Asset flip

An asset flip is a type of low-budget, poor-quality shovelware video game, specifically one in which a video game developer legally purchases pre-made assets, such as a game engine, 2D art or 3D models, and uses them to create numerous permutations of generic, often unfinished games to sell to unsuspecting customers in the guise of a finished product. While these assets have "democratized" development for indie games, allowing access to a higher quality of asset than individual developers could create themselves, their availability from the 2010s onward also led to asset flipping. In particular, the practice is often connected to games created in the Unity engine, through the Unity asset store. ^[1][2][3]

Asset flips have been noted to be a problem on many online distribution platforms, especially Steam, which has little to no restrictions against them, outside of select cases in which Valve Corporation intervened to ban certain developers from the platform. The Nintendo Switch eShop has also been accused of allowing the sale of asset flips.^[4] Critics have criticized the deceptive and fraudulent nature of many asset flips, which by definition have little unique content, and are often riddled with bugs, if not largely unplayable.

History[]

The asset flip game rose to prominence in the 2010s with the advent of pre-made royalty-free assets. The Unity store launched in 2010,^[5] and Unity acknowledged the problem of "flips" in a 2015 blog post.^[6] The term "asset flip" was coined by games journalist Jim Sterling around this time.^[7]

In February 2017, developers Digital Homicide Studios were accused of creating asset flips by Sterling, who reviewed one of their games, The Slaughtering Grounds. In response, they sued Sterling for US$10 million, as well as anonymous Steam users for US$18 million. These lawsuits were dismissed, and the developer's games were removed from Steam for violating their terms of service.^[8]

In September 2017, Steam removed 173 asset flip titles released by the studio Silicon Echo and associated accounts. 86 of those titles had been launched in the two months before the crackdown, accounting for approximately 10% of all games added to Steam in the period.^[9] The games were constructed out of assets from the Unity store, and were released in bulk after the studio had found a means of circumventing the $100 listing fee using a bundle mechanic.^[10] Valve released a statement addressing the move, stating: "this person was mass-shipping nearly-identical products on Steam that were impacting the store’s functionality and making it harder for players interested in finding fun games to play".^[11]

In 2018, Steam declared, after pulling the school shooting game Active Shooter, that it would "allow everything" on its platform regardless of quality.^[12] Valve engineer Erik Johnson later clarified that Steam would only remove "obvious troll" games, despite the contention of critics and gamers that asset flips are harmful to players, developers and Steam itself. The steadily increasing amount of asset flips on Steam, due to a loosening of inclusion criteria, led to what commentators called the "Steampocalypse", in which discoverability for most indie developers dropped precipitously regardless of game quality.^[13]

2018 also saw the release of Asset Flip Simulator on Steam, a game designed to criticise the practice.^[14]

Criticism[]

Some critics and developers, such as Bennett Foddy, have lamented the use of "asset flip" as a "catch-all" term, believing that some high-quality or experimental games that use a large amount of pre-made assets are unfairly labeled as "asset flips" by players, such as PUBG.^[13]

See also[]

• Spamming
• Gaming the system
• Sturgeon's law

References[]