See this ------
When will Unity help developer – where is 30% going – allowing pirates to make games free using assets like Script Inspector, GAIA, Nottorus, World Streamer – everything is put up for free – see image – someone put 100s of GBs of Unity asset – who going to buy assets anymore – Unity needs to stop this NOW — My models there for free — I work on them for months and now everyone can use — what I work for :(:(
Unity has as much power to stop piracy as every one else… i.e none.
It’s a shame to see so many hard working authors assets showing up at places like that. I can understand if it were treated like “demos” to try out assets they plan to buy, but I have a gut feeling the majority of people who aquire assets that way could care less about who gets hurt in the process.
The truth is there is little to be done but report to the proper authorities what you find, which can be tricky I’m sure. I’d say keep your eyes peeled to find somebody silly enough to actually build something from your assets, and then prepare legal action.
I guess it’s worth noting that anybody serious who wants up to date assets, and the developers support, probably makes the right decision and just legally purchases the assets. Perhaps some of those sales could even come from “demos” they try of whatever product they have their eyes on.
People who download that stuff would never have bought the asset in the first place, I would not worry about loosing money. If your assets are good quality people will buy them
Well, that’s a bit naive. It’s true that not every pirated copy is a lost sale, but some are. However, expecting Unity to somehow solve piracy when billions of dollars and much bigger companies completely failed to do so is simply absurd. That said, the asset store staff have worked to take down pirated assets when they can. It’s a game of whack-a-mole though. Claiming that Unity is “allowing” piracy indicates a serious lack of understanding of the issues, considering they do no such thing.
–Eric
unity cant stop piracy, its the asset developper works. there is a plugin called World creator that ask your invoice number inside of unity to activate the ui. without this number you just cant use it.
Not much time ago I received letter from one guy. Who asked for help with one of my assets which was pirated as well.
I asked him for invoice number, but he started to tell stories about company which hired him, and so on…
There was no name and mail of company of course…
I said that I support only customers purchased my assets, this is my tinny way to fight piracy.
It is not much but at least something.
I lost approximately 80% sales of this asset. In the past it was my bestseller.
Someone purchased it, and every time I update, he does the same for torrent.
There is also my asset on that list!!! 
true
It really is. There’s absolutely nothing stopping people from spreading anything they’ve downloaded. Whether it works and you’ll get away with using such assets is a whole different matter.
There is one decent solution that music software publishers use: Watermarking. It doesn’t stop the piracy, but it helps trace where files came from (unless bought with stolen credit cards). Each downloader gets a unique ID embedded in the files, and it could be anything as simple as an additional tag in a structured file to audio watermarking.
It takes a bit of effort and some extra resources to implement though. The instrument industry has automated solutions and generally few filetypes to manage, while Unity assets are all sorts of data.
They take action.
It’s like fighting Hydra though.
Agree, that is a good practice. However it is not easy for designers and animators to come up with such a system. Unity should include that in the default asset store tools so that all authors can take advantage of invoice checking on startup. It is going to be a pain to intermittently put your invoice numbers in our projects, but I think if it can help piracy we should do our part too.
I think that comparison is somewhat wrong. Other companies are trying their best to target this issue. I think the asset store needs to come up with a solution to embed invoice numbers or some additional information in the asset package. This way if someone shares the package you can know easily who shared it. In this digital age they cannot just give up saying that other big companies failed.
Okay. Lets turn this question around:
When will unity introduce a better refund system? And when will assetstore devs forced to create a demo?
I bought 3 assets recently. Megashapes, some flick soccer kit and urecord. Megashapes didnt worked as excepted. And the flicksocker kit and urecord were just crap. And now ive spent ~200$ for stuff i could not use and i cant do anything about that.
That doesent justify pirating. When i see a torrent of an asset that i realy like iam also super pissed
A lot of companies have ditched DRM entirely, actually. You might ask why SaaS is a thing, and the answer is because you can’t pirate services. Any “solutions” like embedding invoice numbers are so trivial to overcome that it’s not worth the effort to implement. Especially for something like assets, where one of the main points is that they exist outside Unity and can be loaded into other apps. The only reasonable thing you can really do is to deny support to anyone who’s unable to supply an invoice number…you can’t stop piracy, but you don’t have to spend time supporting someone who didn’t pay you.
–Eric
I find this disgusting that someone would put so many people’s hard work on torrent for pirating. I have put quite a bit of money into assets and I have a bunch more in the cart ready to be purchased. In my mind, if my games are successful I owe a great amount of gratitude to the fellow developers who create these assets I use. My projects would not have been possible without them.
I appreciate all of your hard work.
I have an idea for custom browser or browser addon which in functionality to highlight only the username who is already an active customer / subscriber. So an asset author only need to supply a list of active customer and forum username. Who is in here savy enough in firefox or chrome addon making ?.
By doing these, it will eliminated the needs and wasted hours from supporting pirate and in long term maybe there might be conversion from pirate into legitimate customer.
