I will never be one to bash Unity. The engine, unfortunately, has attached their name to crap by their splash screen on the front of the game. A spectacular group of this trash is what is called asset flips. These come from abusing the goodwill of the community of content creators for video games. They have taken something that was meant to make game creation more manageable and try to make a quick buck from it. It's not the only Unity's problem because Unreal has starter kits that are used in this same way but for some reason have escaped the reputation.
Asset flips are games that are made from starter packs or low-cost assets sold on assets stores or available for free online. If you need some good examples Jim Sterling posted a video last year where he talks about it and he has several more videos where he plays games made in this way. What you will quickly notice about these games is they tend to never really play well at all. They usually are missing the standard features you would expect in video games and can at times be unplayable. The problem is a lot of the assets from where these flips came from were never supposed to be stand-alone games.
They are not the work of some first-time developer who is doing their best to create an experience but the work of someone who is lazily taking assets available to them and trying to resell it on stores like steam in hopes to make more money off of them then they did to purchase the assets. A lot of these games will cost anywhere from 25 cents to a few dollars so they can try and catch people looking for a discount game. This bogs down an already flooded market.
This whole issue is nothing new and if you are wondering why not much has been done about it, its because it is not seen as something that overrides the good that assets provide. In a Unity blog post written in 2015 Caitlyn Meeks remarks, "Whatever you call it, the amount of attention this practice has received is hugely disproportionate to the many positive ways the majority of our customers use the Asset Store." She believes the good outways the bad and the best way to handle it is through the community of developers helping to report when these abuses happen.
A really good point is made by Caitlyn in that post when she expresses assets are there to make game making a more manageable process. If you have ever tried you will realize that a lot goes into games. There is the coding, the graphics, the story, the sound, the gameplay, and on and on. If you have a talent for code and story writing it sucks that something such as a lack of the ability to animate would hold you back. Each of these talents takes a lot of practice and the fact there is a community out there that will help you fill in where you aren't strong is great.
Steam isn't just standing by though as I wrote about in another blog post where they took off a lot of games from their store. While this was related to shovelware this is not the first time they have removed these types of games and we will hope to see them continue to do so.
It's unfortunate that there are those that will try to take advantage of others this way but my cynical self-believes there is always a small group of people who manage to take something good and make it crap. I think the best thing that people to do is if you ever fall victim to this crap, don't be embarrassed by it, get on to a review store and warn others. We will all be better for it in the long run.
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