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Comment by Springtime | Hacker News Reader

Two additional specifics: it was the second-most wishlisted game on Steam prior to release and upon release customers discovered that it was essentially a different genre of game than was marketed, along with being buggy and much smaller in scope.

This led to mass negative reviews and refunds and calls of it being a scam, which the company denied.

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Also, supposedly large amounts of the game are basically just assets off the Unreal Marketplace, eg: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/ameri...

That in itself doesn't seem particularly damning; what is the purpose of a marketplace except to save game designers from having to reinvent the wheel?

Surely there's more to the accusation, but I don't see how "paying someone else to design part of your video game and then selling a game with those parts in it" would be in any way shocking.

Seems like a smart way to get the important parts of game play down and some traction and then have the money and capacity to focus on bespoke DLC.

On one hand, yes. Video games use stock assets. That part isn't surprising; other forms of media do the same (stock photos, sound effects, video, etc) and it's hardly remarkable when they do.

On the other hand, it's also expected that the developer of a new video game bring some amount of new material to the table. A video game is meant to be a creative work with a distinctive flavor of its own, not simply a collection of assets -- and, from the sound of it, the latter is essentially what The Day Before is.

You can make a fun game with minimal own assets. However, making a game that way shouldn't result in insolvency.

do we expect a chef to grow all of his own wheat, grind all the flour, sift it, and then make all of the bread?

nah, unless it's a main push they'll buy from a B2B bakery down the street.

even restaurants where most stuff is bought from Sysco can be pretty dang amazing, because the magic is the cooking and blending of elements.

The Day Before is just hype and BS. the gaming industry is now bigger than movies and there is just as much graft and hustle as anywhere.

> do we expect a chef to grow all of his own wheat, grind all the flour, sift it, and then make all of the bread?

No. But -- to continue with the metaphor -- we don't expect them to be reheating TV dinners in the kitchen and calling them gourmet meals either.

It really comes down to the “large amounts”.

If you’re using the asset store for some things, that’s fine, that’s the point.

If 100% of your game is asset store assets that’s a problem.

So, it really comes down to how much you lean on the asset store, and how much you do internally.

Ae a gamer, it doesn’t bother me one bit where the assets are from. Just make it fun and engaging.

Edit: stolen assets bother me, legally obtained ones don’t.

I think “asset flip” tends to be associated with totally derivative, lifeless gameplay.

I haven’t seen a lot of games called “asset flips” that are described as “fun engaging gameplay”.

I'd agree. This sounds like a terrible game. It doesn't sound terrible because they used large amounts of assets from the unreal marketplace though. They just made a game that wasn't very good.

I agree - no different to pulling together open source libraries in a codebase generally.

The concern is that they are doing an "asset flip", pulling together assets into a playable game and selling that off with no huge real work involved - especially given that their marketing and trailers had promised a 'game changing' experience. It's more about the mismatch of the advertising and positioning with that, and all of the aspects combined (different genre to announcement trailers, missing key features they'd talked about, large amounts of assets from the marketplace, buggy gameplay, etc).

That said, their use of marketplace assets seems... significant: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDayBefore/comments/18ee3t9/i_pre...

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