I’ve been hearing the term ‘Asset Flip’ lately. It’s scaring me. I have $2000 of Assets that I purchased. I plan on using the assets to help me make and sell a game. Could I do it without the assets? I don’t know. I’ve become so dependent on assets that I don’t know if I could make a game without them.
I’ve been tempted to see what I can do without the asset store.
Yes, you can make a good game without assets. People do it all the time, it just takes more effort/money.
Developers generally like to modify art assets to some extent so they fit better with the overall style of the game. If you don’t do this, it will be painfully apparent to players that you are using asset-store assets.
People who make assets don’t have any special access. Anything they can do, you can do too (if you have the talent and the knowledge). What do you know how to do already? If you don’t know how to code, you’ll need a lot of time and patience to learn. Like wise for making your own art- it’s a whole other discipline that you’ll have to learn from scratch, most likely. It might take you several years before you are fully proficient in either one of those things, but you may be surprised at what you can pick-up in short amount of time.
An “asset flip” is not the same thing as using assets, though. An asset flip is basically when you buy a full game kit, like this:
And then you try to sell it without adding anything of your own or changing anything. Maybe you only change the title screen and nothing else.
If you make an actual good game it doesn’t matter if you use assets. Know one will even think about whether there are assets in your game or not.
I wouldn’t be worried about the idea of “asset flipping” if you’re planning on making good use of the assets and not just using them with little to no thought on their how they benefit the project. If I were to be worried about anything it would be the situation right now where some publishers are uploading assets that they don’t actually own and selling them.
Companies can, people can, I don’t know if YOU can 
If you are talking about content (models, sounds, etc) it can be difficult to rely on the asset store (hard to find everything you need) but if you can do it the cost savings are huge. A good model pack that is $50 on the asset store could easily be worth 100x that if you got someone to do it custom.
If instead you are looking to do it all yourself the saving is about time. Even if you have the skill it might take you hundreds of hours to replicate the features in an asset store kit.
The flip side here: you do need to spend time learning the systems. Personally I struggle with this. I own a bunch of complete projects/systems from the asset store but haven’t ever used one to release anything*.
(* Editor extensions and things like analytics or store plugins are a different matter, I use them heavily)
Kitbashing together stuff is key. Learn how to modify art to your own needs. Blender and Audacity is really handy when it comes to art / sound. At some point you’ll realize that sometimes its faster to just make it on your own.
Finding own strong points is also important, I barely purchase any logic related assets, due to myself being a programmer. So it depends what you’re best at.
(Large systems / systems with high maintenance costs are still should be considered to be purchased in this case because it just save more time / cost than its price tag)
Also, asset store yields more than just paid content, most of the times artists put their content for free to get some reviews.
Make sure to check it regularly, you can build and expand asset library very quickly.
Also, money spent saving time is money well spent.
Yes it is possible to make games without asset store, but it would take much more time. Is it worth it?
Probably, if you can afford it.
This kind of thinking is a recipe for disaster, and comes from valuing the opinions of random people over your own (or your customers for that matter). Would you have worried if you had not ‘heard’ about flipping? The truth is that making a game solo takes many different skills, the likelihood of having them all to a good standard is slim to nil. You can go ahead and spend 5 years doing what you’d otherwise do in 1, or take back that time and enjoy it wisely.
While real-life, ugly ‘asset-flipping’ does indeed exist (usually from people who seem to have no skills in any department except perhaps industriousness) I would argue that sheer lack of game design skill, which cannot be fixed by using the asset store, is far worse from a customers perspective than whether you used a crate that someone else did too. And there’s a lot more of this problem going around than asset flipping.
The only standard you need to have is that your game is a good one, one that you would buy and play. What it takes to achieve that is entirely up to the resources you have on hand.
If I can find something good enough on the asset store for my needs, I will always use it, because time can always be spent and never loses its value. For art, it’s very hard to find the full range of what I need in a consistent style, but there are some sellers whose stuff is very close to being enough for a complete game. For scripts, if it doesn’t annoy me to use it, is not overloaded with useless settings and flashy inspector GUI, and doesn’t have bugs I will go ahead and use it (less of a problem considering my skill set). For music, sound effects and VFX, the asset store is pretty much my one stop shop, besides Audio Jungle.
In short, decide what your standard of quality is, and use the most efficient means to reach it, because your game will always require your attention somewhere else that’s more important.
If you choose realistic style its not impossible to make a game with asset store. We are doing just that, im not in charge of asset acquirement so I do not know how many assets we have that are custom or bought from individual artists on artstation but it’s not alot.
We don’t have any artist on the team but one of our team members have become pretty good at kitbashing and alter assets with blender
I think you are confusing “players” with “game developers”. Overwhelming majority of regular players on PC/mobile/consoles don’t even know that the Unity Asset Store (or Unity, for that matter) exist. The idea that an average gamer who never visited any gamedev resources will be able to visually recognize assets as originating from some gamedev store is not quite feasible, I think.
Even if you have the skill to author your own art, I dont think it makes much pragmatic sense to do that. Depends on scope of your project of course.
Basically, I look and see if somebody else has already done the work. 99% of the time, the solution I need already exist. So then just look and see, could I do it better? Does it need to be done better? What are the time/cost savings?
I just rarely find any good reason to spend time authoring custom art, even if I know how to do it. Factor in all the other work you got to do and its not good to spend too much time in any one area.
Dear theonerm2_unity, just a 2 cents.
I am in the same boat as you, and having several hundred dollars of Asset store content, I wondered that too; but the people here said it is better to focus on making a good game - with said asset parts; customizing them and just ‘finishing’ your game. To not worry too much about it and ignore people who put you down for ‘daring to use assets’ like it’s a crime/bad or something you be ashamed of (because’ devs ‘make all from scratch…’…‘real devs that is’); to me that is bs because larger games require outsourcing (for solo devs) and it’s imposisble to make everything from scratch and in short 2-3 year period (I mean it’s not short…it’s years but…even that may still be not enough; it could take you 10 years to make that bigger game you wish; outsourcing reduces that to something feasible for you - but bigger/more possibility). Surely, if you did not have the assets, the game would be different for sure and you would need to improve skill/work on your flaws/lacking (like art models…textures…animation…they would be Yours…made by you…thus, it will depend on your technical capabilities/knowledge/skills/talent? of softwares to make these assets -your self instead of relying on asset stores). But, as others pointed; it is unsensical and (illogical too) too time consuming when you not to build an Entire game…that is what gamers just don’t seem to get/care of…devs Need the asset store if they wish to make bigger scope games…or else well they will Always be small scope games - made from scratch using no assets…but many devs don’ wish that anymore and wish to compete with AAAs/make bigger games by outsourcing. It’s a bit like building a Blockbuster movie - it requires thousands of people…or you can make a mini film/short film by yourself…like an mini android/cell phone like game or rogue pixel game…yourself/all of it/all assets yourself…but it will not be this big thing; it’s why many of the solo efforts are pixel games/2D thing…not complex huge 3d worlds…except games like Bright Memory (made by solo dev…but he outsourced to make the 3d worlds/models…thus he needed helps/assets to ‘fill in’ the whole thing; because, alone/everhything from scratch, he could not make such game; same thing with my game; assets are crucial they save Thousands of hours/man hours of work/time…and it does not mean the game is less genuine/meritatory/‘low effort cash grab’ as they say when ‘asset flip’…your intentions are genuine…you still need to ‘assemble’ that ‘puzzle’…all its pieces…to make a final game and that is no small feat. A game is not the parts…it is the sum of its parts; as others noted, it’S important to not make ‘too obvious’ that used assest ‘slapped in them/fangled up’ and personalizing them/customizing them. The worse problem with asset use is ‘similiarity’ with other games using same said assets…and, especially, is lack of continuity/cohesion among the ‘various sourced’ assets…this can cause a jarring effect of weird fangled upthings together…there needs cohesion/seamlessness among the assets/all fits together).
Just a 2 cents.
PUBG still uses Unreal’s Marketplace for some assets to this day. There’s nothing wrong with using assets, they exist to help you.
If you want to make a game without the Asset Store, you either need to get fairly good at every discipline required to make your game on your own and accept it will take longer to finish, or pay up for custom made assets to replace what you would have used from the store.
I’m pretty sure anyone with the proper training can make very good games with only primitives. 
I did that for my first Steam game (though I did still use some store bought assets).
tss tss, no cheating! :lol:
On a slightly off topic point… I’ve never heard the term ‘kitbashing’. What a perfect word to add to the vocabulary. Thanks
By the way large studios rely on third party assets just as much as we do. Quixel, for example, is a very popular source of very high quality assets. Epic Games used them to create the demo for Unreal Engine 5. Pricing starts at $19/mo (Unreal developers have free access to the assets for games made with Unreal).
I think most players on PC/console have some awareness of the concept of an asset store at this point. If they see various assets in different art-styles or recognise an asset from anther game, some players are going to guess that the assets have probably been reused somehow.