CGHub.com Now Closed (Edit: Hope for a New Site!)

Popular home for CG artwork, CGHub.com, has been closed.

(Edit: A new announcement suggests that there may be hope for a new site to replace CGHub. More info added to the bottom.)

In a sudden and unexpected move today, the administrators of the site announced that it is no more. Here is a statement from their official Facebook page:

No more CGHUB.

Sad day. Project CGHUB is officially closed.

The reason behind this extremely tough decision is personal and will remain private. It’s absolutely not connected with business or any kind of technical difficulties. On behalf of development team I would like to apologize to CGHUB users and fans for abrupt project closure and delay with its announcement.

If you have any kind of questions please send them to cghub@shakuro.com . Can’t promise replies to everyone though.

CGHUB wasn’t ideal, but we loved it SO MUCH! :*(

Team Shakuro

So far, this is the most they have said, and unfortunately, it basically amounts to nothing. There had been no warnings about the potential for the site shutting down now, and many people whose livelihoods actually rely on the CGHub network are left out in the cold. People with yearly subscriptions are finding themselves practically robbed of any value, and the many artists with work uploaded to the site have suddenly seen their portfolios disappear.

Whether you were an artist that took part in it or someone who enjoyed the many computer generated works shared on it, this closure is rather sad. Though, I would venture to say it is even condemnable. "Personal" reasons are no explanation for stealing people's subscription money and unexpectedly leaving thousands of people without their businesses and portfolios. I currently cannot fathom what might be the reasoning behind this decision, and as much as a I try, I fail to see how anyone in their right mind might close a website like this with no warning or explanation.

CGHub has been important to many artists within gaming, and it has helped provide more opportunities for entry level work in a difficult industry. While the potential closure of CGHub could make sense in the long run, giving no warning, opportunity, or reimbursement to the many people invested in the site is an insult to these artists which have helped add greater beauty and intrigue to our games' characters and worlds.

In my opinion, the administrators of CGHub should explain themselves, setup reimbursement arrangements with paid subscribers, give all artists an opportunity to prepare themselves and their fans before a full closure, and at least consider the possibilities of others continuing the important network they have helped build. This amazing site ending like this would simply be a tragedy for all who enjoy computer generated and gaming art.

Edit 1:According to those who ran the site, the actual people behind the decision are their parent company Full Spectrum Digital, LLC. [a company I can find no concrete information about] This comes at a time when the site was reportedly at its most popular point ever. The parent company has provided no official statement regarding the reasoning behind the site's abrupt closure besides, "Guys, it's over."

Edit 2:

Potentially good news, everyone!

Shakuro, the original developer(not owner) of CGHub has been consulting over the last week with artists on creating a followup to the original CGHub.com. They plan on having a new structure without one sole owner, allowing them to prevent what happened with the original CGHub, and they hope to use a new Kickstarter to fund building a better site with artists' input to compete with the other homes for CG out there.

Here is their full official statement this morning:

Wow that blows big time. I remember using that site all the time when I was in college. Crazy that they would just cut and run like that.

never heard of it, what were the paid subscriptions for tutorials? I used to go here a lot though http://forums.cgsociety.org/

Conceptart.org and the zbrush site

Also, the site Concept Art World has nicely compiled a short list of potential alternatives for those most impacted by its abrupt closure. While they are still not a replacement for the popular CGHub.com, hopefully some of these alternatives might give artists a better chance moving forward:

[CGHub Alternatives]

Wow I wonder what caused that type of closure. I mean fuck weeks notice would have been nice

I don't know the site at all, but from the message, it sounds like the owner decided to just say "fuck it" and shut down everything. I get it that they seem to be going through some personal stuff and don't want to work on it, but shutting it down instead of handing it off to someone else seems like a huge dick move.

@oursin_360: Subscribers paid $9 a month for additional exposure and features as a PRO member. Many people also relied on the site as a way to sell artwork, network, and get jobs.

CGHub always proudly talked about how it was the largest community for CG professionals and recruiters, and this abrupt end will impact many of those invested in it personally and financially.

My initial reaction...

Wow, a lot of people use that site to get work. This is sort of messed up.

I never used the site myself, which is sad it looks pretty awesome. But that is pretty terrible for someone to just shut down and leave everyone confused and angry, even more so with none of this being shared with the sites users. Everyone should be given a reason and be reimbursed and given ample time to move to another site.

Woah what the fuck? I love CGHub. Its like DeviantArt but everything is good. Man, this fucking sucks.

Someone has a god complex.

That's such a dick move. I don't care what those "personal" reasons were, they should have notified their users beforehand.

That's fucked.

They've been such decent people for years, providing this resource for artists, but having it disappear like this... I'm just kind of bewildered. They had indicated in the last year that there were financial issues with just how big it had gotten, and they thus took more money to help it hold up. But shutting it off and then days later saying that it is closed because of personal reasons? And giving no indication regarding people's subscriptions and work on the site?

I don't know how there can even be a reasonable explanation for handling it like this.

That is incredibly fucked up, tons of people rely on that site to promote themselves and get work. I really hope artists get reimbursed somehow for this.

Just up and gone with no explanation? That's fucked up.

Too bad I only found out about this site now. Looked cool enough.

I originally read that as Github and was like holy shit.

Lame bullshit.

CGHUB is run by a company named Shakuro which also happens to be headquartered in Sevastopol, Ukraine which was just annexed by Russia. I would have a slight suspicion as to whatever personal problems they may have had may have been abrupt or due to current and on going events.

Now whether or not it warrants shutting down their entire site is another question, but I would hope that their team is ok if they've gone as far as shutting down CGHUB so abruptly.

Now that... is the first indication that actually almost makes sense of this. Thanks for bringing that up.

The administrators of CGHub are headquartered in Sevastopol, Ukraine, aka. Crimea. The city now disputably called Sevastopol, Russia.

I don't want to jump immediately to accepting Russia taking Crimea as being the real reason, but it's the first potential explanation I could understand.

If this was a forced shutdown beyond their control(perhaps through pressure or having to abandon their offices), of course they would just give a vague message saying it was for "personal" reasons and that they won't ever explain it. It would make sense of why generally nice people in the past would seemingly run off with subscribers' money and abruptly end an important service to many people. If this really is the reason... that's nuts.

I hope they are alright and it's just a crazy coincidence.

While it's sort of shitty for the users to have this happen so suddenly, there's also no reason anyone should be losing anything beyond the convenience of the site for networking. There are still plenty of communities out there and I'm sure people will find a new place to do what they did there. If you only had your work hosted there, you made a huge mistake and will hopefully learn an incredibly important lesson from this that any artist needs to learn: multiple copies in multiple locations, preferably on multiple mediums. If it's worth keeping, throw it on a hard drive and upload it to a site you trust. When one or the other fails, replace it quickly. There's no reason you should lose work because of a forum site going down.

Ultimately, if you didn't have alternative contact information for useful contacts, and you didn't have another place to store your work, that's kind of on you. While this may put a delay on a few things for people, ultimately that void will quickly be filled with one of the other communities out there.

The only thing that seems to be anything but unfortunate here is the subscriptions. It'd suck to put money in and then suddenly that money is basically gone, and that shouldn't happen.

I agree. I think this would actually explain how seemingly nonsensical this is. Unfortunately, all we really got was "personal" reasons they would never explain and a little crying emote, but if this is truly the reason... this is just insane. I hope it's for any other reason, because if they're just having to shutter it due to the war in Ukraine, that's terrible.

It would explain why they waited a few days to say anything, why they were still being vague, and why they used a rather old image of the staff along with the post. Frankly, it would explain everything, and I would understand every aspect of how they have handled this.

If this is true, it's tragic, and I hope they will be alright. Hopefully we'll get a better picture in the coming days.

It sounds like you know what's happened. Maybe you ought to tell people lest you look like a presumptuous moron.

I guessed he was referring to whoever posted that message saying they just shutdown the website for personal reasons. That would fit with a willful disregard for other people.

(which may or may not be the case here)

For their part, the developer behind CGHub, Shakuro, has stated on Twitter that it is not at all related to the situation in Crimea:

Whether that is to be believed is another matter, but if they are telling the whole story, then we're left with a situation that makes no sense. A usually considerate staff inexplicably canceling a service after taking a lot of money in yearly and monthly subscriptions with no explanation whatsoever. Either there is some legitimate life or death reason or it is a horribly unprofessional, perhaps even illegal, abuse of their members and the investments they have made in the site.

Your sentence doesn't make sense. Try again.

Please don't be rude. I think erhard simply misunderstood what you meant. :)

Another statement this morning from Shakuro, the group which ran(but apparently did not own) CGHub.com:

We are getting tons of emails and from the comments to our recent post we think that we need to clarify some things and answer the most common questions.

1. Team Shakuro was NOT associated with Full Spectrum Digital, LLC - a company that ran CGHUB.com. We were actually only responsible for development and of course were not authorized to make decisions like shutting the project down. That also means that we were not making money from ads, pro accounts and so on.

However, since the real owners prefer to keep low profiles we are the only ones on the surface (to blame).

2. We were caught completely unprepared. It was as simple as: “Guys, it’s over”.

Why the shutdown was like this and without prior notification – we have no answer to this question and that’s also beyond our understanding.

3. Even though it wasn’t our decision to close the project, it was us who tried to reach the community with at least a bit of explanation of what was going on.

And we are really sorry to see comments like “I am going to stay away from anything Shakuro will produce in future”, “Unprofessional” and so on … and we hope that they are made out of misunderstanding of the situation.

4. We tried every single option to keep the community running including buying it out, selling to somebody else, even pausing … it didn’t work.

5. Again the reason is completely personal. The project had a very bright future, we were beating our traffic records on monthly basis, had a perfect team and tons of ideas and even a couple of satellite projects in mind.

Situation in Crimea, hackers, SSL bug, aliens have nothing to do with the project closure. The servers and were based in the US and were secure. Management team was in US as well. Absolutely nothing is going on in Crimea that would prevent us from doing our business.

6. If you were a Pro member and didn’t receive a refund – please send email to cghub@shakuro.com with your account details. It will be forwarded to project owners.

7. CGHUB (domain name, userbase, codebase) is not for sale. We have no right to sale it and the CGHUB owners do not want to sale it. The only thing we can promise is to forward your sale offers to the owners.

8. During last several years we rejected ~30 CGHUB-like requests from different people / companies (some of them were very promising) as we wanted to stay focused on our main project. We got some new ones during last couple of days and may start working on new CG /art community soon.

And the last thing.

We started working on CGHUB 6 years ago, from the request “Hi, can you make a website that shows images?” and since then it has become our flagship project and there is nobody in this Universe who would love it and miss it more than we do. Some of our developers are still in disbelief of what has happened. We would never do any harm to this project / community. So we really hope for your understanding.

No more CGHUB. Someone will take the void. Good luck guys.

Team Shakuro

So, it sounds like their US-based owners, Full Spectrum Digital, LLC, just suddenly turned off the servers and then told them it was through for "personal", non-business reasons.

Which brings us back to square one of just how ridiculous this is. A Crimean developer in a bad situation and the many users and subscribers of CGHub being screwed by the site owners for no apparent reason.

At least they clarified that people will get assistance with getting their money back for subscriptions. That's something.

I have nothing to contribute other than, I saw this thread, then finished Infamous Second Son and in the credits see CGHub.com in the special thanks.

Maybe Full Spectrum got notified that they're being audited and panicked

Could it be possible that the US government forced the Full Spectrum to cut the ties with them, with all the sanctions against Russia recently, doing business with a company situated in the specific controversial region? Shakuro may well have done everything they could, but with the area being annexed by Russia (and not being a recognized part of Russia by the rest of the world), could probably cause issues with to which country they should pay taxes or all kinds of stuff like that.

And so, the world of concept art shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, what a pain in the ass.

@fisk0: I think that's unlikely, as they could have easily explained that. Though, current US sanctions seem focused more on those which invaded or supported the invasion and not local companies there. It wouldn't make sense to break links with the normal people.

@vextroid Yeah, CGHub has been helpful to so many people. It's just crazy for it to end like this. I hope outcry might cause the owners to rethink the decision. At the very least, sell it off or transfer it to someone else to try to run.

Shakuro says the owners have no plans of selling the rights, but we'll see.

@fisk0: The US government hasn't come close to those kind of sanctions yet, so that's highly unlikely.

This whole situation is very strange. Regardless of what those involved say I find it almost impossible to believe that the situation in Crimea didn't at least contribute to this. Anything else strike me as too much of a coincidence.

Wow that is crazy. I enjoyed the site but that just screwed over a lot of users who use it as their main hub/portfolio for work and such. I wonder how much work people lost because they only saved their work there. They must have seen the closure coming in some way so the fact that they didn't give any sort of notice is really shitty. I wonder if they will open it back up in the future but still really a shame to see that site gone all of a sudden.

Something stinks here.

You know even if this was not Team Shakuro's fault, if they were the ones accepting payments from subscribers they owed it to their subscribers to be upfront with them about who they were actually paying. And to have a contingency in place to protect their subscriber's money, account information and content.

They claimed that they weren't doing that but was that ever made clear to subscribers that they were paying these Full Spectrum People?

I don't know who these Spectrum people are, but I find "personal reasons" to be a completely suspect reason for this shutdown when their other operations appear to running without interruption.

(I think this is them http://www.fullspectrumpro.com/services/project-management/recent-projects/)

If they really tried to explore a sale and couldn't find a buyer, the decent thing to do would have been at least give people a week to prepare to go elsewhere. I find that claim (no buyer) highly dubious as well. Maybe they couldn't fetch a decent price, but I have to imagine they at least could have sold it for a crappy price even if they just put it up for open bid. It had to be better than just taking zero and destroying your business reputation completely.

Other than US gov't/Russia issues or possible money problems at Spectrum (or their principals), what "personal reason" could there be for just switching off the servers like that? Plain Old Spite?

Maybe Shakuro really are the fall guys here, but everybody involved is at a bare minimum at fault at not being upfront with people about who really owned the site and the fact that the group people interacted with (Shakuro) had no real control over it.

Well hopefully Spectrum tries to fix this needless mess. I feel bad for the artists. :(

@slag: They never said they couldn't find a buyer, if you read their statement I think you'll find that they (Shakuro) tried everything to buy the site from fullspectrum and even offered up buyers but it did not work i.e. full spectrum refused. Nothing in the two quotes below even suggests that they couldn't find a buyer.

4. We tried every single option to keep the community running including buying it out, selling to somebody else, even pausing … it didn’t work.

7. CGHUB (domain name, userbase, codebase) is not for sale. We have no right to sale it and the CGHUB owners do not want to sale it. The only thing we can promise is to forward your sale offers to the owners.

"Personal reasons" is such a bullshit reason.

@truthtellah said:

Or could they? If I recall correctly, when lavabit was audited by the NSA, the company (one guy) was prohibited to discuss that process with the media for a while. I'm not saying the NSA would have been involved in this case or anything, just that some government authorities can enforce confidentiality - that's no secret.

This is getting to conspiracy-theory levels of speculation, and they did say that it had nothing to do with them being in Crimea, but if this was the case I don't think they necessarily "could have easily explained that".

I was talking about Spectrum selling the site not Shakuro.

I'm not buying the personal reasons excuse Spectrum gave Shakuro. As Shakuro pointed out, there is interest out there if the price was right.

Given today's news from Shakuro

We got a permission to use ‪#‎CGHUB‬'s codebase for non-CG / art related project. Not exactly how we would like to proceed, but if someone has super cool ideas - please drop us a line: cghub@shakuro.com

https://www.facebook.com/shakurocom/posts/777584195593021

"personal reasons" excuse from Spectrum makes even less sense than before. I assume it's got to be money related somehow, whether be it an already concluded sale to somebody who wants the site down (maybe a competitor to cghub?) or something about potential litigation.

@slag: Hey thnx for the reply, now I get what you mean I hadn't seen the latest update. I was so invested in that site, hope someone will make a site with the features that made cghub the great site it was.

@sashamaz:

I really feel for you guys. You guys got such an incredibly raw deal. Spectrum didn't even show its contributors basic decency.

hope you find a new home for your work that will treat you better.

Potentially good news, everyone!

Shakuro, the original developer(not owner) of CGHub has been consulting over the last week with artists on creating a followup to the original CGHub.com. They plan on having a new structure without one sole owner, allowing them to prevent what happened with the original CGHub, and they hope to use a new Kickstarter to fund building a better site with artists' input to compete with the other homes for CG out there.

Here is their official statement this morning:

Stay tuned!

CGHUB suddenly dying off without warning or explanation caught most of us off guard and was a huge blow to the artistic community as the site provided a pretty unmatched service for the industry. There are currently lots of cg websites available to the community but Team Shakuro keeps getting comments expecting it to return with a project that would be similar to CGHUB or even better.

With this unexpected event happening the top artists in the industry has joined forces with team Sharkuro to plan a new site where the last one left off. Team Shakuro will create a new site redesigning all the best parts of CGHUB and leaving out the ones that didn’t work. Team Shakuro has the expertise and tech knowledge to create and run the site we all want and need but with even better features and functionality.

We already have received support and confirmation from most of the CGHUB team (mods, admins, staff etc) that ran the community side so the experience should remain consistent and the site will grow naturally from where CGHUB left off.

CGHUB owners controlled 100% of the site, and ultimately when the owners said it was over the developer had no say or control in what happened. The new site will be set up in such a way that it will be partly owned by the developer, the community and potential investors so this way it cannot possibly get shut down and die without warning like CGHUB did.

Based on the past experiences we have all seen rises and falls of different communities, most recently with CGHUB, it is clear that having a community run by one person just doesn’t work. It has to be run by the community for the community, this is the direction this new site will take. The developer will be the engine in the ship and the community will decide which direction it goes. This way we will have a good chance to make something special happen. Everything will be laid out in the open and will be as transparent as possible.

So in the next 2-3 weeks with the support of the community, Team Shakuro will launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the new website and take it into the future knowing it will be in good hands. A network and community that we will all have a part in creating and shaping.

More info very soon!

The only Hub I care about is Pornhub