Materials about using assets in game development

Can anyone knows a book, video, presentations, interview anything about the use of ready assets / modules in game development ?
I’m writing a BA thesis and the only thing I found is one short video from Microsoft and the book “Implementing a Digital Asset Management System”.

This is a bit of a bleeding-edge subject to be writing a research paper on. The use of assets/modules in game development is a relatively recent development in the industry. Up until now, most work of this nature was either done internally, or contracted out. It was actually quite rare for companies to “purchase” assets for use from on-line repositories designed for that purpose. Centralized “Asset-Stores” have only started gaining traction in the last few years, so you aren’t going to find a lot of formal documentation and academic research regarding them. The best that I can suggest is some of the articles and opinion pieces surrounding the practice.

Also, it would probably be a good idea to go over some of the Unite presentation/videos from the past few years. The Unity Asset store is one of the most obvious examples of this practice. Their materials should be available, and will be some of the most relevant.

Thank you for the help

Its going to have to be empirical research. Can BAs do that? :wink:

I’m interested to know what you’re researching in particular. The only difference I can think of between using off-the-shelf assets in software development and using off-the-shelf assets in any other business is that we need to manage the licensing requirements. In fact… with a little extra thought that’s not even unique to us - anyone licensing music, images, video clips, software libraries, etc. has always had to do exactly this, and those things have been happening for decades. So the only thing that has changed is that we’ve now got some specialist stores for our specialist market segment.

If we know what you’re trying to learn about and/or present then we might be able to give you more useful assistance.

Edit: Actually, something else is slowly changing as a result of these new, centralised stores popping up. Consider the mainstream music and movie industries - everything there is licensed by territory because their roots were in physical manufacture of goods. Global licenses would have been restrictive because few distributors could manufacture and deliver physical tapes/CDs/videos/etc to the whole world. So, stuff was licensed by territory to distributors who could effectively service those territories. The distribution agreements included clauses that stopped the distributors from competing with any given product even if they later expanded such that their territories overlapped. Back then this was a good thing - it was the most efficient way to get physical media out to everyone and it helped the industry protect itself by stopping people from competing solely on price. I suspect, though, that this has bled over to how things work today even though the physical limitations no longer apply. If Song X is used in a movie and that movie is being released into many territories where the licensing is held by different people… is this a part of what leads to different movie release dates in different territories? (Genuine question. I do not know.)

Bringing this home, the centralised stores that are now popping up also bring something else - standardised licensing. When I buy something from the Unity Asset Store they don’t care what I’m using it for, how many times, over what distribution methods into what territories. Those are all questions I’ve answered in the past when licensing media the traditional way! So you could research the economic impact of that for content users, content creators, and our audiences. (I could write several more paragraphs, but you’re the one doing the research. :p)

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An excellent point. Coming at the issue from this angle would provide far more fodder for a research effort. Digging into the legal issues and ramifications of licensing resources would likely provide heaps of reference material. Comparing/contrasting this with past instances of licensing in other industries/disciplines would be an excellent means of predicting how things will go for game assets in the future. (a means of bolstering whatever thesis you decide on)