can look at the included assets and most assets provide a web-demo too, that’s almost enough information for me. Details about the texture and if it’s PBR or not should be also included (maybe also how the PBR is achieved, something like “Masked Texture used for Roughness/Metallic output” or “Individual Textures are used”). I don’t expect the creator to tell me in detail how everything works, that’s too much.
I can’t think of a reason why a creator would want to hold back these informations/demonstrations.
I couldn’t have said it better myself and one of the very reasons why we have sought to setup a service which handles this problem in a similar to how the Humble Bundle has curb stumped would-be pirates (to a certain degree).
Now what we are suggesting isn’t a means all to end all solution but it’s a start in hopefully the right direction and at the end of the day if Steam is one thing to learn by is that if you provide a better service than the pirates than you usually win would-be pirates over.
[HR][/HR]
P.S.** We currently have our hands pretty full with a UE4 Plugin and unannounced game project we have in development but we hope to make strong headway with the above proposed service hopefully soon.
If anyone is interested and would like to know more about our plans than please feel free to either post in our forum thread, email us at [EMAIL=“patreon@binarysword.com”]patreon@binarysword.com or if you’d like to help make this proposed service a reality than please don’t hesitate to shoot us an email at [EMAIL=“jobs@binarysword.com”]jobs@binarysword.com.
Well, I think it is absolutely possible to create a virus and hide it within your pack , that will run a batch job when users download the assets, and every time it detects an upload of those files, it prevents it , and reports to the owner , with the computer’s ip address.
To allow Epic to upload the content to the marketplace , there should be some exception logic , that we can use , maybe based on the site where it is being uploaded , or their ip addresses?
It is just a thought. Not sure if it practical approach
Are you serious? Absolutely not. Under no circumstances would we allow this, and I strongly advise against anyone even thinking of attempting something like this. Full stop.
Just to extend Errvald’s post here:
DRMs are useless and a waste of resources. Crackers will always find a way to break it and remove it.
Just take the videogame-industry’s attempts at DRM for example. Even always-on games like SimCity 2013 got their cracks later on (before the offline mode was introduced).
While marketplace assets are not in the scope of major release groups, there are enough smaller people which will take their take on these assets if they come with DRM.
It’s bad that asset creators are the ones suffering the most in this case, which is just sad, but there isn’t much you can do and invading the privacy of the customers will cause a backslash.
You mean “hiding” things inside the open source, publicly-accessible code that’s heavily used and scrutinized by thousands of developers every day? Have a look: Unreal Engine on GitHub
If you come from Unity you’ll know the asset store is full of garbage, the same garbage has spilled onto UE4 marketplace. If people pirate to pick apart the asset and think it’s worthy of purchase, so be it. I’ve purchased a few packages from both Unity and UE4 marketplace, kubold for example is amazing but others are questionable.
