UT pushed hard towards democratisation of game development by making its tools free. Unfortunately, the freebies culture is a burden for all parties involved with this: 1 person will become filthy rich, 10 will make good money, 100 will stay afloat and many 1000s just starve.
Yeah I think if people were actually buying things we could have lower prices for things but there is only a small subset of people buying anything.
I would like an option that allows Asset Store people to set the price for my assets. I’m a terrible businessman… is it me, or artist have a hard time pricing their own work? In the end I just play by ear.
But nevertheless, right now I try to set a price that it’s worth buying for most people… since I can’t fight piracy, all I can do is set prices that allure people to stay at the asset store, and not go looking for assets on the piracy seas!
If that fails? well, what else can I do? My last resort is update an asset I suspect is being pirated. Random improvements/updates every 15 days, so it makes it harder to push the latest version into piracy sources, and even pirates desire the latest version! This way the people who spend their hard earned cash has some benefit over those who got it for free; and those who pirated it, have a reason to buy.
Except of course… the situation is that my asset isn’t really worth buying… but honestly, I don’t hope for people to mistakenly paid for an asset that doesn’t meet their price/needs expectations.
No. It does not work like that. This notion works when selling physical goods because when many people buy stuff you can have a larger scale/optimized production in factories that allows for cheaper costs (the way that LCD screens have been cheapening, for instance). In such environments, those with the lowest costs win.
When selling non-physical goods, prices are determined by the competition -you want yours to be comparable or lower. If someone says - “bah! my PalmTree Fbx asset isn’t selling due to piracy, I’ll raise the price” he won’t get any more sales/profit that way.
There is no “conspiracy” of unity3d asset creators to raise prices due to piracy
it doesn’t, and having a licensing API that authors could use with the store would just allow them some way to track valid customers and provide proper support… which I believe is the concern of this threads origin.
I combat it a couple of ways. I check invoice numbers nearly 100% of the time (except in cases where I know someone has purchased). That is for all Asset Store purchases. I also sell my asset through FastSpring and use their notification API to push order notifications to a web service on my own site so I immediately have the purchaser information.
One thing to think about based on the suggestions above… take a look at something like FastSpring. They have licensing API’s built in where they can even auto-generate license keys per-purchasing user for you.
Dongles are coming back in style.
i would think that if an asset’s prices are set reasonable enough people would be less likely to private it. too high and it encourages piracy.
then there are other enticements provide support, early access to alpha/beta, incorporate customer feedback into development.
basically the customer is getting someone more than an asset they could easily steal…
they can’t steal support and getting the opportunity to get their changes in…
i would have said updates, but unity gives you those. perhaps early access to updates, but that too could be pirated.
so its those other value added things that cant be pirated
also have active presence in forums answer customers questions, i would think people who chat with you over time would find it harder to steal from you… sort of have dialog with customers.
all these things i would guess would also drive sales up as well… not just from reducing privacy, but customers buying your asset over competition that is not doing these value added things…
Not so easy for art assets but for code, that always will need maintaining, bugfixes, support and such, I think the best way to deal is as I said before, essentially lock anyone without a key out of the support process. The author of unity2lwp very wisely directs any questions about his asset to a webform, so hes only providing support to license owners. You could additionally have a site with a forum with a ‘general’ section so people can get information on a product but the meat of the forum needing a valid license to register for. Keeping track of how many different IPs a registered user logs in from would be useful too (and trivial with most forum software)
Along with a decent licensing api (which unity really should be offering by now!) then that would make things a lot better, again at least with code-based assets
Regarding art-based assets I have mixed feelings - i use them a ton for placeholder use, but i have no idea how a legitimate game developer could repeatedly use the same art that a bunch of others are using in a commercial production? So I consider the really good art assets (BEP and that kind of level of art pack, that are extremely high quality) really fantastic for making demos of your stuff, filling in say, a ‘portfolio’ terrain project that you might do for fun or as part of a ‘get a job’ initiative, but unprofessional an approach to a commercial product.
People should be buying that stuff, tonnes of it, because its so strong (and unlike code based stuff, easier to tell when its strong) but it’s harder to limit the piracy because you cant embed licensing information into art assets (meshes and bitmaps) meaningfully, so controlling that aspect of it is way harder, it would be nice though. Maybe have an option where a script or some form of information has to be attached to each asset with licensing information to be present, or a build to contain a script with a hash for licensed art assets contained that can be checked against.
I think the solution lies in an official “Support” area of the asset store that is only accessible to those who have a valid license for the asset (or, more beneficially probably, an “official asset thread” here on the forums that you can only post to from an account that has purchased the asset?).
The reality is that anyone who is pirating professional software is almost certainly not going to be converted to a paying customer - at least not in massive numbers. The real problem is that they are a drain on developers because they still come to these forums with support questions, or e-mail developers with support requests. I’ve always received stellar support from asset developers, I’m sure a select handful have spent more time working with me on issues than my license is worth to them even. I can’t imagine the situation they are in with having to (or wanting to) offer that same level of support to pirates.
This is a good point, ive got a little circle of game dev pals who i share ideas and bits of work with and i almost sent one a copy of a package just so i could demonstrate something that he was trying to learn about. However i got the package from a very cool asset developer who had been very helpful and generous about the package in the first place and even though i was trying to help a mate, i felt like i was screwing this dev over by giving away his stuff so i offered as much info as i could on unity-provided material instead, its a powerful psychological effect!
I’ve never submitted anything to the asset store, so I wouldn’t know, but how does one check if someone on the forums purchased something on the asset store?
They could be using another forum account?
Or the asset could have been purchased on the company account used by the boss?
Sorry, I just don’t see how it’s possible to start throwing false accusations at people who could very well have purchased an asset under alternate circumstances.
I also do not sell in the asset store, but I thought I could give you some insight on what seems to work for a few of the authors I work with. Generally they’ll ask me to submit my purchase invoice. Our company is small, generally with a single programming working on a project at a time - but my boss technically purchases everything (as opposed to me or another programmer purchasing an asset and invoicing him for it later). I’ve had several asset store authors ask for an invoice before sending me a beta build or offering extensive support, and not one of them questioned the fact that my name is clearly Kyle Staves and the name in the invoice is my bosses. Googling our names shows our working relationship very quickly if they were curious. Maybe it helps that I post under my real name and I’m very easy to ‘look into’ (kman24215 may cause them to be a bit more skittish? I don’t know).
Generally I think asking for an invoice is absolutely fine and should be expected - if they notice several people all asking for support or beta builds under the same invoice that throws a big red flag and it’s probably worth looking into. Chances are that won’t be the case though (pirates likely won’t be offering up an invoice in the first place).
Ask for their asset store invoice #.
–Eric
It’s fairy easy to ascertain a few facts about someone regarding wether theyve paid or not by what they say. You cant make direct accusations but you CAN be on the lookout and its in a developers interests to do so. If the person doesnt seem like they COULD buy anything, theres one, another is wether they show enough understanding of the topic to show they had the motivation to buy the asset, given if youre spending money on something then you should intend to invest some time into it is another - if you buy something you dont just dispose of it mentally, id hope.
You could check against any emails, or inconsistencies between what their interests and motivations might be and what the asset is, and how many assets they seem to own, particularly expensive ones, based against what they are actually making (or seeming to make) at the time. Its often fascinating having a think about what many forum posters are actually making, as opposed to fooling around with pirated assets.
Also if you’re fairly au fait with the sort of places you might find this pirated material (and i am, not necessarily for pirating myself(ahem)), you do tend to see certain ‘characters’ cropping up, with very idiosyncratic behaviour. And then very spookily similar people show up on here…
you can handle art / music, etc like i posted using registry / authorization system (website)
so basically you know the author and you know everybody who bought it and you know everywhere its being legally used
if the asset shows up in a place that is not in the registry its then easy to do dmca takedown , ect
so you can go to the website put the name/id of the game and like the name/id of asset and it tells u ok or not found…
the thing is the unity asset to license agreement will need to be changed requiring registration / authorization
so buyer gets the asset but not legal right ot use until they register an dthen only for that registered item
if they want to use asset multiple times ok but they have to register each use
so if in 3 games u have record of the 3 games and the author and the buyer
if it shows up on some other game then u know its illegal use
the website could be made in short time and so can change to license. its just running around legal
basically it can tie into sale store asset manager
you can select the asset u buy and say add authorization and put the name of the game or application. some minor details
that later can be used to search by author of asset. so lets say i had a game called “most amazing game” i would go there and perhaps select all the assets being used and select to get authoriation. then i can type in “most amazing game” and perhaps release details, some reason amount of information. it would give me back some id. then author could see his asset and all the people who bought it and all the places it was being used. if someone points out that asset was found in “worse game ever” the author could check see its not there and call the lawyers…
I doubt anyone, or very few, are making money from using pirated assets in their published apps. So you aren’t loosing much if any money from theft of your assets. A bigger problem is erosion of your reputation through altered assets or because pirate-wannabes tend to be mealy mouthed whiners at any rate.
Who is making money are the organizations offering the pirated apps to others. The people taking on the pirated assets are risking having their computer trojan-ed and wasting their own time by not focusing on the task at hand for them (learning how to create a game / app in Unity and publishing it) and instead wasting their time searching for the asset that is one-click publish. It isn’t going to happen.
As far as knowing who bought you assets does an asset store purchase reveal your forum ‘avatar name’ to the seller? Because I use another ‘avatar name’ in the asset store and of course my purchasing of assets is using my real name address bank information.
That I wasted much money on assets is my problem not the asset sellers. That said, a recent asset with DLLs that consistently (as in every time) trashes my Unity 4.3.1 install in import has me reconsidering buying any assets in the future as DLLs. Now free assets that are DLLs is another story.
What I mean is say you can sell x number of units at say $10. You can lower it to say $2 and you would have to sell 5x as many units, as long as you made the same amount of money who cares because you more devs get access to it, but that doesnt seem to happen so you are better off pricing it higher which means things are expensive for devs. If more people bought shit from the asset store i think prices could come down.
If you like the top 10 top paid in the asset store there is nothing at $2, $5 or even $10.
If five times more people buy your asset then that means five times more support. Actually, as someone pointed out earlier, it means more than a five times increase in support requirements because as you lower the barriers to entry you get more people with less experience people using your stuff.
So, five times more sales does not mean you can lower the price to one fifth and make just as much money.
some assets have more support because all you get is dll, not documentation, no sample scene, or at least working one, ect… so there is only forums if that…
if authors want less support they need documentation, (references + users guide), faq, work examples, forum, etc…
also by said post i guess unity is really messing up cause they are giving away the engine and indie who need nothing but support and pay $0… 