Asset Flippers
Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2017 1:49 pm
A guy on Youtube reported a new form of shitting on customers who want to buy games.
He referred to them as "Asset Flippers." The guy will purchase a game framework for Unity from someone selling it for $50-100, then taking that framework - which is intended to be used to provide the base mechanics of a game, allowing the developer to skip over coding the minor parts and put more time into the actual game - packaging it as an actual game, with nothing added, and selling it on places like Steam Greenlight (or whatever replaced it after Steam discontinued it) for prices from $5 to $8.
This in effect is selling a demo that has no value for the price of a reasonable game.
The guy looked at some of the games that this slime had released and identified them as three unchanged or minimally changed Unity asset packs that sold for a few dollars each, and flipped them into three fake games that, after the minor expenses and Steam's cut of the sales price, made around $120,000, $65,000 and $16,000.
This slime gets a 6 figure return on a net "investment" pf less than $400. Something tells me I'm in the wrong line of work.
The term comes from people who buy houses, do some repair and paint, and resell the improved property at a profit. Only difference is house flippers do a hell of a lot more work.
Another nasty trick is to stitch together two of three of these asset flips into some incoherent mish-mash bastard hybrid of a "game." And that is presuming the game even works.
He pointed out that when you pay for a game, no matter how much, or how little, you should be entitled to three things: (1) That the game will run; (2) that it will not crash; and (3) that you receive reasonable value relative to the price paid, e.g. a game you paid $5 won't have the same level of graphics or length of game play as a $10 game since the publisher has more money with a somewhat more expensive game to spend it on resources.
These "flippers" often produce "games" that violate 1, 2, or all 3 of these.
He referred to them as "Asset Flippers." The guy will purchase a game framework for Unity from someone selling it for $50-100, then taking that framework - which is intended to be used to provide the base mechanics of a game, allowing the developer to skip over coding the minor parts and put more time into the actual game - packaging it as an actual game, with nothing added, and selling it on places like Steam Greenlight (or whatever replaced it after Steam discontinued it) for prices from $5 to $8.
This in effect is selling a demo that has no value for the price of a reasonable game.
The guy looked at some of the games that this slime had released and identified them as three unchanged or minimally changed Unity asset packs that sold for a few dollars each, and flipped them into three fake games that, after the minor expenses and Steam's cut of the sales price, made around $120,000, $65,000 and $16,000.
This slime gets a 6 figure return on a net "investment" pf less than $400. Something tells me I'm in the wrong line of work.
The term comes from people who buy houses, do some repair and paint, and resell the improved property at a profit. Only difference is house flippers do a hell of a lot more work.
Another nasty trick is to stitch together two of three of these asset flips into some incoherent mish-mash bastard hybrid of a "game." And that is presuming the game even works.
He pointed out that when you pay for a game, no matter how much, or how little, you should be entitled to three things: (1) That the game will run; (2) that it will not crash; and (3) that you receive reasonable value relative to the price paid, e.g. a game you paid $5 won't have the same level of graphics or length of game play as a $10 game since the publisher has more money with a somewhat more expensive game to spend it on resources.
These "flippers" often produce "games" that violate 1, 2, or all 3 of these.