A new royalties system is here and it makes it clear - reputation is everything

With so many improvements taking place on our site in the last couple of months, another new feature (though super exciting) shouldn't come as a surprise. It is one of our early New Year's resolutions to step into 2015 with a fresh mindset, so we're making important tweaks to the way the royalty/reputation system works. No reason to be alarmed, it's all in effort to bring more clarity to the process. Without further ado, let's review the changes.

Based on the feedback we receive from you, we've gathered that the current royalty system may be quite a challenge: difficult to understand and manage with all the different price points. We would have never come so far if not for our early believers and top sellers, so it only seems logical to have a royalty system in place that rewards highly-engaged, loyal designers based on their portfolio, sales and engagement. It's going to be all personal...

The royalty rate will now depend on your reputation on CGTrader. There will be 13 different reputation levels - from Beginners, who've only recently joined the platform, to Legends, whose names speak for themselves, and the royalty rate will vary accordingly, from 70 to 90%.

Building trust with clients, delivering high-quality projects on time and actively engaging with the community - these will be the key factors to ensuring good reputation; and we all know that, in any business, reputation is everything. Your reputation, and therefore your royalty rate, will grow based on different reputation attributes: most importantly sales and model uploads, but also referrals, sales, social likes, active participation in forum discussions, etc. Reputation points will also get you free CGTrader credits when you achieve a certain level.

It will be fairly simple to get started - anyone with tens of models will easily reach 1,000 reputation points and will enjoy the 80% average royalty. Getting to 90% will be an easy task for most of the loyal sellers, but will require extra work from the sellers who are just starting out. We aim to encourage newcomers to build their portfolio, promote their models, and thereby not only enjoy a higher royalty rate, but also be more successful onCGTrader in general. Take a look at the full list of important factors.

In order to set the new system in motion, we had to recalculate the current reputation points. It's possible that your royalty rate increased or decreased according to your overall performance. If your royalties went down, but you're an active community member, please let us know - or just use the clever shortcuts to gain reputation points and you'll be able to get back on track in no time.

We understand this is a major change, but our research shows that it will have a positive impact on the majority of loyal sellers' performance and will contribute greatly to boosting newcomers' sales conversion rate.

Anything you have to say about this - we want to hear it.