Hi There,
I want to preface this post with a comment saying that I know this will not appeal to a lot of people, but I think it is worth suggesting. I search for similar posts but did not find anything about this.
It has become a real problem where people make really cruddy games in unity, and then throw them onto Steam Greenlight. Somehow, a major portion of these games pass Greenlight and get into the marketplace.
A lot of these are sullying the reputation Unity has, and makes Indie Game developers generally come off as amatuerish. Some of these games are asset flips. Someone buys a toolset such as UnitZ, and then stamps a new name on it, puts 1 hour of effort into customization, and tries to sell it on Steam Greenlight for 9.99.
I saw one game called Project Catz that is an amalgamation of several of these assets into different game modes sold for 29.99. The game doesn’t even warrant 99 cents.
Unity should really consider implementing its own sort of Greenlight system that allows publication of free games freely, but if someone intends to charge for their game, Unity must give its quality stamp of approval. Perhaps a very quick arbitration process could be done to determine if a game is an asset flip, which is essentially plagiarism. Also, if the game can be played on some basic level, and is not entirely broken, then it gets the thumbs up. If someone attempts to publish the game and charge a fee without receiving the okay from Unity, then Unity can force the project to be removed, thus saving potential customers from a terrible product, and helping repair the quality image of Indie Development.
This doesn’t need to be a deep arbitration process - just something superficial to enforce quality on the people who put almost no effort into their work, and drag Unity’s name through the dirt (Not to mention all indie developers).
Edit#1 I only am referring to the free version of Unity. Not development in Unity Pro!
Edit#2: Two people were unsure what plagiarism is (so just posting here for reference): Here is the definition: Plagiarism: The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.