Hi fellow artists and enthusiasts.
I just wanted to give everybody a heads up about this vendor: https://www.cgtrader.com/seekstore
I was told that the above vendor was selling my work here on cgtrader and that he has been reported to CGTrader several times in the past for selling stolen content, and with 486 models of varying quality and styles and no consistency between them, I wouldn't be surprised if most or all of his content was stolen.
I actually just selected a random model from this vendor and googled the first sentence of his product's description and sure enough, it's another stolen model.
The stolen props in question from my own work can (or could) be found here: https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/furniture/furniture-set/medieval-bedroom-set
It's a fraction of the props included in a Fantasy Bedroom I did a while back. He sells the props for $39 while the whole Bedroom set including more than twice the props can be purchased legitimately for $24.95
Images of the original can be seen here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/A94gem
While I'm grateful that cgtrader seems to have removed the content pretty fast after reporting it, I had done some googling on the topic before reporting, and emailing them with the issue, and after some reading walked away with the impression that cgtrader has a pretty lax attitude towards theft and scammers.
Often it seems, repeat offenders have the specific content removed (if at all) but the vendor himself isn't removed, which really just encourages their behavior.
If you can steal and upload 100 models, who cares if 5 of them are flagged and taken down, right ?
I personally don't find this acceptable for a website that presents itself as reputable or legitimate in any way.
In my email I offered to help by contacting the investors they list on their website (Intel Capital, Practica Capital and Karma.vc) which I'll do after this, hoping that maybe one of them might have some motivational tips or tools for them or experience to share in dealing with similar issues, providing them with links to some of the reported and ignored stolen work and vendors. They may not care where they invest perhaps, but it also can't hurt to raise their awareness.
Clearly, just reporting the offenders isn't doing much.
- Now, it may seem like overkill to some but this is where the opinion bit comes in which I hope will resonate with some other people trying to make a living, supplement their regular income doing something they love or people still trying to simply make a break and a buck selling their 3D work online.
Sorry ahead for the rather long post...
I've worked for 15 years in the video games industry as a lead artist for a large, wonderful and successful Studio before 'retiring' a few years ago. Nowadays I just do stuff I love and sell it online.
Buying models, Substance painter/designer materials etc online on various sites is nowadays a normal part of game design. You can get so much for so little these days that it has become the first go to solution. If you can find and buy it, don't build it.
You'll generally save 80% compared to what an in house artist would cost and the time he/she would spend creating the same asset. It frees up your artists for more unique needed work and saves a lot of your own time you'd usually spend communicating your needs to the artist and then giving feedback and dealing with revisions until you get what you were looking for.
Purchased models by a studio can be anything. Sometimes you buy the simplest stuff, big or small, as a stand in and to help reduce the gray box / blocking out phase, or to quickly provide programmers and designers with something they can test game mechanics and design with.
I've bought (or the studio did rather) entire hipoly refineries for hundreds of $$ just so I'd have a few premade pipes and a detailed silo to start with, using about 20% of what I bought and ignoring the rest.
I've also dabbled in contracts doing renders and such for ads (out of curiosity and for the experience) and it's the same. Someone doing ads will happily spend a few thousand dollars for 1 or 2 3D models to provide you with, and feel like they made huge savings by not having you model the content first.
- In all my years and experiences one thing has always been a constant, and that's for the need of the purchased work to be a 1001% legal.
When doing the ads work I was always provided with the models, for the simple reason that nobody can afford to use illegal work so they would usually link me to the store models they trusted and wanted to purchase and ask if they would work for my needs. They would not trust me to pick the models nor did they care to spend hundreds of dollars more for a very similar model if they didn't trust the cheaper vendor or the website it was on. They literally don't care about whether they spend a $100 or a $1000 on a single model.
At work at the studio was the same, we were always very careful to veto purchases and the vendors as good as possible. In case of doubt, products wouldn't get used and any trace of them had to be scrubbed from the game. Leaving just a single illegitimate blade of grass and it's texture in a shipped game, can result in a lot of headaches and wasted time and money replacing/dealing with the prop.
Websites with sketchy content and vendors were entirely blacklisted, not worth the hassle. It's always cheaper and preferable in the end to spend $100 on a model and website you trust than $20 on a similar model on a website you do NOT trust.
Needless to say, if a website that has ripped video game characters or other recognizable assets, vendors with 100s of assets that don't add up skill or style wise with little to no description, few or inconsistent model previews, google results that confirm issues with the website's content right away, IP protected models/designs with the wrong license types etc etc, are all huge red flags, and 1 is most of the time enough to blacklist a site, given all the other options available out there.
Bottom line, allowing such vendors to exist hurts everybody.
It hurts all legitimate vendors because scammers scare customers away from the website in general.
It hurts them because their original content will always be second guessed on this website.
It also hurts them because their hard work gets buried beneath large dumps of illegitimate work, unable to shine or compete.
It hurts the website if it's trying to present itself or become a legitimate, respected, go-to place.
Growth and Investors will be harder to come by as the industries they try to attract as customers don't materialize and their reputation becomes known.
New honest vendors will also be harder to come by as they're faced with the poor reputation of the site.
If you read all this, thanks.
If you work for cgtrader and didn't delete this post, thanks to you too.
