I apologize for being away for so long. My wife and I have been prepping to buy a house, I recently gutted and rebuilt my gaming PC, I've been taking on more responsibility at work, and I'm trying to get my own game project off the ground before the end of the year. However, that is no excuse to allow a blog to stagnate, so I will try my hardest to be more diligent in the future. Some of my posts may be a bit shorter, but I'll be able to get more information and news to everyone a little bit more frequently.
In the past couple weeks I've become a fan of Jim Sterling. Until I stumbled upon his back and forth with Digital Homicide over their lazily copy/pasted shooter, The Slaughtering Grounds, I wasn't overly familiar with him. Even if his presentation can be (for some, I'm fine with it) a bit vulgar, bombastic, or downright silly, I usually end up cheering towards my phone when I watch his videos, as he frequently echoes sentiments that I have been feeling for some time.
I was both infuriated and gleefully excited when Jim recently put a disturbing trend on display. He called it "asset flipping." That is, buying asset/starter packs for game engines and either assembling them using the most minimal effort possible, or simply using the sample levels that often come with them, packaging them up, and trying to sell the end result as a "game." With Valve's virtually non-existent quality control on Steam Greenlight, along with the community's often painful ineptitude towards researching a product before spending their money, this has begun to spiral out of control.
We saw it with West Games and their Areal/Stalker Apocalypse/Everything They've Ever Had A Hand In scam. We saw it with Digital Homicide and The Slaughtering Grounds. Right now, we're seeing it with the developer simply known as "Kotach," as he buys Unity asset packs, imports them into the engine, compiles them, and sells them. He even uses the descriptions from the asset packs as the descriptions for his "games." Once a week, he clears the forums of any threads calling him out on his garbage, and then continues searching for the next way to exploit the community. And while most people know he's being a dishonest lazy greedy pompous scumbag, you see the occasional comment saying "this game looks great!" Even if there is only one comment like that, it is one comment too many.
And so, we circle back around to something I'm constantly saying. We as consumers have to educate ourselves on a product before making a purchase. Uncrowded, one of Kotach's "games," uses the Unity UnitZ asset pack. So do many other games, several of which have been hastily thrown together as a scummy cash-grab, just like Uncrowded. However, if I am a casual gamer, and I am not even aware of the existence of pre-made asset packs or Greenlight's awful filtering system, or I am seeing this asset pack in action for the first time, I can see how someone might feel a twinge of excitement. You should be able to walk down a dark alleyway without fear. You also should be able to support an "indie developer" to promote the release of solid, feature complete games without being worried about being scammed. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, if you choose to walk down a dangerous alley and get mugged, its partially your fault. Additionally, if you choose to give money to someone before researching whether or not they just want to take your money and run, it is also partially your fault.
These types of "developers" are particularly infuriating for me, because I'm trying to break into the indie development scene. Guess what? We're making all of our assets from scratch. We're writing all of our code and blueprints ourselves. And, even after we have a solid gameplay demonstration put together, I know that I will still need to campaign like hell on Steam Greenlight, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or wherever we go, in order to make any headway and gain any exposure. You know why? Because those places are now being flooded with lazy, half-assed attempts to sell "games" that barely pass for a playable tech demo. These people are dragging the rest of the indie community down, and the indie community is, if we're being honest, the only future the gaming industry has left. Indie games are all we have to turn to after we've gotten fed up with being squeezed for every last penny by large publishers. There are a few exceptions to this, but its not like these exceptions can cover every genre and corner of the industry.
In this situation, there's something to be said for being an elitist, I think. With accessibility, comes the masses of assholes who want to exploit the entire system for a profit with the laziest efforts possible. It seems we have reached that stage with game development. The only way to stop it, is to do a few paragraphs of reading on a product before buying it (suck it up and do it, you'll be fine), and for Steam, Kickstarter, and other indie developer outlets to start policing what get's approved and what doesn't through carefully altered policies/restrictions. The refund policy was a step in the right direction for the most part, but we need to stand together to prevent this type of garbage from taking over the entire indie community. Its only going to hurt all of us in the long run.
