The "paid resource" meta

FiveM Discussion
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Expanding on some issues posted in my other thread.

There is a low barrier for entry, no quality control, nor any assurance that paid assets are meeting the release guidelines or terms set by the Creator Platform License Agreement. I’ll also mention some general issues with releases that are still relevant to paid releases.

Quality

The release guidelines has a section on this, but many developers simply ignore it. There is a note about simple resources with “less than 50 lines”, which doesn’t really consider

  • code formatting
  • code complexity
  • 1000 lines “config” files
  • functional lines of code (ignoring whitespace, comments, etc.)
  • framework boilerplate code (e.g. login event, logout event, job update event, etc.)

Encryption (asset protection)

The quality of code cannot be verified by users until an actual issue occurs, and then there is no guarantee of improvements, bug fixes, etc. Questionable and sometimes exploitable code is able to hide behind encryption and customers have no way to know until an exploit becomes common knowledge.

Free resources cannot be encrypted or obfuscated, and MUST be under an open-source or minimally restrictive source-available license; this frequently pushes developers to sell something simple because of concerns about the content being stolen and resold.

“Open source” releases

People frequently advertise their assets as “open-source” despite not meeting the open source definition, a key part of which being the permission to redistribute, modify, adapt, etc.

ULTRA DELUXE EDITION

The state of gaming is nicely replicated on the FiveM platform by its many “talented” (see greedy) developers. Rather than including an unencrypted file to setup events or exports so you can freely use any framework, you are often forced into buying different versions for ESX, QBCore, or whatever.

Even worse is the sale of an “open-source” version of a resource for twice the price as the encrypted version. Asset protection was added to protect developers from having their assets stolen and redistributed, but is instead used to justify a higher price point for accessing the source code.

ChatGPT

Introducing PixelVision™. Some 50 billboard resources, with their release threads including seven short paragraphs of AI-generated text - and somehow this isn’t mass-reported as spam and delisted!

Asset theft, copyright infringement, and licensing violations

Feel free to look through Mr PixelVision™’s topics for such examples.

There are many blatantly obvious examples, and reporting them often results in no action being taken, or a single thread out of dozens being delisted. Many releases import assets from other games (like The Sims) or the Unreal Engine Marketplace; delisting doesn’t even do much because those assets will stay on Tebex indefinitely, unless they receive a DMCA from the copyright (or trademark or whatever) holder.

Even when somebody has multiple releases removed they aren’t blacklisted from the platform and will continue to resell stolen assets, despite the PLA stating:

6.3. Repeat Infringer Policy. Repeated violation of the Creator PLA by infringing our intellectual property rights or the rights of third-parties is subject to the repeat infringer policy set out in the Rockstar TOS.

In accordance with the DMCA and other applicable law, the Company has adopted a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances and at Company’s sole discretion, registered accounts deemed to be repeat infringers. The Company may also at its sole discretion limit access to the Online Services and/or terminate the account of anyone who infringes any intellectual property rights of others, whether or not there is any repeat infringement.

I don’t need to talk about the abuse of open-source releases again.

Other blatant violations of the PLA

Can I mention MenanAk47 again? He still has his Patreon up with 557 members, has been DMCA’d multiple times for redistributing stolen content or violating licenses. Before double dipping by releasing on Tebex he was earning something like $10,000 monthly for content he did not create, employing tactics such as code obfuscation, remote loading, and ip locking.

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I fully agree with most if not all the points mentioned. It is very sad how all these scriptkiddies are pushing the limits and ruining it recently.

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This is very well pointed out.

Theres several users being scammed from these so said “creators” stealing others people code to sell them in tebex and using Keymaster and these forumns to advertise it “which Cfx provides and vouches for”

Cfx might close te post “most of the times they dont” , but the script keeps being sold on tebex allowing Tebex and probably Cfx make money out of stolen content and users paying for something that if they knew was stolen would not pay for it, therefore this is called scamming.

These said creators sell content that they do not provide support and neither Tebex refunds users claiming lack of support from these “creators”.

This isn’t anything new Cfx is well aware and so is tebex , but removing these produtcs is losing money.

They also seem to have favorites like Nopixel removing any post that the title mentions Nopixel when literally hundreds of other posts use Copyrighted Brands as title and they are not removed.

This is just all a joke for Cfx, money making, the amount of good Cfx does is just a shut eye to lower some suspicions.

Just like other posts when people speak up they always close them. but fortunately this is 2024 now we all use screenshots.

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I agree with all points in this topic. While Releases does contain detailed posting guidelines and general rules on what’s allowed/disallowed, there is a serious lack of [consistent] moderation.

Here’s my take on that topic:

For how popular the forums are for advertising new releases, there really should be manual approval done before making a post with a “paid” tag since by the time a community flag is verified, sales have already been made and/or the author simply reposts again, achieving the same exposure, and having a window of opportunity to grab sales before it’s taken down again. Depending on the violation, they should be suspended from making more paid releases for a period of time.

Especially since this an official R* platform, there must be manual code reviews done for every paid release, especially including resources protected by escrow. The release needs to meet a certain criteria in order to be approved including the points mentioned above; and these points need to be verified before the post gets approved.

All in all, there’s needs to be a complete refactor on how cfx uses it’s platform to allow it’s creators to profit off third party resources.

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Developers who sell their scripts, then stop support them, leaving them with a bunch of critical bugs that we can’t fix since they are using FiveM escrow, even if they don’t “work” on their scripts anymore they leave it on tebex to make more money (Hey HighScripts)

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Customer reviews/ratings would probably help with that to some degree.

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I completely agree with you, I have always said that the releases page has turned from an actual releases page where you could look for cool resources and learn from them to a Facebook Marketplace kind of shit.

It would be okay if only the higher quality resources were sold. But since the barrier for entry is so low (just register a tebex account and comment on a few posts) people sell resources that any decent developer could make in 30 minutes.

The encryption is even worse, few months ago I was working on a server that buys a lot of resources. I was tasked with making some resource work with ox_core. 3 years ago this task would be fairly easy, but since the whole thing apart from a 3 line config file was encrypted. I had to reverse engineer the resource through NetEventLogger and write the server-side myself.

Without some quality checks and barrier for entry this low, people will abuse the system which hurts the whole platform.

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I have kept my mouth quiet for a while in the community as last time I spoke out (way less vocal then Linden may I add) I got silenced by strangely angry Cfx team member. However, I feel so strongly about this that I need to say something.

The FiveM community as a whole has basically turned into a bunch of money hungry nonsense. It saddens me to see that 5 years ago I released Burgershot for free for everyone, now there are 50 different paid versions of it all using some amount of converted gtaiv assets. (this is an example showcasing what things used to be compared to now)

I know the forums themselves are basically only moderated by Indra (elements don’t seem to do much these days) so I understand why much isn’t done as Indra only has the power to lock and unlist things. But certainly more needs to be done, I thought with Rockstar taking over things would be more tightly controlled, but honestly it seems to be the opposite. More seems to be getting through the cracks and people are getting away with basically anything.

More needs to be done to stop the ToS violations and the general abuse that these people get away with on a daily basis. Unlisting things does not stop people from buying and gaining access to those assets (especially considering the discord release channel still has a link to the thread).

Now I have kept my comments on topic with this thread, however I feel pretty strongly about the state of Cfx itself as well. But that’s another topic for another locked thread somewhere.

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You forgot to mention the threads that are filled with 10-20 “good script” posts not even a minute after posting without people even having clicked the link to their store.

This will probably even happen with a review system like that, but at it would at least provide something, you’re right.

That being said we are still waiting for the “new” release section/website/whatever being created. Has been announced ages ago and I even asked in a community post once if there are any news and just got a “not yet” (sadly cannot find it right now).
A new and proper platform for this stuff would clean up the forum and probably open so many new doors for features that simply cannot be implemented here.

One thing I’ve seen though is that posts in the release section now happen at a specific time which leads me to believe that my rant to the moderator group about “topics being empty, then edited to circumvent filters” actually has led to them checking every single post. Though of course I cannot be 100% sure about that. But it’s something :man_shrugging:

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don’t forget quasar store with all the security breaches and bugs with 0 support they offer to fix them
i am one of their biggest victims so far

not to mention their entire work is stolen from QB Core and LJ-Inventory

you cant even fix the problems because they are encrypted

yet you have to pay 50$ for their stuff

and quasar are not the only ones

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I agree with this, I have run a server in 2018-2019 and more recently in 2023-2024. The whole paid resources situation is complete out of hand. As you mentioned, the quality of 90% of the released content is extremely questionable, without any guarantees.

That is why I vowed to either use actual open source resources, or just make my own. With cheaters still being a big problem on the platform. It is important to secure server side events so they do not trust the client. To do that, I usually implement a somewhat similar version of the zero trust model, to the extent of what is possible. But with all those encrypted resources there is no way of knowing how secure it will be, and I am unable to implement my own logging/security policies.

The whole idea of paid resources was that creators could make something great and ask for some compensation, but it has become a gambling addiction for servers with deep pockets. And because of this, the creators selling bad resources have no reason to stop.

Open source has always been the reason FiveM could grow, and now it feels like it is being spat on. But the big question is; how do you suggest that this problem is solved?

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FiveM changed over the years its legit full of scammers 0resmon is one main stores that legit make uis using GPT and sell it for 60$ :skull:

everytime we put something free it gets reselled on tebex takes almost weeks to take it down but they make new account and boom back up with new post in cfx cause of lack of staff legit expand the team but anyways

You got the pro claimed developers title discord users so its like…I changed one line of code now am developer :skull: bro what world you live in .

Anyways I think they should verify the stores instead new accounts and re-post

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Cfx/tebex profit out of scams , why would they do anything about it. this is why when a post is closed tebex still sells it, it is clear that an action needs to be taken agaisnt them.
Now wtih R* in the picture this will all fall under their name.

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I starting doing some things on FiveM just before monetisation came along; while there were plenty of trash releases, at least you weren’t forced to spend $50 before realising just how terrible it is. While less common, open-source releases can at least get feedback - even from people not looking to use them.

I get the whole “people were selling resources anyway” argument - but ignoring straight up scam sites which pretend to be affiliated with FiveM and R* in some way, there is a popular third party seller that somehow manages to enforce some level of support, quality, and developer verification.

I think they already have a stance of not caring about fake engagement, which is why reviews/ratings by paying customers would at least be helpful to some degree - the spam is generally because the creator will post an announcement with something like “comment and like the post for a chance to win a free resource”.

That being said we are still waiting for the “new” release section/website/whatever being created.

Around 3 years of “coming soon but we don’t have the resources”. I doubt there has even been any progress.

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I think the root cause of the discussion over licensing, TOS, etc. is the weird non-verbalization/non-communication about FiveM/CFX that CFX as a whole has kind of stuck to for years.

The strange thing is, is that we know everything about CFX/FiveM that one would probably want to hide (financials, rumors, other ‘personal’ nonsense no one cares about and is constantly shared), but nothing in terms of project direction, enforcement, goals, etc. is ever communicated.

There is nothing “cool” about an anonymous/faceless organization that hides all its movements and decisions in the shadows. Hiding in your shell to avoid critcism just fosters a weak, passive image that then fosters resentment of the platform, CFX, Rockstar, and generates a pretty terrible environment, which we’re stuck in now.

At the very least, we need clear communication and some kind of community engagement and individual(s) we can expect to have an answer from, even if we don’t agree with it. Hell, I’d prefer a CFX rep telling me directly that they don’t agree with my issues/or view the situation in a different way rather than waiting 1-3 months for support tickets to be closed by a timer.

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I’ve ended up going down a rabbit hole of posts after the recent community pulse, but I absolutely agree with every point that has been mentioned here thus far… I think it’s a much wider issue than what was initially brought up, but I still agree. It’s all down to greed, nothing more, nothing less… the amount of money that’s able to be made from running a successful server these days is astronomical… and with servers making a ton of money each month, people, of course, are wanting to capitalise on this by charging money for all of their releases… and to be honest, I don’t entirely blame them, but there are some that are simply exploiting it.

The platform was at it’s height 3-4 years ago before servers were selling overpriced nonsense and putting things like moderator up for sale on their stores, but more and more servers are beginning to adopt this approach of selling anything and everything on their store because they know people are… well… stupid… enough to spend large chunks of money on these servers.

I don’t see a way forward to reshaping this environment that’s been created though, FiveM are getting their 20% from all these purchases on the stores, the platform just announced that it had surpassed 300,000 concurrent players… It’s not exactly like FiveM/Cfx.re are in a terrible situation yk?

I don’t want to be all negative though as that’s not the point, but there’s definitely massive improvements/overhauls that need to be made to improve the platform as a whole to bring us back to where we were 3-4 years ago, patching/reshaping this whole paid resource meta included… It will just be interesting to see how/if this gets dealt with :woman_shrugging:

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It has nothing to do with being Greedy selling 2 different Versions (each Framework) of the Script.
If you write a Script for ESX you have a lot of work. If you write it again for QBCore / or convert it you have additional work and thats work you obviously want to get paid for.
Im not talking about 200-500 lines Scripts. Im only talking about Scripts that have 20.000+ Lines because of their complexity.

A Question for you so you can understand that point more easily:
Is a Publisher Greedy only because you have to pay for playstation and xbox versions independently? I mean with your logic Publisher have to give you all the required possibilities to simply make your playstation game work on xbox.

If you bought a complex / quality script for esx, you cannot expect to get the qbcore version of the same script for free. Yes you could probably make any qbcore or esx script work for on the other framework with access to required events/files but the majority of server owners couldnt. All they can do is setup a basic trash server, add some addon vehicles and then create a Tebex Store to sell those addon vehicles.

So no. If you buy the playstation version of the game and you decide to switch to xbox you cannot expect to get the xbox version of the game for free. You have to rebuy it if you want to play.

About this one: You cannot blame that in a general mannor. Because the Unreal Engine Marketplace Guidelines say this:

4.2.1 Usage Rights

4.2.1.a Purchasing a Marketplace product grants to the purchaser a non-exclusive, worldwide, and perpetual license to download, use, copy, post, modify, promote, license, sell, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform, distribute, or transmit the content for personal, promotional, and/or commercial purposes under the Epic Content License Agreement. Distribution of products via the Marketplace is not a sale of the content but the granting of digital rights to the customer.

From my understanding that means its totally legal to buy assets from the unreal market and use them in FiveM Projects as long as you do not violate any agreements that dont allow you to do that.

For all the other points you mentioned in the OP, i totally agree with you.

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Supporting both generally comes down to several events and functions which are almost identical (considering QB copied a lot from ESX).
My own scripts generally have under 100 lines per framework; writing wrappers to transform the data that you can use in different resources as a lib makes it even simpler.

You cannot possibly compare ESX/QB to PS/Xbox nor the development time for different frameworks to that of a game.

That’s the issue. If the framework logic is stripped away from the internal code then you can sell a product that is usable by anyone.

The PLA generally will not allow this.

you own the sole unencumbered right in and to such UGC and that the rights granted to us in
this Section 5, and our exploitation of those rights, will not violate or infringe the rights of any third
parties

Your rights to the content are not unencumbered as you must abide by the EU Marketplace terms and any terms for the assets you are selling.
There are some parts of the Unreal Engine EULA which would also prevent what people are generally doing, I’d recommend looking at

    1. How You Can Use the Licensed Content
    1. How You Can Share Projects You’ve Made with the Licensed Content
    1. b. Non-Compatible Licenses
    1. c. General Restrictions
    1. Who Owns What

Probably the simplest conflict here would be

Also, right after the terms you listed from 4.2.1.a

4.2.1.b Sublicensing Marketplace assets in Source Code format is prohibited. Sublicensing Marketplace assets in object code format, or any Content, is also prohibited except to grant end users the ability to use, or to permit sellers and distributors to market and Distribute, a Product Distributed as permitted in Section 3(a) of the Epic Content License Agreement.

4.2.1.c All content hosted by Epic Games is exclusively downloadable through the Epic Games Launcher. Once downloaded, most content can be exported to obtain the source files and/or migrated to other existing Unreal Engine projects.

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You can compare ESX/QB to PS/XBox because that comparison isnt based on development time but other similiarities. Let me give you an example:

In txAdmin you have 3 major recipes that matter: ESX, QBCore and CFX Default
First we define the boundries for the comparison:

ESX → Playstation
QBCore → Xbox
Standalone [CFX Default] → Average Notebook

If we use for QBCore and ESX a Game that is available on both Consoles for example GTA 5 and for the Standalone we use a Movie DVD for example Bad Boys 2

You cannot play the PS Version of GTA 5 on Xbox, same for the Xbox Version on PS Both wont work. However you can watch the Bad Boys 2 DVD on PS, Xbox or the Average Laptop.

And the exact same can be seen for Scripts, you cant use ESX Scripts on QBCore, same vice versa
But you can use Standalone Scripts on ESX, QBCore or CFX Default.

And since the comparison is based on compatibility and not on development time, the comparison is reasonable.

You ignored the context of the message. with “You” i was referring to you as a Person. “Linden” would be able to make the ESX Version of the Script work on QBCore with access to the required files because you have enough knowledge to do so. The Majority of Server Owners dont have that knowledge so they would ask for Help causing more Support.

Another thing you didnt consider while writing that ESX/QBCore “Pay for both versions separated” Part" is the removal of the Tebex Revoke Button.

Back when the Revoke Button existed most Script Devs said in case a customer switched the Framework “Okay, i revoked the ESX Version and gave you the QBCore version, please check your Keymaster”.

With the removal of said button thats not possible anymore, the only 2 ways they have now is either press “Refund” where the Seller has to pay the Fees because the Customer decided to swtich Framework or he gives the other Version 4 Free.

But giving the other Version for free has one major risk, since Tebex removed “Revoke”, CCs (Content Creators) cannot prevent Reselling.

Now if you have a ESX Version of the Script and you switch to QBCore and get the QBCore version of the same script, you could simply resell the ESX Version you dont need anymore for 50% of the original price and the seller can do nothing against that.

If the Script costs 30€ and the Customer resells the version he doesnt need for 15€, the Asset Creator basically loses 60€.

So the best way to prevent that is to say: You can rebuy the other version since you decided to switch the Framework but you dont have to pay full price, you get a 50% Discount to rebuy the other Version of the Script.

And no Asset Creator cannot do anything against reselling because Tebex doesnt do anything if they dont have any proofs that a transaction happened, basically Tebex wants to turnthe Resell into a Scam.

(Let me explain why “Turning the Resell into a scam”)
If i would buy a script from a reseller just to get proof of a transaction there is a chance that Tebex will do something against it → Removing the Asset which will lead to the case that i lose the asset that i bought and my money, because the Reseller will say “You got what you paid for, everything that happens afterwards doesnt have anything to do with me”.

For the Unreal Engine Market Part:

Im not a lawyer so i cant tell if what u said is correct or not. So i just give you that point.
There is no real reason to argue about something that requires knowledge that i dont have as a random ss dude from the internet ^^

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This is a perfect example of why reselling the same script with support for a different framework is a horrible idea. and personally if a creator is doing this then misusing features such as the short lived “Revoke” button to enforce this flawed concept then they deserve to lose money to resellers.

Free resources such as most ox resources, Some resources by Randolio along with countless others handle multiple framework compatibility significantly better then most of the paid scripts I’ve seen.

You very much should expect to get another framework support for free or have the ability to support these frameworks yourself, Especially given how a lot of these creators (such as Jaksam) charges more then a triple A game price for a poorly made resourced tied to a single framework.

It also worth noting that your comparison with lua scripts supporting other lua scripts and AAA games supporting several different software and hardware is utterly stupid and makes literally no sense with your recent comment (there are no “other similarities” aside from the baseless ones you just thought of).

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