It is not been much time I have published this asset on the store and also I haven’t got any sales for it yet.
To my surprise while I was doing SEO testing procedure for promotion of my asset I observed a strange thing. As there were no purchases for this asset till now, I found my original asset listed on a Chinese website!
Since I haven’t authorized this website to list my asset, how can my asset be listed on this site?
Since I don’t understand Chinese, I did a google translate and found that the download button has been grayed out and telling that only members registered on the form are allowed to access the download link. Then I tired to register but found that new registrations are closed. Also there was no registration link. I had to manually guess to randomly enter anything in login form just finally conclude that no new registrations are accepted.
Therefore, I need help to find out whether that site is illegally selling pirated copies of my asset or may be that download link is redirecting to unity asset store?
Has anyone else faced this problem yet? If anyone is registered on that Chinese forum, please elaborate whether that site redirects to the Unity asset store or sell assets in unauthorized manner?
I am also a new publisher so can anyone tell me is it normal for a publisher assets to be listed on other website (for sales or redirection to original asset store) without the publishers consent?
Well they are linking to asset store, so it may well be a placeholder. Honestly, just don’t bother worrying. All you have done so far is alert everyone to the possibility they might find out how to steal your asset.
I tried to steal your asset as a gesture of good faith but the site in question did not have a download link, only a link to the asset store. I would not worry.
My daughters found their art from Deviant Art on sale on a Russian site. Very similar. Their art was shown with links to buy prints but if you clicked on it, a shopping cart never appeared. I think they do stuff like this to drive people to their sites and to make them click. We were able to get it taken down by writing to the hosting service which happened to be in the US. If that is the case with this site you may be able to contact them.
You sure it’s not just someone trying to make a buck off the affiliates program? If they’ve gone to the trouble of translating all your marketing material into Chinese, this might not be a bad thing.
Glad you mentioned this! Very interesting. I never knew they had an affiliate program for the Asset Store! I used to spend my spare time working on Internet businesses focused around affiliate marketing and ads. The whole “get paid while I am sleeping or doing whatever” passive income thing really appealed to me. It was a nice little side business that after several years made about $20k per year.
Might be worth dabbling in it again. I’d see this as a more sensible use of time as far as making money goes than spending time creating actual games. With game dev we need to actually build the game first then focus on marketing it. Affiliate system is great because we don’t need to spend time creating anything and can just focus on the lead generation. Actually anyone wanting to make money in game dev should be doing this. It is real world lab to learn how to do marketing.
I’ve often thought I’d be more inclined to make games if I could have affiliates doing the marketing for me. Unity doesn’t have something like that too, do they? Or Steam? I just think tackling both the game development and the marketing as one person very part-time is too much. It’s like I’d have to actually try… actually work I mean. Who wants that?
Well you could do this with the number of assets you’ve used before. I know you’ve mentioned using several assets, more than the common user I think, so promoting those assets you’ve deemed quality is not a bad idea.
It’s just automated scripts creating fake shopping sites that those that don’t pay a lot of attention get ripped off at one time and never again. These sites actually probably have never even seen or heard of your Unity asset or your artwork it was simply blindly copied over. Now, if a few people get there via search engines it’s a small income in petty cash and/or ad revenue that is essentially devoid of any further labor by the thieves.
It’s pretty common thing actually and yes ignorance of the internet is often your best defense again the internet, although sophisticated search engines like Google should be sophisticated enough to filter such criminal activity out they don’t, but then again my GMail ‘Promotion’ Inbox is filled daily with clearly crooked promo ads by crooked scam ‘businesses’ placed there and approved by Google itself…
LOL, I didn’t learn much from the one game I’ve released but I did learn that.
hi there,
you can contact that website to remove that link.
if they disagree then you can go to the web hosting companies of that website and tell them the whole story.
web hosting companies remove that website whose complaint they get. so
first
ask the website to remove that link
second
complaint about that website to their hosting provider.
NOTE: as told by someone above. you can do anything if that website is of CHINA.
