Elder Game: A setback

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on February 21, 2012.

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I just got this email from Unity3d’s asset store manager:

We deeply regret to inform you that the seller Atlas Studio, aka Five Frog, aka BE3D, violated the Unity Asset Store Publisher Terms of Service and EULA by uploading and selling 3D models which were not theirs to sell.

Long story short: a number of the assets I’ve purchased are illegal and now I have to destroy them. I get all my money back, but not the days spent integrating them, adding sounds, and statting them.

One whole subzone of the “castle map” will now be completely barren of monsters: the giant snail, the mantis, and the upcoming fish-people were all in that area and are all illegal.

There are more assets out there for sale from various vendors, so I’ll recover… well, there aren’t other giant snails or mantises for sale, as far as I know, but I’ll find something else. But this affects a lot of things: the new food recipes involved snail meat, lots of rare and crafted items involved snail shells and mantis claws, etc.

I’d rather find out now than later when I get sued for using stolen assets, but… sigh. Disheartening.

EDIT: I just realized that the vast majority of future monster content I had earmarked was coming from those three company names. Most monsters in the asset store aren’t optimized enough to work well in an MMO; this stuff was really tight. Which means they probably stole them from some MMO I don’t recognize.

This means the usefulness of Unity’s asset store just took a huge nose dive! I’ll have to go searching for monsters all over again. In the short term I’ll probably plug in some more mammals, like bears and boars, since there are a fair number of those available.