So I may be kinda late (pretty sure of it), but I recently came across an asset called “UnitZ”. It is a simple foundation for survival/zombie games. Something just to help you get off the ground. A few hours after while browsing youtube related to unity, I came across this video:
and then this video…
and finally this video…
All three games, or rather one game, reviewed by the same person in less than one month. While the last two have been removed from steam, one still remains.
“Uncrowded”
This is literally just the unity asset published to steam under a new name.
This was talked about in a pretty long thread about Jim Sterling called “The Asset Flip” if you want to search for it.
I don’t think there’s any reason to think they stole the asset. My thoughts on the matter are that if you don’t actually want to be a game developer, then don’t be a game developer. This copy and paste stuff that people throw out there with no effort is obviously just an attempt to cash in on a perceived gold rush.
The asset costs $50, and does not appear to have any additional licensing restrictions. So, yeah, they can do that.
The whole point of asset store is that you can buy stuff there, use it in a game, then sell the game.
Those guys did exactly that. Although they probably only use single asset in the project and didn’t use it a starting point.
As you can see that wasn’t a very smart move, and they faced predictable backlash from the public.
Yup. UnitZ is quite popular with people wanting to publish a game without building a game. Heck, I even I brought a copy of the asset. Its always interesting to pull apart other peoples work. (Verdict: The code base is massively tangled. Its okay as a starting point. But you need to be a pretty competent coder to successfully modify it. And if you are competent, then you are probably more interested in building your own frame work).
The publisher seems to have found himself a nice niche market in selling ready to publish games. He has probably made more money from that then he would have from selling the game on steam as is. Its okay as a frame work, but it needs a ton of design work to make it a real game. If you prefer frame work to game design, then why not release something like this on the asset store?
I beg to differ. While it does get a lot of negativity, they apparently sold quite a lot copies based on the huge number of reviews.
Funnily enough, if you search that game on SteamSpy, which is quite accurate with sales estimations, you get the message that Uncrowded was filtered out, which means the “developers” asked Steamspy to exclude their game from the database (yes you can do that)
This means they don’t want everyone to see, how much of that garbage they have sold so far.
Maybe they fear more competition in their shady business, when people figure out how much you can make with minimal effort.
Ultimately, they don’t have a long term plan. They just want to make money as fast as they can, as long as it is easy like that.
I don’t see what’s the big deal with that (and why Jim Sterling is freaking out over it). The market will decide the fate of the game and similar projects. Just make sure your own games are better than that.
I don’t know how old he/they are. But if they have 100 bucks for Greenlight and letting their game exclude from Steamspy’s database, they are well aware of what they are doing. And not just a innocent kid who makes some life mistakes.
They probably sold more copies of that AssetStore project, than some highly polished games, where honest people invested a lot money and effort into (WarShift, Bierzerkers, Flame in the Flood etc.)
And that is kind of a big deal. Because Steam was known as a platform with quite high quality standards. Now everyone and their grandmas can publish flipped assets, which brings a lot noise to Steam, which ultimately damages honest developers, who make real games with a lot blood, sweat and tears.
Hmm… I think you’re not seeing the broader picture.
The big picture is that there’s no pilot flying the plane (Steam). Rather, the plane has been hijacked and there are fighter jets ready to blow it out of the sky on the president’s order.
They’re counting on the civilians on board to take back control of the plane. And the civilians are joining the bad guys, instead.
Having a better seat on the plane isn’t really relevant when everybody is going down together.
