3DGameMarket - The Company I Started That Robbed Me

Long story short (I wish)...

For 13 years I was a partner in 3DGameMarket LLC. For 13 years I was denied my LEGAL RIGHTS as a partner by my partners Vince Lindow Jr. and Ilya Sorokin to access the company's financial records. I completely wrote 3DGameMarket's website where we sold software I wrote by myself and whatever glasses-free display we could get our hands on to resell. Our deal: 40% Ilya, 30% me, 30% Vince for ownership. Ilya would contribute startup money, Vince would handle whatever he was good at, and I would work on software with our only focus at the time being SpawnIt3D (which eventually evolved into 3DGM).

I worked long days just like I still do. Often working 100 hours a week because I have a family I am trying to support and coding helps alleviate my anxiety. I never made more than a few dollars an hour, but I knew I was investing and that few dollars an hour was the only way my partners could invest as they had/have no applicable skills in technology or software. We had started the company together based on my pre-existing SpawnIt3D software which partially used some Philips licensed code. The problem: Philips wanted $10,000 a year to license their code... so I started learning C# and wrote 3DGM from scratch to save us that $10,000 a year. By 2015 3DGM had replaced SpawnIt3D and we no longer had an obligation to pay Philips the $10,000 a year. I got NOTHING for doing this for 3DGameMarket.

What is SpawnIt3D and 3DGM

These pieces of software inject into video games with the purpose of rendering additional 3D views so the games can be played in 3D on glasses-free 3D displays, anaglyph, SBS, Over-Under, etc.

The abuse

Not only was I denied access to the company's financial records, I was lied to repeatedly, mentally abused, and bullied by my partners. I have severe social and general anxiety and have my entire life, and they both used it against me. They would message me and tell me "good luck paying rent without us", "have fun explaining to your family why you can't pay rent". (Paraphrasing - I have emails to prove their abuse if ever needed.)

Vince WAS a friend of mine before we approached Ilya Sorokin about 3DGameMarket (Ilya's forced rebranding of SpawnIt3D). At one point my business partner Vince told me we owed Ilya, our other partner, $1,000,000... I got angry and told Vince I DID NOT OWE ILYA ANY OF THAT, as I had NEVER been allowed to see the books, never allowed to have ANY say in what money was spent on, and that paying Ilya back WAS NOT a part of the original agreement. If someone owed Ilya $1,000,000, IT WAS NOT ME.

Hell, I had to ask Ilya and Vince to buy anything I felt we needed, even after we were making money. Vince told me he would take care of it and I never heard about the supposed $1,000,000 again (because it never existed).

Ilya and Vince would agree I completed software contracts completely on my own in the name of 3DGameMarket for companies like Deepub, Exceptional 3D, KDX, Z2D Vision, Acer, and more... and Ilya and Vince collected the money.

I taught myself CSS, HTML, JavaScript, HLSL, GLSL, shader assembly language, C++, C#, SQL, DirectX (9, 10, 11, 12), OpenGL, WebGL, ASP.Net, Drupal, PHP, PayPal APIs, Ubercart, Alipay APIs, and more to better my abilities.

Eventually Vince admitted 3DGameMarket had NEVER kept any books... and that is why he and Ilya could not share them with me. So Vince started watching YouTube videos about how to handle finances for a business and he began writing up books based on whatever he could find. So fake books were being created to try and make good on the promise Vince and Ilya made to actually do things legally... but it was just for show, and just for me. Those "books" were never meant to be REAL business financial records.

I eventually told them both I would no longer create new products for 3DGameMarket LLC if I was not going to be treated like a partner, but I kept working on 3DGM as I believed in it and my own abilities.

Of course 3DGM was not good enough for Vince and Ilya. They wanted to continue selling MY SKILLS like they had done in the past to Deepub, KDX, etc. They wanted more profits from jobs where I do 100% of the work and I alone am 100% responsible for the deliverables, but where THEY COLLECT ALL THE MONEY and share with me what THEY CHOOSE.

The Z2D Deal

Z2D wanted me to write a piece of software for them, and due to the ongoing issue with my partners and violations of my rights as a legal partner of an LLC, I declined. Vince and Ilya flipped their shit and came at me with a vengeance.

I just kept working on 3DGM, which at this point I had improved immensely by creating a new way of generating additional 3D views in games by actually redrawing each frame from a different camera position - and it was BEAUTIFUL. Previously, 3DGM had been using code I wrote to extract the depth map from a frame and used that with the 2D color image to create additional views. The 2DZ (2D with depth) method worked well, but the 3D was a bit cardboard cutout... not with MRM. MRM, a shorthand name I gave it, meant "multiview render mode". My code would modify vertex shaders on the fly at runtime to allow for a second draw pass that would draw the second eye's view for significantly better 3D.

But selling stuff on 3DGameMarket.net didn't appear to be what Vince and Ilya wanted. They never advertised. In fact, I personally paid for advertising out of the few dollars an hour I was making just to try and drive up business, as it was obvious my partners had ZERO intention of actually selling anything on our site. Vince and Ilya were more interested in making deals with other companies that involved my doing more contract jobs that THEY would collect on.

Vince and Ilya were still pushing for me to do the software job for Z2D, and I had even researched the possibility, but what Z2D wanted was a bit far fetched. After telling Vince that, he came back at me and said Z2D was offering $100,000 now for the job, and that Ilya and Vince would give me $10,000 of that if I did the job. Mind you - at this time I owned 30% of 3DGameMarket and my PARTNERS were offering me the equivalent of a finder's fee to be 100% responsible for a complicated job I was not sure I could complete to Z2D's satisfaction... and I still did not have access to any 3DGameMarket financial records. So again, I declined.

Vince and Ilya BLEW UP. Insults and threats started flying left and right in my direction from my "partners". The same partners who NEVER allowed me access to company financial records I had/have a legal right to immediately stopped paying and contributing. For nearly 2 years after that, I funded 3DGameMarket's servers myself out of my own pocket. I paid domain registration fees, hosting fees, etc., while maintaining and continuing to work on 3DGM software.

Trying to exit

This does not even touch on the investors Vince got, who paid HIM $10,000 per 1% of 3DGameMarket. He never documented those investments, but frequently talked about them in his emails. He often referred to the investor money as "his family's money" and he treated it exactly like that. The money sat in an account labeled 3DGameMarket LLC, but ONLY HE was allowed to access that account and the records for that account. According to him, he was only doing the same thing Ilya had initially done: treat 3DGameMarket financials as personal accounts instead of belonging to the company.

I eventually tried to sell my entire stake in 3DGameMarket to my partners, and Ilya bought most of it but REFUSED to buy it all - even though I offered to sell it ALL for $10,000 because my dog was dying and we needed a vet badly. Ilya paid me the $10,000 and made me keep 10% ownership of 3DGameMarket... likely because he knew the company was dead without me. I told him (and I quote from the email): "Honestly, I would rather sell it all and become an employee as I am tired of trying to get treated like a partner instead of a form of cheap labor who is otherwise ignored. ... If required, I agree."

Vince as CEO

So Ilya has essentially exited 3DGameMarket at this point. He owns more than half the company but does absolutely nothing for it. I later found out he had filed a brand new Florida LLC without my knowledge or consent, listing only himself, and abandoned the original Delaware entity. He left Vince and me off the new filing completely. Eventually he added us back.

Vince declares himself CEO and I couldn't care less, as I know it means nothing. Vince eventually starts paying me $200 a week to offset my own consistent investment in 3DGameMarket. The problem with that is the same problem it has always been: Vince thinks he is my boss because of that $200. He starts asking for phone calls so he can probe me for information... at which point I need to briefly address the "phone call issue".

Phone calls and lies

After Vince LIED to me about owing Ilya $1,000,000 - while at my house, in a verbal conversation - I had BANNED Vince from my house and from communicating with me in any way except email. I flat out told him it was because I was sick of his lies and his stories always changing, so I wanted emails ONLY so what he said would be documented. That worked for a while. But now that Vince was paying me out of his own pocket and I was TRYING to trust him, the phone calls started again at his repeated request.

But this is the same guy who has lied on and off for years; who has bullied me and mentally abused me to get what he wants. So I record the phone calls. Vince spends a lot of the phone calls talking about useless crap, and often tries to bait me into attacking Ilya or other people. Maybe he wasn't baiting me - but it sure seemed that way (to me and others who have listened to the recordings) - though I am not sure what his goals were with that. I keep working on 3DGM but not at the level I had been. I have ZERO ability to trust Vince, especially with the way he appears to be playing me during phone calls. So I continue working on areas that would benefit 3DGameMarket and allow me to improve 3DGM and even make new products eventually. See my GitHub - plenty of those libraries are massively useful to a company that specializes in 3D gaming: github.com/LostBeard.

The "severance"

To end it all, Vince threw another temper tantrum when he did not get the call he wanted, when he wanted, and when I had the gall to question the future of 3DGM specifically in today's market - given that advertising had NEVER entered his or Ilya's minds. Even though I proposed using my advanced SpawnDev libraries as the base for new products, Vince was frothing mad that I dared question him - the guy who had been working 50 hours a week to get me $200 a week.

So he sends me a PayPal payment from the 3DGameMarket LLC account that ONLY HE has access to (and that he had been paying me out of for a year plus) with the message "Severance check 1 of 4". He was, once again, treating me as an employee - the same way he and Ilya always saw me and treated me. Like an employee, not a partner.

After a little research, I found out 3DGameMarket had been dissolved by the state of Florida on Sept. 26, 2025 - 6 months earlier. Vince claims he knew nothing about it and that it is all Ilya's fault, and that we should start our own company without him to sell 3DGM. I ignore all of this. At this point, I am happy to be done with these two clowns.

The worst of 2 worlds: partner and employee

They treated me like a partner to get cheap labor and to avoid employee labor laws. They treated me like an employee to avoid giving me the legal access to the books a partner has the legal right to.

Vince Lindow Jr. and Ilya Sorokin are not good people and are worse business partners. 3DGameMarket was a scam to extract cheap labor from me - a somewhat intelligent programmer with severe social and general anxiety. Shame on them. I likely could sue, but I am choosing not to at this time because there is enough hostility in this world and I have a family and work to focus on. I wish them the best in their future endeavors. May they live long and prosper... and NEVER talk to me again. 🖖

From one of the last emails from Vince: "You already got paid today and I will send you money for the next three weeks to give you time to get a job or get on disability". Sounds like he cares, right? No. The mention of disability is his way of poking me, as he knows I will not get on disability. Even the thought of applying for it causes me severe anxiety. FYI - he did NOT pay me again after that day like he said he would. Lying, manipulation, and abuse are what Vince does. He may not even realize he does it.

I have left a LOT of things out for brevity. The evidence of abuse and improper conduct is staggering, but well documented in case it is ever needed.

I received this message on LinkedIn from people I do not even know, warning me about Vince.

This is the "severance" pay Vince sent me, which proves he treats me and thinks of me like an employee. Also, severance pay generally comes with an agreement not to sue. I never made any such agreement with anyone.

TL;DR

Be careful starting a business with other people. Even "friends" can turn into enemies when money is on the table.

Be especially careful if you have a disability. Mine allowed two business "partners" to abuse me for 13 years. 🖖

Signed,
Todd Tanner

🛠️ Support Independent Open Source

I’m a solo open-source developer building infrastructure for .NET in the browser that doesn’t exist anywhere else. 50+ MIT-licensed packages, 351,000+ total NuGet downloads, everything free.

• GitHub/LostBeard
• Nuget/LostBeard

What I build:

• SpawnDev.BlazorJS - 1,014 typed C# wrappers for the entire browser API (150K+ downloads)
• SpawnDev.ILGPU - GPU compute on 6 backends (WebGPU, WebGL, Wasm, CUDA, OpenCL, CPU) from one codebase
• SpawnDev.ILGPU.ML - Native GPU neural network inference, no ONNX Runtime
• SpawnDev.WebTorrent - Pure C# BitTorrent/WebTorrent, browser and desktop
• SpawnDev.RTC - Cross-platform WebRTC for .NET
• SpawnDev.MultiMedia - Cross-platform camera, microphone, speakers
• SpawnDev.Codecs - Pure-.NET, ILGPU-accelerated, patent-clean audio and video codecs (Opus, VP8/9, AV1, FLAC, Vorbis)

Your sponsorship goes directly to development time - no company, no overhead, just code.

Become a Sponsor - Thank you for supporting independent open-source software!

Donate with Crypto

Crypto donations are anonymous by nature. If you'd like acknowledgment or want me to know who you are, send me an email at lostit1278@gmail.com with your transaction details. Otherwise, just know that every donation is appreciated.