Hey Everyone,
Last week, after Unite, I wrote a recap of the conference and was published today at raywenderlich.com. If you are interested in attending a future Unite, check it out. The short summary: it was a blast!
Interesting except I don’t think the people that buy the assets and using the assets in a game is the problem. Despite the market speak of many of us saying of games, development, and art being our passion and that we’re leaders in it…well let’s take a step back for a minute and acknowledge no we and they aren’t.
Unity Personal Edition and Asset Store re-use is not the problem and to expect market leadership from the end users of those people that at least spent their limited time downloading and integrating those things to create games isn’t realistic and especially so when you read all those gaming and development and marketing blogs and sales pitches that tells a singular person in most cases they need to go through and do all those that marketing and sales pitches successfully to even have a small chance and that the game they actually create is less consequential. Hey, they see if the big businesses and celebrities are essentially refrying beans and making money from it it’s not unreasonable for them to expect to be able to do the same thing.
Oh, I just spent 2 years of bespoke coding and creating artwork but I know nothing about all these monetization and marketing schemes that I’m told I must know about to compete. Well, better to learn the mechanics of those things upfront and then spend 2 years creating bespoke code and art work. True you still can’t afford effective advertising but at least you’ll know that upfront and concentrate on your game and not you’re marketing. And that’s what they mean by the best advertising is free.
However if those app stores wanted too they could weed out the asset flippers as they are called. Instead all those that sell that partake in the profits contribute to a solution to a marketplace that allows each game maker to publish essentially a plastic apple that no one cares to eat. No problem.
The percent of profit of the App Stores is such that if they think that assets being directly sent to the market as purchased in the asset store or elsewhere is losing them business then they will start running code diffs and binary diffs and start weeding out the duplicates based on lack of originally. They’ll decide that though based on their own profit motives.
However, if they do that that’s still a problem - because although you’ll be able to weed out the ‘asset flippers’ as they are called you are denying a dreamer and a potential future really good and original story teller and game maker their tiny chance at a bit of fun. With human beings essentially 99.98% or more genetically alike who’s going to be the one to tell an identical twin they have got to go because they are not original enough? Although honestly as a computer game it’s not that a big problem because changing the look of an asset’s art is the easiest and least consequential part of the game.
They and people like myself have not been the problem. If you can’t afford to buy the advertising you need to get what you are advertising noticed, well then you can’t afford it.