Rethinking the New Payout Rate System: A Call for Balance and Recognition
Discussion started by thesilverman2010
As a long-time designer on CGTrader, I want to start by expressing my appreciation for the platform's continuous evolution. The effort to improve fairness, encourage quality, and align incentives through a revised payout rate system is both commendable and necessary in today’s rapidly changing 3D marketplace.
However, after reviewing the new payout structure—set to take effect on June 2nd—I believe there are some important considerations that deserve attention before fully transitioning to this model.
The Core Concern: Ignoring Long-Term Reputation
The decision to calculate payout rates based solely on sales performance in the past 12 months introduces a degree of short-termism that may unintentionally disadvantage many dedicated designers who have:
Built a strong reputation through consistent high-quality work.
Maintained positive buyer feedback and reviews over the years.
Participated in and successfully delivered custom project work on the platform.
Contributed to the platform’s growth through long-term collaboration and royalty sharing.
Many of us have invested years of hard work to reach higher royalty levels—not by flooding the marketplace with poor models, but through reliability, professionalism, and creative integrity. Under the new system, a temporary dip in sales (due to personal circumstances, market fluctuations, or seasonal changes) could cause a steep drop in royalty percentage, potentially reducing it from, say, 80% to 68%.
This does not reflect the full value these creators bring to the platform.
Potential Impacts on Designer Motivation
While the system rightly moves away from rewarding the sheer number of uploads (especially in the AI era), it also risks devaluing:
Long-standing trust and reputation, which are harder to build and easier to lose.
Designer loyalty, which takes years to foster.
Cumulative contributions that helped CGTrader become one of the most designer-friendly platforms.
Reducing payout rates solely based on a short-term window may discourage top contributors from further investing in CGTrader as their primary marketplace.
A Suggested Hybrid Model
To create a fairer and more balanced payout system, I propose a hybrid model that combines:
1. Recent Sales Performance (Last 12 Months):
To encourage active engagement and quality uploads.
2. Reputation-Based Metrics:
Including factors like:
Total royalties earned over time.
Number of positive reviews.
Successful delivery of custom projects.
Historical consistency in model quality.
These elements can help maintain a sense of trust and continuity, while still keeping the platform dynamic.
3. Optional Appeal or Grace Period:
Allow designers whose rates drop significantly to:
Submit a performance appeal.
Recover their royalty level by meeting specific short-term sales or quality targets.
Final Thoughts
CGTrader has long stood out for its fair treatment of designers. This legacy is one of the reasons many of us chose it as our creative home. The upcoming changes represent a major shift, and with refinement, they can become even more powerful.
A system that balances performance with long-term contribution will not only feel fairer—it will inspire designers to grow with the platform for years to come.
Let’s continue building a marketplace that rewards not just fast results, but also sustained excellence, loyalty, and professionalism.
Let’s Talk
Fellow designers, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you feel the new system reflects your efforts fairly? What would make it better?
Let’s open this discussion to help shape a more inclusive and sustainable model for everyone.
Answers
1
This new payout rate, which will start on June 2, will completely discourage new and small sellers. The rate is very low and to compensate for the 10% increase, the price of the products sold will have to increase. And with the increase in the price of the products, there will be fewer sales. The previous percentage was already low, now it will be practically unfeasible. This is quite sad.
yeah screw this, i have to increase my model price for now, if that resulting into few to no sales at all in the next month or two, i'm gonna delete all my model and move elsewhere
Yup. I just increase all my model prices by $5. I'll probably see less sales but screw it. In the meantime I will look to sell them on other platforms and then once I am transferred over delete my account here.
cgt-clients purchased 7 models at once in my little store a few days ago. "He" has no nationality showing up in the sales tab and didn't answer message. Is this CG Trader buying models ?
Yes those sales are legit , confirmed by support , but now we don’t know if those sales will be paid with the new commission rate system or with the old ….
For sales made before june 2nd, sales will be paid according to the "before june 2nd" commission rate. They are already calculated in the sale tab as soon the sale is made although you have to wait (the time that money doesn't work for you isn't taken in to account but it increases real commission rate as well as the other fees...) quite a bit before you are paid.
Precisely! It has been going downhill for the past couple of years and It will only get worse. Fortunately for me , Unity Asset Store, FAB and Superhive(Formerly Blender Marketplace) have been very reliable. CGTrader and Turbosquid are at the bottom of the earnings table for me so ditching them in the nearest future will not cause much disruption to my overall earnings. Time for me to get back to indie game development and creation of animated web series and shorts.
I am just glad this is not even remotely my full time job. The entire industry is turning to crud.
2
Well now yes , after work I will start to delete every model , Clearly they don't care about the seller (although they say otherwise),
Something that I never understood was why this page never developed a 3D viewer of the models that the seller sold (like skechfab, FAB)? Is it a lot of investment? For months now cgtrader stopped working for me simply due to their bad policies, they simply don't care about the seller but with this new change in rates (now they are going to charge more LOL) this has gotten out of control
Practically the entire month there are discounts (like 4 times a month, CRAZY), now the profits are going to reset to 60% + at least 30% discount on sales WHAT IS THE PROFIT?? Please, this cgtrader team has no shame
I will continue to prefer other pages to sell models (in the end any page on the market is better than this one)
Do you have other places that you would suggest? This is the only place I ever listed my models.
Sketchfab (FAB now under epic ) is the best choice
@luismi93, sketchfab was a solid choice, but fab is a joke. Worst publishing experience, worst sales, most restrictive licensing, utterly complicated and unclear payout system, full of serious bugs, commonly hated by the sellers and buyers. The only good thing about them is royalty rate, but what's good of it if you can't sell a shit?
Well, everyone has their own opinion, friend, but on a website where I sell 10 times or even more per month than here, for me that is MUCH BETTER. That the issue of licenses is more restrictive? It's true, but you learn to adapt, and let's not forget that the commission is 12% and they have much, MUCH more potential buyers than cgtrader.
Yeah, best marketplace is where you earn the most. Unlike you, i earn 10 times less not more on fab compared to cgt, so naturally my opinion of them is not the highest.
11
I am a small time designer but the income from designs is very important to me. I have worked very hard to get to a 74% payout rate over five years of selling on this platform. This past year I had the most sales yet ~$600. That may not seem like much to a company like this but that amount of money has helped me immensely.
Now you will be dropping my payout by 10% to just 64%. This feels like a slap in the face for all the work that I put in watching my rate increase one percentage point at a time. Your telling me after all that now I am going to be below the 70% that I started at five years ago! This stinks of corporate greed to the highest level!
Exactly.
as a small time modeler myself, with a niche that doesn't have much market to start with, i feel your pain
3
Ok. It looks like you need more money or to lower our income to preserve yours:
An unrealistic 300 000 usd earning a year to reach a 85 % commission rate and a very realistic -10%+ commission rate compared to now for most of us. And it's supposed to be good ?!? Only for you ! Poor explanations/communication to try to justify this fact.
Doubt it's good even for them. People are already removing their portfolios from here. Tones of negative comments and no single one talking in their favor. There are a lot of issues with this website bugging us for months if not years and they are not able to fix even small things ("we're small team" is always an excuse) but when it comes to robbery they have all resource they need to achieve that. They put zero efforts to make this website better and zero efforts to promote platform, bring new buyers, increase sales... and that make people leaving this place for some time now. So they are trying to take more money of those who remain here to fix decrease of own profit. Nobody there seems to be able to understand basics of economy and this will be last nail in the coffin. Bottom of line is that they rewarded people for being loyal by taking 10% off of their revenue by introducing system that doesn't reflect quality, effort and devotion, but profit which is not under control of sellers. Only way for us to fix this is to raise prices which will drive buyers to other platforms. And atop of all, nobody is going to use this platform to make $500,000 revenue and give them $200,000 yearly.
So, if big sellers are rare and small sellers and newcomers are literally pushed away, who will remain here selling? And when amount of models drop, where buyers will go. How is that good for them? Don't forget that this move will certainly get very bad reviews at all 3D community boards which will further push both, buyers and sellers, away from CGT. Soon they will get in situation than any % they want to take from sellers out of $0 made equals to HUGE ZERO!
Big irony is that they used AI as lame excuse for changes and seems that massive AI generated assets of low quality 3D models just become the only way for people to make profit here (because CGT took all other tools out of our hands).
Shame but we can't do much to turn things to better, and obviously, they can't either.
7
Last month they auto enrolled my models in a sale without notifying me and now they cut my royalty percentage. I'm voting with my feet, just deleted all my models and will delete my account as soon as the last royalty is paid.
10
Those are really good and valid suggestions, but the problem is that decision has been already made and we can discuss matters to death but that will change nothing. If cgtrader would care about opinion, they would announce changes well ahead and would invite sellers to discuss. The fact is, they don't care about us in a slightest, all they care is how to increase their profit and if the easiest way to do that is at sellers expense, so be it. Corporate greed.
7
That's just pure greed from CGtrader. I've worked hard to gain that 80% and trust from my clients. And now it's just gone for nothing. And they say it's a good thing. They changed freelance royalties too, like 6 monthes ago, I don't freelance there anymore. There are Cults and 3D Export that offers much more.
11
A utopian payout system for creators... basically means “buy yourselves IV drips and work 24/7,” and maybe you'll reach 70% royalties. Earning $300,000 a year is unrealistic if you're doing everything alone — that’s probably an achievable number for just a few percent of people across all 3D stock platforms. And as we know, those people aren't on CGTrader. This isn’t a food market; it’s a niche product... Seems like CGTrader just decided to lower royalties and came up with this scheme to justify it))) Thanks, CGTrader.
I’m disappointed in you!
7
Hello.
So after reading through the email on this subject and seeing that the new 12 month sales tab shows that your revenue for the year is based on the final earnings (and not on the after tax earnings).
This tells me that as a new user (less then a couple of years) will either have to raise the selling price (which could make it too expensive to buy) or accept a lower royality rate (which can be upto a loss of 13%).
This will make it very hard for new users on the site to grow a marketplace where they can be back upto a good royality rate (between 70 & 75 percent).
I hope their will be enough people who raise this issue and have them reevaluate this policy, because as of now it does more harm then good.
4
I completely agree with your suggestions about including buyer ratings, past earnings, and project success.
However, to reach the top payout rate of 85%, a seller would need to earn $300,000 per year, which means an average of $25,000 per month.
Honestly, that alone is enough to prove how out of touch and disingenuous this system is. I really wonder how many users have ever consistently made $25,000 or more per month since CGTrader was founded :)
8
To understand whether this decision benefits the sellers or CGTrader itself, it's enough to compare the old and new payout rates for the sellers.
In previous comments, everyone has complained about a significant drop in payout rates. While we don't have exact statistics, it's not hard to assume that this has been the case for the vast majority of sellers on CGTrader.
Of course, CGTrader is free to change its payout structure as it sees fit, but what's disappointing is the lack of honesty in the way it's being presented, as if it's somehow to the sellers' advantage.
I'd bet that the percentage of sellers whose payout rate has increased or even stayed the same doesn’t exceed one percent.
Additionally, the rise in AI-generated models has been used as an excuse for this change. If AI models are truly that valuable to CGTrader, I’d love to see what happens if, after a large-scale boycott, the platform is left with nothing but AI-generated content.
You bring up some powerful and important points — and I fully understand the frustration.
The new system may indeed offer better rewards for a very small percentage of sellers, but for many others who’ve spent years building solid reputations and earning steady royalties, the change feels more like a penalty than a reward.
That’s why I suggested a more balanced approach — one that combines recent sales with long-term contributions like buyer ratings, past earnings, and project success. A system like that would be fairer to experienced designers and less dependent on short-term fluctuations or bulk uploads.
I don’t think anyone is against progress or improving the marketplace — but many of us are asking that CGTrader listens to long-time contributors before fully rolling out such a drastic shift.
Let’s keep sharing our views — the more voices, the harder they are to ignore.
0
Hi, I have a question that's still unclear to me. With the new payout system, will payments be processed after June 2nd, or are we still going to receive payouts this month as usual? I couldn’t find a clear statement on this—maybe I missed it. Any clarification would be appreciated!
Hi! Just to clarify: there’s no change to the payout schedule — you’ll still receive your earnings this month as usual. The only change is to the royalty rate, and it will apply to sales made after June 2nd. Hope that helps!
20
Obviously what CGTrader cares about now is faster growth. Productive people will be rewarded while those who can't keep up should be paid less as punishment. By looking at new rate graph I can see no one will get 85% - the threshold is ridiculously high. You can see top designer reputation points in your dashboard. For instance "Squir" - a company with 6k good quality car models earns about 20k points per month - which are surely mostly sales meaning if you apply 80% current rate is about 16,000 $ monthly\ 192,000 $ yearly earnings. Even this guy barely reaches 83-84% rate. Most of the artist will be stuck between 60-75%. So in conclusion - we are lowering your rates although promising 85% you will never reach. So keep up working even harder now(for lower pay), so you can stay at the same level or as close at your old 80% as possible.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts – you raise valid concerns.
It’s true that the bar for 85% seems very high, and like you pointed out, even top designers may find it hard to reach. That’s exactly why I believe a hybrid model would be more balanced — one that considers not only recent sales, but also long-term contributions and designer reputation.
Many of us built our royalties gradually through consistent effort and customer trust, not just bulk uploads. A system that recognizes that history could help retain talented creators who might otherwise feel discouraged by short-term dips.
Let’s hope CGTrader is open to hearing this feedback and making adjustments that work for the whole community.
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