I feel you, I’m not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you’ve bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they’re shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don’t meet some weird criteria they can’t quite meet.
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
A minimal level would be analyzing assets used and if more than say 90% are known free assets then block a game.
I feel you, I’m not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you’ve bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they’re shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don’t meet some weird criteria they can’t quite meet.
What if you have a fun game idea but aren’t big into graphics? You could just use a bunch of CC-BY licensed assets.
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
That’s a very significant additional cost!