Over the past few months I have been saving various creatures I’ve seen on the asset store. Two weeks ago I went through those saved assets because I was about to introduce new creatures into my game, but I found that nearly half of the assets I had saved to my list were no longer available, and I had been looking at these assets no more than two weeks prior, and suddenly a huge collection of them have been removed.
These are mostly whole publishers that have been completely removed. A few are individual assets from individually publishers, but mostly these are whole developers that are completely removed, all at the same time.
What happened? I could understand if one individual publisher removed themselves - (no scratch that I don’t understand why anyone would do that) - but this is several publishers all completely removed at once.
I honestly can’t see how this would happen without blaming this on some bad political move, which I have a hard time being able to fathom could happen here.
Maybe they started giving a shit about pirated assets being sold on the assetstore and purged some of the bad apples in one go? Or they changed some guidelines and temporarily disabled a bunch of accounts until they accept or comply with new guidelines? Neither would surprise me.
Duuuuuuuude!
There were a bunch of creatures that I was really interested in!
And now I’m feeling paranoid about other publishers who made similarly-styled creatures.
Also, I bought a rock golem from one of those guys; shouldn’t I have been notified that the asset may have been stolen? I don’t want to get take down notices; shouldn’t Unity be notifying people who bought these assets?
Best to reach out to the publisher of the asset and get a sense for who they are, and their community. Those of us who do create our own content will likely present a very different community than those who are ripping content and trying to make a quick buck.
It’s a tricky one, but I really hope that they start looking at how to solve this proactively, so that ripped assets are harder to get on the store in the first place.
Just thinking aloud, here, but maybe getting people to submit screenshots or other evidence of the creation of an asset along the way would be useful? Not a huge amount of effort for someone really making stuff, but pretty painful for people who are just ripping finished stuff out of others’ work.
Also emails should be sent out to people who bought the assets, when pirated assets have been detected/removed by Unity. If unity sold something that should not be sold on its marketplace, I dont think it should be left to the users to then figure it out once they recitify that. @UnityMaru maybe this is something you could raise with the relevant teams?
Bought something that ended up being a fraudulent asset rip on Itch.io a few years back and they sent out this automatic email. If Itch has the ability and resources, I would think Unity does as well:
You’ll then see endless complaints about people submitting assets to the store only to get rejected because they had no idea they needed to document the asset creation process along the way until they were already done and moved on to the submission process.
In my opinion that’s a smaller problem than stolen assets being sold regularly to unsuspecting users who are then at risk themselves.
If you want to sell something somewhere then you really should read the vendor’s rules in advance, anyway. This isn’t the only snag you could run into.
And even if you don’t do something as fundamental as reading the docs, standard practices such as using version control or keeping manual incremental saves would make this a non-issue.
No, I see it being really hard to find an effective balance where it is hard for rippers without being hard for honest people too.
It really is NOT hard to put a model into blender and show a wire frame, or even run a “simplify” command and claim its an early rough model.
And as was mentioned, what about people creating new content that didn’t take screenshots while they were making it? At that point, anything they can show would take just as much effort as the people pirating stuff.
Not to mention, taking those screenshots takes time away from the creating process. Professional artists get into a flow, and they aren’t going to stop and take screenshot.
FWIW, I did get an email from Unity about some of these assets. They didn’t get into a lot of specifics, just that there had been claims of misappropriation and they removed them from the store.
