Do you consider developers who utilize 'Asset Reuse' and 'Drag and Drop' the antithesis of actually developing a game? I had no idea Unity allowed drag and drop/asset reuse but is an interesting concept,
I recall Sony Online Entertainment coming up with something similar for one of their MMORPGs in development a long time ago where the players could make textures then sell them to other players to use.
Anyway thank you for sharing your thoughts, it does give some clarity about the different game creating softwares.
Reusing assets and drag & drop in itself isn't bad. Even if you reskin a game and sold it as a different thing, isn't bad if there was an artistic reason or value for consumer to do it. The problem is that many games don't even try to be enjoyable, they just make something that plays like a game and sell it, even if they have easily fixable bugs in it or if the assets they used don't mesh that well together.
Which game that was?
I think with the Metaverse, this will become incre4asingly popular in the upcoming years, which can be good or bad as how you see it. (I see it closer to bad, but I can see the good it can do.)
It was 'EverQuest Next: Landmark'. Their goal was to receive help from the players to create game assets and sell them on a marketplace where the creator would get a cut from the sold pieces that other players could buy and place in their area.
Here is a video from the 2013 presentation:
The concept might've been a little ahead of its time but it seemed like a cool idea.
It appeared 7 years too early...
I do. It's also a common opinion in the game industry. There were many game "developers" completely destroyed by critics, audience, every intelligent human being who heard about them (Digital Homicide, this dude who made Hunt Down The Freeman). The problem is fact, that nobody notice most of them. Their "games" appear on Steam and nobody says in the comments, "Don't buy this. It's a scam!". Nobody makes a research and figure out that this title was mix of "FPS Shooter Template" and 3 maps from asset store.
The worst thing about it is that it works... Well, if there was a soul in it, I wouldn't mind. If they were transparent about it, I wouldn't mind. If it was cheap enough and gave some people some enjoyment I wouldn't mind.
But most of the time, they don't even fix the bugs resulting from the loose way they glued up the assets together.