Plagiarism comes in many forms depending on the medium in which it happens. Copying books or articles, movie scripts or plots, and even in video games. Now this type of plagiarism is a grey area. It is known as asset flipping. Asset flipping is taking a pre-made piece of game coding or a model of an item or character and making a game using minimal effort. This is widely seen on the gaming platform known as Steam. On steam you can find many games where these assets are used over and over with only slight modifications to make them seem different and then resold usually for very little but still sold. Now these assets are usually sold. They can be bought to be used for the purpose of helping new developers create. With the advent of easy to use game engines such as Unity, a game engine is the core a game is built upon its what allows specific physics or graphical qualities. In the unity store you can find character assets such as these
and purchase them for your game. Now the question is if you take these assets and make 5 different games with slight modifications to make them look just different enough is it plagiarizing? Probably not if you are the one making and releasing the content, but in some cases if you use the assets without buying them, ripping the assets from the code or files, and using them without the knowledge or permission of the creator then yes i believe that it is exactly plagiarizing. One example of how this goes wrong taken from this article "Back in March of of 2016, video game critic and commentator Jim Sterling was sued by the video game developer Digital Homicide. The allegations were that Sterling had defamed the company and its co-founder, James Romine, in a series of posts and videos criticizing the company’s games. The lawsuit drew a great deal of publicity as the lawsuit was eventually dismissed in February 2017 after an agreement from the two sides. However, in the 11 months between, Digital Homicide had attempted to sue 100 anonymous Steam users for defamation and, as a direct result of that action, had all of their games removed from Steam." Crazy right? Well unfortunately this is an all to common occurrence especially when it comes to mobile gaming. Do you remember candy crush? Do you remember at the height of its popularity how if you happen to look on the app store how many candy crush like games there were. How many grand theft auto clones and fortnite-esque games that can be found? Too many! In a time where any original idea is redone and beaten to death its a breath of fresh air when we get something original, though honestly i can not blame someone for trying to copy a winning formula.
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