If you have ever paid for a 3D pack, a FiveM interior, or a shader bundle and then waited on a Google Drive link that never arrived, you already know the problem. A lot of game-asset sales are still a handshake: a checkout form, a promise, and a file transferred somewhere else.

That is not escrow. Escrow is a third party holding the money until an agreed condition is met. If the store charges your card, takes its fee, and hopes the seller uploads a zip, the risk is still sitting on you.

This post is a buyer's checklist. It is also the bar we used when we built GameBuildMarket. You can use it on any storefront.

1. Money should not move to the seller at the moment of payment

The moment your USDC, card charge or PayPal payment hits a seller's wallet, "escrow" has already failed. Real escrow has three states you should be able to see:

  • Paid, held — the marketplace or an escrow agent has the funds, the seller has a notification, you do not yet have a final transfer.
  • Delivered, released — you can download the files you paid for, and only then is the seller paid.
  • Disputed, held — if the file is missing, corrupt, or not the thing in the screenshots, the funds stay put until that is resolved.

If you cannot tell which state your purchase is in, you are not in escrow. You are in a queue.

2. Delivery should be the release condition, and delivery should be on the same site

"I will email you the files" is how purchases disappear. The release condition should be the platform confirming that the packaged file, the one listed on the product page, is available to your account.

That also means the store should host the deliverable, or control the download, rather than bouncing you to a Discord DM. Off-site delivery is not automatically a scam. It is a place where escrow can no longer see whether delivery happened.

3. The fee should be visible before you pay, and it should not be dressed up as a tax

Buyers should see the price of the license they are purchasing. Sellers should see the fee that will be taken when escrow releases. Hidden processing lines and surprise conversion spreads are how both sides lose trust at the same time.

A flat, stated fee (in our case, 10 percent) is not automatically more ethical than a higher one. It is only better if it is honest, complete, and applied the same way to everyone in the same situation.

4. The license you buy should be the license in the zip

Escrow protects payment. It does not, by itself, protect you from a vague license. Before you pay, you should be able to read:

  • whether the license is personal, studio, or extended;
  • which engines or platforms are covered;
  • whether the assets can go into a shipped commercial game;
  • whether they can be redistributed, even as part of a larger product;
  • what happens if the pack is later updated.

If that text exists only in a Discord screenshot, it will not be there when you need it in a year.

5. Provenance should be labeled, especially AI use

Asset buyers are now in the same position music supervisors were in a decade ago: they need to know what they are clearing. A storefront that lets a seller hide generative-AI textures inside a "handmade" pack is creating risk for every downstream game.

Disclosure should be specific. "AI-used" on a listing that was modeled by hand, but whose export scripts were written with a coding assistant, is a different fact from a pack whose meshes came out of a generator. The label should not be used as a scarlet letter, and it should not be optional.

6. You should be able to see that other people actually received the thing

View counts are a weak signal. Sold counts, when they are real, are better. A public seller badge that is earned, and can be removed, is better than a self-applied "trusted" icon. Ranks and badges are only useful if the site will also un-verify a seller who stops delivering.

7. Refund and dispute paths should be written down before something goes wrong

Ask, before you pay, what happens if:

  • the download fails;
  • the file cannot be opened in the engine version that was advertised;
  • the pack is missing a module that is in the screenshots;
  • the seller disappears.

If the only answer is "open a Discord ticket and hope," the escrow story is incomplete.

A short note on why we built ours this way

GameBuildMarket is a marketplace for game, 3D and animation work. Payments are USDC or USDT on Solana, funds are held in escrow until delivery, and the fee is 10 percent. We added a Verified badge, view and sold counts, and an AI-use label because those are the signals we wanted as buyers.

If you are evaluating us, or anyone else, ignore the homepage headline and walk a real listing through that checklist. Here is one you can use: Space Station Hydroponics. If a store cannot survive those seven questions, the Buy button is doing more work than it should.

Disclosure: I work on GameBuildMarket. This post was drafted with help from an AI writing assistant and reviewed before publishing.