Hello mates

I guess most users on SG are aware of what Asset Flipping is, but for those unaware, Asset Flipping is a technique (scam) used by some devs (usually from Russia) that involves making generic games as fast and easy as they can with stock, stolen or free assets, hence the name, usually empty walking simulators, then selling thousands of keys to shovelware indie sites to be sold in bundles.

Valve made some changes over the years to fight this, like charging a fee of US$100 to publish a game and recently limiting key generation to a 5000.

The biggest problem for SG users specifically are inflated giveaways when asset flippers increase the price of their games to ludicrous values for short periods of time and sell these games on shovelware sites for much less, drawing users intending to trade these games or looking for a cheap CV on SG, which then might bait unaware users judging games quality by their points. One example is this asset flip game, scaleplanet with a real CV of US$45.

The tools available in SG are to manually filter these games when you see them, use the metascore filter to remove the asset flip games but it also removes actual real games that have a bad rating and blacklisting / whitelisting users.

I suggest creating a filter for developers, I think it would be more precise and effective because accounts used for publishing have to go through some bureaucracy before publishing a game, including giving bank information and waiting 30 days, these asset flippers can't easily spam accounts to publish games.

Example, filtering gamesforgames and Hede devs would considerably decrease the amount of inflated giveaways.

1 year ago

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Good idea but good luck that cg invest time to program something useful that don't raise his earnings with the site.

You will need it.

1 year ago
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