Hey everyone, I must first preface and start here and say I have been a member of the FiveM community for over 6 years now. Its been a major part of my life and my community means the world to me on this platform. However I think with the recent developments its time to call into question the business practices of this platform.
Before I get into any concerns I just want to say that this is FiveM’s platform and they are allowed to do whatever they want with it. These are just open concerns I figured it be time to show. Please do not be disrespectful and try to be giving constructive criticism. I also won’t be covering the ZAP hosting stuff because frankly to a lot of the community its kind of a meme and I don’t care about that partnership at all really.
So long ago when FiveM wasn’t FiveM and really, up until only rather recently, did FiveM start to profit off the platform. Now this is no concern of mine, this stuff has to be extremely expensive to afford. It was under the impression of myself and a lot of the community is that we as server owners were basically funding the project through Patreon.
Then the boosting came, and to be honest I was completely okay with the boosting at first. After all my community is a success story most likely because of it. However what used to be is not anymore and in order for you to be competitive on the front page we have to dish out thousands of dollars…
Then the sellers/resellers came and the open source leaking fight ensued…
All the scumbags(I mean “entrepreneurs”) came to FiveM when the learned of the money going around because of content creators. So now they need to get their money. So they come in and start selling scripts. But FiveM doesn’t allow sold scripts, so they had to go to 3rd party sites. Leakers fought back against the paid scripts by leaking them and breaking their iplocks. This was basically the fight over the past 2 years going back and forth.
Then FiveM partnered with Tebex and we got paid scripts on the forums. Paid scripts were abundant now but they were being leaked now. The leakers who were on FiveM’s side were now going against them. So leakers started to obfuscate their code or add these dumb locks again. FiveM then came out and said no you can’t do that we will have something soon.
Something soon is now here and now we have the same stuff to server owners that we hated (obfuscation) and now truly FiveM is in control. But the real question is did we ever want that…
nope
The stance on this forums and out of Bubble’s mouth himself is that this should be an open platform of ideas. People should release things publicly for free, but now money has polluted that and unfortunately this box is not one I don’t think you can easily close since the precedent is now set that paid scripts are completely okay. So this is a lost cause I can’t even argue anymore because it is basically a “too late” thing.
However, the real criticism came with this or so the straw that broke that camels back:
What is this crap? This looks nothing more than a pure money grab to continue to generate revenue. Frankly I think this has gone on enough and I think we need to stop here before this path of ruining the nature of the platform contunues.
Seriously where does this monetization stop? Remember when you guys said the serverside clothing streaming was only a pre-release for Patreon for a short while? Still now you can only get it with miniscule players or by paying. Which again, didn’t care about because we felt we were funding the project. Now it feels like I am paying for a service rather fund a project.
This may also explain the uptick in entitleness around people demanding things…
Anyway, hope this doesn’t offend anyone and I hope it sparks some actual discussion. I know these things have been murmured in the sidelines. But this can not continue to go down this path…