This isn’t specific to one creator, but it is a systemic issue in FiveM.What can we do about developers (especially those who sell escrowed assets) abandoning their work with conflicts, bugs, and other unfixable issues?
There’s only so much Tebex is willing to do (they have an interest in doing as little as possible to help out anyone so they can sell as much as possible through their platform), and contacting them about abandoned work/profiles leads nowhere.
For example, Gabz (probably the biggest creator on FiveM) has largely abandoned its work and hasn’t pushed a single fix or update for its releases in over a year.
That would be fine if the assets weren’t escrowed, but there isn’t much we can do about some conflicts. Gabz currently sells MLOs that are marked as standalone but that conflict with each other.
They work in the Gabz subscription, but these conflicts aren’t available in the Standalone versions.
Although marked as “standalone,” these two conflict with each other. This has been a known issue for a year in the Gabz community. However, it is not noted anywhere on the site. Contacting Gabz via support is not helpful; contacting Gabz by email leads nowhere as they don’t respond and trying to get Tebex to help leads nowhere.
At this point, these resources would be considered by any reasonable standard. Is there a process for reporting abandoned creators’ work?
On topic, no one mentioned any of the obvious issues that would arise from restricting the ability for users to fix issues left to fester by money hungry creators when the escrow system was announced. The community only cared about owning those dang, dirty l34kers, even if it meant that they lost true ownership of their purchases. Prices of assets have only increased, even though the incentive to price a asset to be double, or more, the original cost of GTA V itself is to dissuade sharing the asset. Now, especially with scripts, when an asset is sold broken, users are at the mercy of creators, most of whom use a specific, incredibly abusive moderator to trash talk and insult users who only want help from the person who sold them a broken product. As far as I’m concerned, the escrow system, as it is, only hurts the end user and incentivizes creators to release low quality assets. In an attempt to stop the th3ft of assets, we’ve done a great deal of harm to the community and empowered narcissistic, careless creators.
Ultimately, if the original creator has expressed that they no longer wish to support their work, that work should be given, for free and unescrowed, to the community. I know that isn’t gonna be popular with creators who just want to grift money, quality be damned, but it’s the right call for the community as a whole.
Oh, and a personal opinion of mine is that assets shouldn’t be subscription only. You’re just trying to take advantage of people, at that point. Sorry that you don’t think $80+ once is enough for your addon(s), but making people pay for timed access to something that has no guarantee of being finished is absurd. Or, knowing your uber popular server that you make people pay hundreds just to be considered to be let into will have clones, so you make a subscription package for your own server’s assets, many of which have been broken since their release, just to take advantage of server owners who don’t force people to pay money to join their server, or spend long amounts of time waiting to get in the sometimes open no whitelist version of the server.
I feel like there is no remedy that could be applied through TOS or normal legal means for those that abandon their works, escrowed or not, unless those sellers have some sort of clause or agreement in their terms or on the asset page.
This also happens outside of Cfx with software and physical goods all the time. I actually think Kerbal Space Program is a pretty analogy to this question. Absolutely sucks, but it’s really only on the seller to issue refunds or remedies outside egregious issues like completely non-functional software or outright fraud that could be covered under general terms or possibly even governmental consumer protection policies.
Oh, sorry. It’s Otto’s and Pizzeria. I fixed it. I think there’s some other stuff that conflicts with other MLOs, but this isn’t unique to Gabz; other creators have this issue.
I see the benefit of the escrow system, but because Tebex is such a predatory company, we really have no recourse when it comes to these devs. If a Dev was forced to refund customers for abandoned resources, I wouldn’t care at all if everyone charged even 50% more and escrowed everything.
I agree mostly. I’ve never seen any other modding community charge the prices I’ve seen in for mods for FiveM. It’s hard to stomach the prices getting higher than they already are. I believe in paying people for good work, but double, triple, sometimes more than the price of the game for a single script, car, or MLO? It’s egregious to insist that little work is worth just as much, if not more, than a AAA game that spent years in development and had thousands of people work on it. If $60 is enough for R*, it should be more than enough for a developer using their games as a platform to sell what is often shoddy work.
The difference is in the real world, you can dispute charges and sellers have more of an incentive to try and make things right. Because Tebex is the only player here, a single ban can result in basically a total lock out of your server from the market.
Doing a credit card dispute might get you blocked from a specific store in the real world, but you won’t get banned from buying from every seller in the world.
You aren’t comparing apples to apples here. Tebex resources are sold to servers with many users. The equivalent pricing would be if you were charged per user for resources. Or if servers provided a free copy of GTA to every player and you as the server owner had to pay R* a distribution license give your players a free copy of GTA that only worked while connected to your server.
I fail to see why that means that barebones scripts that take two or so hours to write that often have free counterparts should be priced more than a video game that thousands of people worked on for several years. Also, FiveM is (was) a modding community for GTA 5. No other modding community has monetized their community the way FiveM has. Go try to sell a $60 script for New Vegas, when the game has numerous free mods that completely repurpose the map and add new worldspaces that are often larger than New Vegas itself. Is that apples to apples, a modding community compared to a modding community?
That’s a single player game. The reason you can’t compare a single user license like GTA to a multiplayer server license is that all your players essentially get the mod while connected to the server. So a comparable pricing model would be paying per user connected rather than an outright flat fee.
It’s called a free market and people will sell scripts based on what the market will bear. Consumers choose to buy or not buy something if it’s overpriced and/or bad. Third party platforms have no control over sellers on their platform beyond what the law allows which does not include forcing them to make quality products, sell for certain prices, or make anything open source if they stop supporting something.
People have always sold crap for more money than it’s worth, and as long as people continue to buy it, they will continue. See every micro transition conversation that ever existed.
Tebex has a lot of guidelines that creators have to adhere to. If something does not work, you (as a customer) are entitled to receive support or a refund. Of course you need proper evidence for this kind of stuff.
Also if you bought something that e.g. has a feature listed on the store page that is not present once bought, you are protected by consumer laws (in most countries) and Tebex also has that in their ToS.
The thing is that many people don’t have the patience to go through these processes. Some will “try” to get a refund but fail to deliver as to why they want that etc.
Which I can understand. It’s simply annoying to do in an already frustrating experience.
And that Ladies and Gentlemen is exactly why this works. Tebex has absolutely no incentive to investigate a creator account if there are no valid claims.
Most creators probably don’t even have a company set up (this is a requirement at least in Germany) and aren’t paying taxes properly. Which is a whole different topic, but yea.
Recently had a support ticket for compatibility problems with one of my (paid) scripts and the user shared the readme which also contained the “license” for that script. It consisted of four points where two are completely illegal, one is just useless and the last one I can kind of excuse simply for “not enough thought put into it”. Give that to your lawyer and he will probably laugh his ass off and get that creator shut down.
I swear if I had way too much money, I would buy stuff from random creators and report the shit out of them. It’s a joke what many get away with. But as I am not a customer, I basically cannot hold any claims against them.
And as one last thing:
The industry has changed over the last decade. “Gaming” has gotten a lot more attraction especially in the mobile sector. There are now a lot of people that have the money and are willing to spend it. I have a friend that likes playing games but doesn’t have a lot of time (1-2h/week) so he sometimes likes to spend that little extra to give him exactly what he wants during that small time frame (e.g. a cosmetic set or progression boost).
You can think about that what you want, just keep in mind that your situation does not reflect theirs.
Also I personally cannot understand why many people are willing to spend thousands of bucks on their server (sometimes per month). I have never seen such a community like FiveM in all of my years as a gamer/modder.
And when people are willing to spend money, creators will capitalize on it. That’s how businesses and the market works.
I often get messages like “oh you are way too cheap for what you provide” and I counter it with “I feel more like everyone else is too expensive”. But that’s my thoughts being a long time gamer and only using free mods… There was nothing paid when I started.
Tebex has a lot of guidelines that creators have to adhere to. If something does not work, you (as a customer) are entitled to receive support or a refund. Of course you need proper evidence for this kind of stuff.
They don’t guarantee anything except refunds from totally broken resources.
For example, when I reported the issue of “standalone” Gabz MLOs not working with other “standalone” Gabz MLOs. There’s no protections for us as consumers, as Tebex doesn’t actually follow any local laws except in the EU where you have 14 days to return.
Why they even follow this, I don’t know.
Assets/scripts are only ever guaranteed to work on their own as a standalone/on an unaltered server. If this clashes with other scripts you have implemented into your server, the store owner nor Tebex are responsible for this.
Is the email response I received, i.e. Tebex only guarantees that the MLO works on it’s own in an empty server by itself. If Gabz releases conflicting MLOs that conflict with their own work, as long as those MLOs work on their own, they will not refund them and it’s totally within their “policy” to sell assets like this. Whether they state this in the description is irrelevant to Tebex.
I’ve gone through maybe ~10 reports to Tebex and out of those, I’ve gotten refunds on 3, 1 being a return I got because support called me a slur, and the other two because the creator didn’t respond to the email and me providing proof of the broken resource.