This is not directly related to my projects but it's something that's starting to piss me off and I think indies should be wary.
Basically the Unity Asset Store and Sketchfab are selling pirated 3D models. This is not really something new but the real problem is that it seems these stores just gave up when dealing with these scammers. Some time ago it would have been enough to report an obviously stolen asset and it would get removed (for example, some Mass Effect weapons I found once) but now they will ignore user reports and ONLY remove them if the COPYRIGHT OWNER fills a DMCA form.
Here's a scammer selling 3D models from the game "Ghost in the Shell First Assault Online", a dead south korean game (it seems dead south korean games are the ideal target because it's kinda hard to contact their owners so they fill the DMCA form, at least I haven't received response from Nexon regarding this):
I understand the DMCA form is something that only the copyright owner can fill but you can't convince me these stores can't just remove offending users from their stores, that's absurd, what's the point of having an EULA then?. They just washed their hands if any developer buys an stolen asset and then is forced to shut down their game if the asset is found after publishing.
This also affected me personally because I bought one of those assets before finding out they were pirated so I put a negative review and started
a thread in the Unity forums to warn people and ideally get an official response. The problem is that the scammer "deprecated" the asset (basically marked as obsolete and removed the page so now users can't buy it but also can't see the negative review warning them of piracy) so I sent a refund request to Unity support and they told me that
I can't get a refund because the asset was deprecated too close to my purchase date (it's just $8 but this answer is just insulting).
The thing is even if Nexon reaches out and fills the form, the problem will persists, nothing will stop another scammer from coming to the Unity store or Sketchfab and upload a lot of models from a dead or obscure game and make some quick buck while Unity takes its 30% and pretends like they did everything they could. I'm thinking the only way for this to stop is to maybe get some youtubers and game journos involved.