Wasteland 2 crowdsourced experiment
polycounter lvl 8
Hey guys, seems like wasteland 2 devs are trying a crowdsourced model creation, kinda like Valve i guess.Looks like the deadline is 1 week from now, so goodluck.I personally wanna try this thou i never used unity i guess i need to test it fast 
http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/unity
http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/unity
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Also, their art-style guide isn't very interesting, it's not the best looking or most interesting way to do create assets... I personally wouldn't like to create stuff that fits in with theirs.
this
So I guess it's not that bad...
A large quantity of free filler assets, meaning they can focus their artists' attention on more important stuff
What people like me get out of this:
Practise working to real specifications, timescales and art direction
Involvement in a live development
The possibility of getting credited
Money
I think this is a great idea; I see nothing inherently wrong with it. Gonna get on it next weekend
I appreciate your excitement, but this sort of thing is bad for freelance artists long term. It devalues the work and makes your time meaningless. It's not a good thing.
For example, by doing this you send the message that you don't mind working for free (which if you don't win, that's exactly what you've done) and when you DO get paid, you don't mind getting paid bottom dollar (which you will be, since you have to undercut everyone on price to win - they will reject assets that are priced too high).
I dunno ... I don't like it. :-/
Their initial goal was $900,000 and they made $2.9 million. If people who are fans want to help out I guess that is fine but I feel like they should just hire someone outright and pay them a fare amount.
In this case however, even the one person chosen gets screwed. Say you work for 10 hours making a prop, then you list it for $10 and it wins. I assume that Unity takes its 30% cut for using the Asset Store, so you make $7. $7 for 10 hours of work is 70 cents an hour.
Compare that to these sweatshop labor numbers that I Googled up:
Bangladesh $0.13 per hour in U.S. Funds
China - $0.44 per hour in U.S. Funds
Costa Rica - $2.38 per hour in U.S. Funds
Dominican Republic - $1.62 per hour in U.S. Funds
El Salvador - $1.38 per hour in U.S. Funds
Haiti - $0.49 per hour in U.S. Funds
Honduras - $1.31 per hour in U.S. Funds
Indonesia - $0.34 per hour in U.S. Funds
Nicaragua - $0.76 per hour in U.S. Funds
Vietnam - $0.26 per hour in U.S. Funds
Do you really want to work for 10 hours in order to have a chance to earn less than a Nicaraguan slave-laborer?
I know that the get-out argument would be that you could conceivably make some amount of money selling the asset to others in the Asset Store, but let's look realistically at what a poor deal that's going to be:
1) There are going to be many other near-identical assets to compete with.
2) Unity is going to take 30% of every subsequent sale.
3) Some of the assets look pretty specific, possibly too unique to be of use to many potential customers on the Asset Store.
Lastly, to expand on WarrenMarshall's point; If this practice became sufficiently popular there would be no such thing as a career in game art anymore.
You want to make stuff that is going to sell in volume at a low price. You make a very good return on time invested if you know what sells and what people are willing to pay for it and you budget your time accordingly. There's a sweet spot.
Let's say you spent 10 hours on something and sold it for $20 in the asset store. If you sold 2 copies per month, you would get 2 x 12 x $14 = $336 in a year. That's $33.60 an hour before taxes.
1) Yep, that is something to consider. I would avoid making stuff that is nearly identical to other stuff. You could differentiate yourself on quality or price, but you might have a hard time hitting your hourly rate goal (whatever that may be).
2) Unity is the best deal you are going to get for any online store. If you are selling any other product wholesale and get 70% of the retail price, you should be very happy.
3) Similar to point 1, I would avoid making stuff that is too unique or has a limited market share. Post-apocalyptic is a small genre. You'd want to find ways to re-use the models and fit them into other packages.
Selling game assets online is a totally separate market from being an employee in a studio.
In no way do I mean to imply that selling large-volume assets via Turbosquid, the Asset Store or something similar is a raw deal in and of itself. It's just that in this specific situation the deck is necessarily going to be stacked against you.
Of course, my point is that Wasteland is violating that divide with this move and that's not a good thing in my opinion. It would be a different story entirely if they were simply buying the assets which were already available and not attempting to commision new ones.
Yeah, I think we are mostly in agreement. I know they have bought a lot of existing stuff from the asset store but there isn't a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff available.
I understand and don't entirely disagree.
I don't know what InExile's financial situation is or their business plan so I don't know what they can afford.
If I was to make models based on their concept art, I would make a bigger package with enough models to make a small post-apocalyptic/warzone/zombie survival environment. It needs to have value to lots of different groups to make a decent return.
However, I did happen to go to Unite 12, and see a talk from Brian Fargo about wasteland 2. I have to say i'm a fan of how he conducts business and though initially put off by the cheek of it, and annoyed how this appears to be working on spec, i feel there may be some hidden benefits compared to those of working on spec.
For one it is pretty cool that fans of the game have the chance to make content for it.
Also, I have a few products on the unity store (3 models to be precise) and have been consistently been making $150+ per month from sales. I've also found the market to be extremely fickle. I.e. people generally don't want useful things for game development, they want the fun bits, the show pieces, and they will pay more for it.
So initially i thought none of this stuff will be useful to others but actually that doesn't matter because it will sell if its good, and it will sell more when wasteland becomes popular (and even more if it gets used in wasteland).
The other side to this coin is that unity are desperate to get assets store content in proper games, and not just be a market for hobbits. So I think its a fairly generous move by in exile to do this. No doubt it will be harder to compile a game out of a ton of different models than it would be to use freelanced, sourced work. They will probably learn a lot about how to get art from different sources working well together in game, and perhaps pave the way for other AAA dev studios to make use of the unity store, which would hopefully increase quality and prices.
I don't bill by time anymore. In the world of indie dev (and digital products) it doesn't matter how long you spend on something, and it certainly doesn't mean its worth more.
This is probably a different argument all together but if you bill by time you instantly trap yourself into only being able to earn how much time you spend on something. Art is subjective, if its awesome then charge a ton for it. If they don't buy it from you then maybe its their loss. Get people to value your artwork not your time.
Also consider that once the model has been made you could sell infinite copies of it with little to no input - all the models ive made for the unity store paid back their time input (based on my freelance rate and 6 month sales) and the feedback from customers was much nicer than that of freelance clients.