Indie solo video game dev here.
I am okay with gamers “requisitioning” games if they truly can’t afford it. While it is my livelihood, it’s also my attempt at art and I want people to enjoy it. I even plan on releasing a safe cracked copy for the next game.
If you pirate a game, there are ways to help support us starving devs if you like the game.
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Spread the word far and wide that you like the game. A little effort on your part can save us marketing budget and trigger new sales.
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In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.
But please don’t cost us additional money. It costs time and money to process chargebacks triggered by the key resellers selling keys procurred with stolen credit cards.
Unless you plan on implementing any other stronger DRM than the steam provided one. I wouldn’t bother releasing a safe version.
It’s brutally simple to crack steam drm on your own. You just need the clean files from cs.rin.ru/forum or something.
Unsafe cracks will be published elsewhere anyways if your game is popular enough.
I suggest you just don’t add any DRM at all.
Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong
cs.rin.ru is very well regarded in the piracy community and quite a few cracks originate there. You can also learn how to crack yourself on that site.
how to crack yourself
now you got my attention
“Very well regarded in the piracy community” isn’t a phrase I thought I’d see today 🤣
Why not, after you clicked on a post in a piracy community?
Well, it’s not like people that know what they are doing, download from any random site they come across. There are sites that are well regarded and many that are not (like piratebay)
Speaking of cs.rin.ru, unfortunately most of the clean steam files are not available anymore there right now.
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- In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.
I’ve been doing this a lot recently. Back when i was a teenager i used to pirate a lot, but now that i’m older and have disposable income i’ve been buying a ton of the games o used to pirate then.
Which unfortunally leads to me having tons of games on steam with barely any hours played (yet), when they should be in the thousands already.
I will also use this excuse to justify my huge backlog of steam games bought on deep discounted sales that I in all likelihood will never ever ever actually play.
I’m just making up for my middle school years That’s the ticket…
Lol, yeah, i do that too…
But with these old classics it’s even harder to resist for me. They usually have the biggest discounts, and how can i say this game that gave me so many hours of fun isn’t worth 2 fucking dollars?
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It’s silly to assume all (or even the majority imo) of key sellers are fraudulent. How do you know resellers are costing you more money in chargebacks than they make you in legitimate purchases?
Edit: downvote away, but until someone provides some actual evidence of this instead of just “a few devs said so” I’m going to assume this isn’t true.
So, those resellers listed have been known to hold and sell keys that are linked to stolen credit cards and other unauthorised payment methods. The keys are bought up cheap during sales using the stolen credentials then posted on the reseller sites. A few things happen when the victim notifies their bank or institution of the fraud. Steam or whatever site cancels those keys, meaning the person who purchased the key on the reseller site is out a product, the dev/publisher then has to front the cost of the charge back for the fraudulent purchase, or at least the 70% cut they get. Knowing that sometimes the keys you purchase dont work the resellers also offer a service, for an extra fee, to ensure that your key will work.
In essence, the reseller makes money from the purchase of the key, the fraudulent posters of the keys make money from the sale of the key, the legitimate store and the dev lose money due to the chargeback caused by the fraudulent sale, and the user who purchased the key is out money and a product. There are legitimate resellers who dont operate this way but the ones pictured are not those ones.
Thats not even the fact that the reseller wouldn’t be selling the key for less than they bought it so the customer is giving more money to someone else rather then the dev. So sure, the dev may have been paid for the keys at sale price, but the end user is paying more which goes to someone else.
I understand the theory, I’m looking for evidence that this is a problem that makes resellers a net negative income for devs. I’ve used resellers plenty of times for games I otherwise would not have purchased and I have never once had this happen to me, which makes me think that this is an unproven talking point based on outliers.
It’s not like it’s a straightforward calculation, it’s hard to distinguish between regular sales and sales made to resellers, as well as regular chargebacks and chargebacks made to resellers. So until someone actually puts effort into proving this, “because the dev said so” isn’t a good enough answer for me.
G2A made an offer years ago to any video game devs that they would compensate any devs if they and an external investigation could prove that the keys were illegitimate.
Wube the company behind Factorio was the only one that took them up on the offer and they were right, the keys were illegitimate.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/g2a-and-wube-software-settle-usd40-000-chargeback-dispute
Official announcement from G2A: https://www.g2a.co/g2a-strikes-anti-fraud-agreement-with-indie-developer-wube-software/
About the issue from Wube: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
Follow up [last section]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-348
I’d still be very interested in knowing whether or not this was a net negative income for Factorio, as the question wasn’t “does fraud exist on G2A”, it was “is pirating better for devs than resellers”. For pirating to be better than resellers, resellers have to provide net negative income, and to know that we need to know the total revenue from resellers. I didn’t see that in the links provided (just seeing that 198/321 chargebacks were fraudulent), but let me know if I just missed it.
Thanks for the links though! This was a super interesting read, and honestly big props to Wube and G2A for being so transparent about the process. Honestly not sure why more game devs wouldn’t take G2A up on this offer, 10x the cost of chargebacks with zero risk??
198 chargebacks mentioned cost Wube $20 per chargeback, on top of losing the sale. They mention this in the linked blog post.
So instead of earning $20 (minus various cuts), they lose $20. So they urge people to avoid using key resellers, and instead just pirate their game if you can’t afford to buy it properly.
What he’s trying to say is that if there were 198 fraudulent copies sold on G2A, but G2A also was responsible for 500 non-fraudulent sales, then Wube might have still netted a profit off G2A from people who would not have bought Factorio full price. Since nobody has ever shown that anywhere near a majority of keys are fraudulent, it is entirely possible for most games that they still make more money even after chargebacks than if G2A didn’t exist. There are, however, definitely going to be games where that’s not the case.
The better argument, honestly, is that G2A being unwilling to police fraudulent sales is helping the scam industry, and is responsible for us getting more Microsoft Support, Amazon Refund, etc scams in our inboxes. I do not hold the negative view most do on key resellers because most of the reason big media hates on them has nothing to do with the fraud… but honestly companies like G2A should be doing more (something) to own and police their shit. I personally think a majority of G2A’s keys are legit because there are a lot of ways to legally gets keys much cheaper than MSRP. I frankly support that behavior because I’ll never be a fan of the IP price controls and treating game purchases as “licenses” instead of purchases.
For pirating to be better than resellers, resellers have to provide net negative income, and to know that we need to know the total revenue from resellers.
The Gamestop NFT marketplace will hopefully allow creators like you to release games and collect a royalty for each re-sale
Sounds kinda sus man
What’s sus about creators receiving royalties for their own work?
The sus part is the royalties being tied to unregulated, highly risky “assets”
I don’t think your opinion is wrong, just misinformed/uninformed. I share your opinion mire generally about blockchain tech, as it’s clearly been used for scams and bullshit.
We’re not talking about Bored Ape fake trading card nonsense. We’re talking about Game Publishers and re-sellers who want to verify provenance of a file. The publisher (creator) wants to get a cut of a forward sale of the game. That’s the speculated way that this would work. Whether it’s tied to Gamestop is irrelevant. NFT technology will serve this purpose for all forms of digital media.
Gamestop is just the only service currently offering this benefit when minting your NFT (or was… Maybe it changed)
Ok, I’ll hear you out but explain to me how the developers and teams get money from it
Why not just give them financial incentives? Why shoehorn a cryptocurrency derivative into financial incentives?
The publisher mints the NFT. As the creator of the NFT, their wallet will automatically be given a percentage of future sales through smart contracts.
When it goes mainstream, it won’t feel shoehorned at all. You probably won’t even know you’re using the technology unless they decide to emphasize it in marketing materials.
Right now, how would you re-sell a digital game and verify it’s an authentic originally purchased copy? Blockchain tech allows for this. That’s the incentive for end users. They can know where the file originated and trust the seller. You’re not buying a stupid trading card, you’re buying digital media with a certificate of authenticity attached.
Edit to add: I’m pro-piracy and generally anti-blockchain (especially as currently used, where we all pretend it’s stonks).
Fuck no. Nobody wants NFTs.
I am not really all about NFTs but they are not going away… They are the perfect tool for digital capitalism. They create a kind of artificial scarcity
In the case of the Gamestop policy, at least creators get paid for their work as long as its remains popular/desirable
How does it been an NFT stop piracy?
Honestly, I don’t think it does, but it makes re-sale of digital media possible. Right now you can’t return a crappy game to the shop where you bought it. If you want a refund through Steam or something, there’s a limited time. If. you accidentally buy the wrong version of a game, it’s a lot of hassle. If you get tired of the game, or just don’t really like it, it’s basically stuck in your library forever
Attaching the files to NFTs will make these things possible and even easy.
You probably won’t even know you’re interacting with NFT technology
hasn’t that been coming any day now for like two years or something?
just drop the bags and move on with your life man
The Gamestop marketplace has been operational for a while. Not sure what you’re on about…
The company’s wallet, not its NFT market. The recent ruling with Ripple and SEC made it appear that running both an exchange AND a wallet would be considered a violation of securities law.
Gamestop wallet users can move their digital items to any compatible wallet
The future
Will be a dark place, mostly
Their NFT website doesn’t even work anymore andyou still out here shilling garbageThat’s just not true.
Oh my bad. It did load after connecting to a UK VPN, seems like they block my region from accessing it.
The part about shilling garbage still stands however.
Only if you can put the license itself on the blockchain, and guarantee the blockchain is robust enough to last beyond Gamestop’s bankruptcy. Or survive past the day Gamestop decides they can make more money by destroying the current blockchain and “upgrading” the system.
The blockchain has nothing to do with Gamestop’s solvency as a company (which is not in doubt, BTW). It’s Ethereum blockchain.
The last sentence of your comment sounds like you don’t actually understand blockchain technology at all…
I don’t think anyone can say that Gamestop will definitely be around longer than people want to use these licenses they sell. And I hope the license isn’t just a pointer to some Gamestop website that stores the licenses (re: standard NFT). But I don’t trust any corporation to do something like this without building in some sort of backdoor to revoke licenses. Especially Gamestop.
Your comment makes me think you don’t get how the technology works. Ethereum blockchain will continue to exist whether Gamestop does or not…
It doesn’t matter if the blockchain is eternal, if this is a traditional NFT, it isn’t stored in the blockchain. All you’re buying is a link to a website where the NFT is stored. It doesn’t matter if it’s a license key, or a shitty computer generated picture of an anthropomorphic ape. When Gamestop decides to shut down the server (it will happen eventually), you lose access to your license key. If Gamestop allows you to copy your license key, you still lose access to your software when Gamestop shuts down the licensing server. I’m not sure the technology works the way you think it works.
Uhm… Sorry but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this tech works.
NFTs are stored in a “wallet”, the address is recorded on the blockchain. As long as you know your seed phrase (or other recovery key) it will be yours eternally. The NFT market is only a place to put buyers and sellers in the same spot. Even “in the market”, the NFT lives at a blockchain address, someone else’s wallet.
That’s why Gamestop can say “we’re shutting down our wallet service. Get your recovery key and restore your NFTs elsewhere”
Gamestop doesn’t run a licensing server and probably won’t. That’s for publishers. Also, NFTs make licensing servers redundant.
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NiX:
I love you guys and postal series, but I’m not made of money, if I can get a game for cheaper I’d rather pay less than more.
Running With Scissors:
Which is why we’re telling you to pirate our games instead of paying a scammer who will cost us money and probably even get your key revoked Our games are cheap right now through official sites. Is saving a few cents worth lowering the chances for releasing another POSTAL game?
NiX:
Isn’t pirating illegal? You want your fans get fines and shit? Now they are on sale so I might pick up some but normally i still rather get the game of g2a for cheaper
Running With Scissors:
You can’t get fines if the owners of the IP give you permission to download. Just know that by getting on G2A, we not only get no money, we also have to pay for the chargeback, that’s the core of the problem and it means no new games in the future and no more RWS
Edit: fixed formatting.
I’d be super interested in reading the full interview if you could point me to it? I’m not familiar with the “NiX” acronym
It was part of a twitter thread that I’m too much of a luddite to figure out how to link. Last comment: https://twitter.com/RWSstudios/status/1671832971601408000#m
I thought it was a news outlet! I’ve know that G2A and the like were “not good” but didn’t have any insight why and am definitely going to look into this more. Thanks for the link!
Wow that guy was kinda a dick
Not sure if this was intentional, but on mobile that text has no line breaks. Just one looooong line I gotta scroll sideways to read.
Try Sync for lemmy, it formats the comment correctly.
Try Infinity for lemmy, it formats the comment correctly.
Ive never seen a company have this take. Interesting
Key resellers are really, truly awful. In many cases the keys are purchased from legitimate sites using stolen credit card numbers. The key resellers plead ignorance as to where the keys come from, but it’s an open secret at this point. If you don’t want to pay the Steam/Gog price, piracy is less awful because you won’t be fueling a criminal enterprise and there’s no chance your Steam/Gog account will get a stolen key revoked.
Credit card fraud and software keys actually ends up being paid for by the rest of us. Fraudulent transactions and chargebacks lead to higher merchant fees, and those costs end up getting passed on to legitimate purchasers.
The only time I used a key reseller was to get a cheap digital copy of GTAV as I already had multiple copies for 360 and X1 on disc.
I’ve used them and will continue to use them. In Australia half the games here have a premium added to them just because fuck us. I’ll buy the cheaper option every time
Just pirate games then.
I do that too, but some shit cant play online when cracked
I see this all the time which makes me wary of buying from there, but surely the gaming industry would push for removal of these sites, no? Is there any proof of these allegations?
Indie game developers have been getting hit with chargebacks for years. To be clear, not every key on the resellers’ sites are illegitimate. There are lots of legitimate reasons to want to resell a key, for example a key for a game you’re not interested in that’s received as part of a Humble Bundle or something. However when someone uploads 1000 keys for a newly launched game, it’s highly unlikely that those are legit but the key reseller sites don’t ask any questions about where the keys come from. The resellers just want to sell the key and take their cut, and they don’t give a shit if it was purchased with a stolen credit card because the original key seller is the one left holding the bag when a chargeback occurs.
Most of the keys are obtained illegally (stolen accounts and/or credit cards) so eventually the money gets taken back. So not only was the game stolen but the indie has to go through processing the takeback which costs them money on top of it.
And since the takeback issue can occur the person purchasing could lose their game without even realizing it and then complain to the devs when it wasn’t even their fault.
You’re basically double-dipping and ensuring that actual costs are involved.
edit: brain fuzzy. Chargeback is the word.
I’ve also heard that this is a myth, and while there might be some fraudulent purchases, the majority are just picked up in other regions where games are cheaper and maybe during sales. Devs who tell you to pirate their game instead of using resellers may be actually making more money off resellers than they think, but there isn’t really any way to confirm it. Without a mass study.
It’s hard to know because both sides are arguing that it’s 100% their side. Game companies are claiming it’s basically all pirated keys. G2A (in court) used to argue that it was basically no pirated keys. The truth is somewhere in the middle but nobody is talking.
In some cases, the fraudulent purchase route is less profitable than just buy-selling across countries and abusing sales. I can’t imagine in those cases that we’re looking at fraudulent purchases.
Exactly, devs need to prove that resellers are an overall net negative on their income before they can use this as a talking point. Fraud happens in every industry, the existence of fraud doesn’t make a service net negative overall.
For what it’s worth, I’ve used G2A plenty of times for games I otherwise wouldn’t have purchased and I’ve never had an issue once.
…Do they?
I feel like if the person is telling you to pirate the game, a method that is 100% confirmed to provide no money to the dev, they probably are already actively feeling money drain from the other method
Like telling someone to pirate your game is a pretty extreme argument against resellers. I don’t think it’s a myth, and while a mass study would be good, there’s just more evidence against at the moment. I think the resellers have more to prove than vica versa.
Unfortunately that’s spotty evidence at best. Game developers generally don’t sell their own keys, they sell them through distribution platforms like Steam. Gamers and resellers both pick up keys from distribution platforms. A percentage of these are legit, a percentage are fraudulent, however the game dev has no way to actually tell:
- How many legit sales are to resellers
- How many fraudulent sales are to resellers
Distribution platforms don’t make you check a box that says “I’m a reseller”, so there’s no way to know if the net income from legitimate sales to resellers is less than the cost of fraudulent sales to resellers. The only thing game devs have to rely on is signal from chargebacks, and a chargeback makes a lot more noise than a legitimate sale.
I think it’s very possible that the few devs that tell you to pirate instead of using resellers are misinformed, and of course they are, because they don’t own their own distribution line. Fraudulent sales cause more noise than legitimate sales which causes people to jump on the “pirate over resellers”.
But regardless of which side of this argument is correct, telling people to boycott an entire sub-industry based on claims with speculative evidence is ridiculous.
I mean,
I still feel that a dev willing to take a lost sale over a resale, still says more than just saying they’re misinformed.
And at the end of the day, resell is supposed to be a cheaper way to say “I bought it”. And at the end of the day, devs are saying “If anything, it’s worse for us”
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think resellers are more needing to prove their legitimacy in this case.
The thing I find most ridiculous honestly, is that you seem to be under the assumption that the devs aren’t already getting noisy chargebacks. Like this whole thing sprouted from nothing.
the movie “the man from earth: holocene” was released by the film makers onto the piracy websites. They’d prefer people see their film for free than not see the film at all.
I have that movie on my Plex! Yes, I pirated it. Is it worth watching? How about the first one, for that matter?
The first one is beautifully done, I have watched it multiple times over, the second one is okay, a bit leaning over religious too much.
Have you ever seen the movie Coherence? Is it similar to that in tone?
the first one is better, but the second one is far from bad also. I’d say they’re both worth the watch.
They made another? I loved the first one. Have watched it many times.
Hotline: Miami devs supported people in The Pirate Bay threads and said aussies to get their game anyway since it was banned here, iirc.
I remember devolver telling aussies it was cool tonpirate but i thought that was the extent of it.
Darkwood went a step further in 2017:
https://www.destructoid.com/darkwood-devs-put-the-full-game-on-the-pirate-bay-out-of-guilt/
The latter option does leave you with the game in your Steam account though, which is infinitely more convenient than downloading a repack made by some Russian somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
…I mean, I assume. It’s not like I’ve ever bought a game… or several games… from resellers
downloading a repack made by some Russian somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
Never had this problem with fitgirl but rinru users unfortunately end up using some awful rate limited site usually. It’s always a pleasant surprise when it’s a drive link tho
The latter option does leave you with the game in your Steam account though
This is why I use them. Someone hosted a zomboid server on here but it’s set to steam only, I don’t want to give any money to valve if possible and I’m definitely not buying the game a third time at full price so I just used a gift card and got it for ~$7.
Honestly if I end up in a similar situation I’ll probably just do it again
It’s even better when you click through all the captchas and countdowns and get that juicy, juicy link only to be greeted by “This file can be downloaded by Premium Users only”
Thankfully I haven’t encountered that in forever but I always get multi-part 5gb download thats capped to 1mb/s and takes 5 hours
There’s a lot to unpack here
somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
Why not torrent it?
I don’t have a VPN, which is apparently a requirement to torrenting games, movies and TV shows in this day and age.
I do still torrent things, but I try to stick to older/obscure stuff. Guess I’m averse to getting disapproving letters from the copyright police
That sucks :/
One of the upsides of not living in the G7 countries is easier piracy, I guess.
That’s quite true but still, in my case I only pirate if it’s the best way to experience (and keep long term) a given piece of content.
I almost always buy games from resellers as long as it’s the best price. I’d rather have something cataloged in my Steam/Epic/Origin/etc library than deal with having to deal with the installation manually.
I usually end up buying from resellers in cases where I’ve been waiting for one of the big Steam sales for a game, only to discover the price not discounted as much as I’d hoped.
Or, in the last case where I used cdkeys.com, I waited until the last day of the Steam Summer Sale to get a game but found out that game’s discount had already ended, presumably due to timezone shenanigans or something. Went to check cdkeys and the game was still there with the discounted price so yeah, I ended up getting a grey market key.
Does cdkeys.com really count as grey-market? AFAIR, they directly purchase all their keys from legal sources. Unlike G2A and the like who shove fingers in ears and say “we’re just a key marketplace”.
That’s actually nice to hear. I just assumed it was a Kinguin-style operation from their pricing
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The old school pirate philosophy. Pirate the game. If you like the game, buy it. If you loved it, pay full price. The best games are being released by indie devs that could use the money.
I wonder where sites like GreenManGaming, Fanatical, Humble and IndieGala fit into the mix as I understand it are legit keysellers?
the listed ones have contracts with publisher to get legit keys where the developer gets it share too
At a legitimate website, the developer(s) and publisher(s) make money for each key purchased and every key is legal to own, so there is little chance of a key being revoked and your account banned on your chosen storefront. At a grey market seller like G2A, they can sometimes get their keys illegally (credit card theft, stolen accounts, etc.). So because GMG, Fanatical, Humble, IndiaGala, etc. are all legitimate resellers, they buy their keys directly from the source (usually the publisher or storefront where they are redeemed, but that’s just my guess). Apologies if that’s not what you were asking.
I wonder if Humble Bundle has any stance on the giveaways people do with their unused Humble Choice keys
It’s against the TOS unless you are actually giving it away as a gift with no promotional value. https://support.humblebundle.com/hc/en-us/articles/202712380-Can-I-sell-trade-or-use-my-keys-for-promotional-purposes-i-e-Stream-Social-Media-giveaways-
So perfectly fine in the common case where people give keys away for free.
Like this one.
THE LONG DARK is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies – only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.
Pee See Pee Aych En - Nine Why Ay Eee Double You - Vee Eight Pee Em Vee
Please don’t take it unless you actually want to play it.
Yeah exactly like that. Damn that’s a good one.
Here’s another: Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
Ex Seven Pee Ex Jay - Four Gee Bee Gee Bee - Too In Eye Eee Tee
At first I thought I was having a stroke, then I realized it was a key. If I may ask, why spell everything out instead of just posting a copy and paste able code? Only thing I could come up with was to prevent bots from scraping codes out of comments, but I think it would still be pretty easy to parse it into a regular game code.
It’s probably not as bad here; But if you posted a game code on reddit without some kind of obfuscation, a bot would grab it in seconds. I was mostly just copying the person I was replying to.
Great game. Spent over 50 hours not even playing the campaign just exploring with a majority of the hazards turned off.
It sounds like the typical Reddit giveaways would be fine under their TOS but they would understandably not provide support for them.
Those are all official seller stores.
They’d fall under Steam.
G2A would technically fall under Steam too, except they have a history of buying stolen keys and reselling them (over and over again).
They buy keys from the devs/publishers directly or legit wholesalers who are known to get the keys from the devs/publishers. Wholesalers themselves don’t popup on consumers’ radar since they only buy and sell in bulk.
Who do the wholesalers buy FROM, then? It seems clear that the dev, in this case, wants no part of this. Is the publisher enabling this crap?
Wholesalers get them from the devs and publishers, like I said. But they’re not the key sites.
Key Resell Sites, like G2A, don’t often get them from wholesalers. They operate like eBay. The sellers buy them from whatever legitimate source they can use their stolen credit card info at, and then they slap their essentially free key on the Resell Site for pure profit. Some sellers on sites like G2A might be legitimate, buying keys from wholesalers, but too often they aren’t. With a site system like that it’s near impossible to police for stolen goods, as there is no way to verify a key’s origin. Sites like Swappa, which facilitate selling mobile devices, can use things like a phone’s IMEI to check if it’s marked stolen or not. But Valve, for example, provides no way to check a key without redeeming it, and hence there’s also no mechanism for anybody to report a stolen key short of telling the dev/publisher and having them revoke the key which has likely already been used by some unwitting consumer.
Yes, only the publisher/developer can generate keys. That’s where all key sites get their keys from. You cannot obtain them through the Steam store. And that’s also why games that simply do not sell keys to wholesalers don’t have this issue. Just look at Factorio. They don’t do sales, they don’t do bundles, and they don’t sell keys. You can get it on key sites but only as a gift and for the same price it’s being listed on for on Steam.
That’s also where most other key sites get their keys from (mostly from bundles). It has been shown time and time again that keys being purchased with stolen credit cards is mostly a myth. Just look at the fact that Factorio, which never had a sale and never sold a single key in a bundle, is just as expensive on key sites as on Steam (Source. That wouldn’t be the case if criminals where purchasing licenses with stolen credit cards and then selling them for cheap as a form of money laundering.
Where are criminals even supposed to purchase those keys? Only the developer (and publisher) themselves can generate keys. You can’t obtain them through Steam.
I’d only buy grey market keys for AAA games, like the slop Ubisoft serves up every year.
You like buying and eating slop?
I’d still pirate them, from both sides it’s more ethical
For indies, it prevents the chance of causing a charge back situation
For AAA companies, it prevents the chance of them profiting off of a potentially legitimate key.
Either way, pirating is just better.
ELI5, Why are resellers bad? Do they acquire the keys in a shady way?
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How can the key still be sold after the chargeback? Is there no way for the devs to deactivate it?
Because keys are randomly generated. To block them, you need some cloud infrastructure and force players to always be online. That’s expensive for indy developers and gamers hate online requirements for offline games.
So if you know how the rng works and have a seed you could, in theory, generate keys that would work?
Possibly, but doing that also opens up the potential for someone who is not legit to work out the algorithm used and build a keygen for it, then they could sell/distribute keys that shouldn’t exist or keys that already exist.
Some games only contact the key server once to tell the server that it’s activating the key with X account, then never contacting again, or only contacting again if an internet connection exists. This will prevent the same key activating twice, while also allowing for offline play post installation.
If a key can be generated, someone could steal a legit key and activate it before the legitimate key holder activates it, which would then result in a “key already activated” error, and a massive headache when the purchaser(s) complains and shows legit receipts.
This is why keys are usually randomly generated and logged server side at purchase, the key is then handed over to the user via secure connection. This not only allows for key activations, but will also allow the company to revoke the key if needed.
Most pirates get around this by blocking or spoofing the “activation successful” message and preventing contact with the activation servers.
Of course this is the general idea behind key and key activations, the true mechanisms are usually more complex than that, especially if a game launcher like steam, ea play/origin or Ubisoft connect is involved, but it all more or less accomplishes the same thing.
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Here’s a dev explaining it: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2618947
Apparently they do chargebacks, which costs the gamedevs money.
This is something that should have been in the opening post.
It explains why using these sites actually causes harm.
Instead of getting a game at a reduced rate without harming the dev much (just losing a sale) you’re actually harming the dev.This is something I didn’t know and now I’ll look more at discounted games on official platforms instead of these key sites.
That’s why I stopped using those sites. The only reseller I buy from now is Humble Bundle, but most things I just buy direct from the Steam Store.
Fanatical and greenmangaming are two other sites that only sell legit keys. I usually try to only buy games that are on sale, so I check Humble, Fanatical, GMG and GOG whenever something I want is not on sale on Steam.
Yes.
They steal a credit card, buy the game with it, and sell the game. Then the owner of the credit card (or the credit card issuer) discovers this and demands a refund from the game seller. Processing this refund requires extra work and additional money from the game seller.
For a longer explanation, with successful results, you can read https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303 .
I sorta blame big media companies for this. They have been trying to kill used movie/game sales for decades, moving to these (should be illegal) licensing models, etc. In doing that, they have failed to allow an infrastructure to form that would keep used or third-party purchases “legit” so you end up with sites that have no choice but to live in the grey area, even cdkeys.com that (allegedly) sources their keys 100% first-party legitimately.
Ultimately, credit card fraud will always be a risk. Someone installed a barcode copier on a local gas station machine a while back, and they bought 5 PS4s on it before the Bank got wise. It’s a little easier in other countries because there’s no physical shipping to deal with, but it’s not really creating the market. As a defrauded individual, you just can’t chargeback a playstation that was sold anonymously on ebay and already shipped.
I do not understand why publishers don’t cancel the keys. Why do they allow that parasitic industry to exist? Surely they know which key corresponds to a chargeback?
I don’t think the majority of those keys are from stolen credit cards. A lot of them are just purchased in countries where the game is extremely cheap then resold for a profit.
Yeah the devs are still making their money. Just not the big first world money they want.
The indie dev behind Factorio spoke out about the grey market resellers in their blog. They talked about G2A, where they had received a bunch of fraudulent purchases, and had to pay fines to the credit card processor for each chargeback… Effectively making reseller sales cost the developer money instead of earning it. Here’s the 4 blog posts talking about the issue.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
Ok. So. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.
It pushes the price of games up in countries where the median income is a small fraction of places like the US. So it either takes away the gaming experience or encourages piracy from people who would have loved to support the developers and enjoy the game that way.
Fair enough. But devil’s advocate: presumably they’re still selling it there at a profit?
When it comes to individual copies of games, there’s not really an “at profit” price. Either it sells enough copies to cover the development costs, or it doesn’t. Like let’s say an indie game cost $100k to develop, and after taxes and the storefront (i.e. Steam or the PlayStation store) the net revenue for the dev is 50% of the sell price.
Using Pizza Tower’s regional pricing as an example, it’s $20 in the US Steam Store and ~$0.80 in the Argentina Steam Store. So with those numbers (i.e. $10 revenue for US sales and $0.40 revenue for Argentina sales), you’d need to sell 10k copies to become break even if all sales were in the US compared to 250k copies in Argentina.
So if people all over the world are using the cheaper country’s price, it becomes a lot harder for the game to become profitable, and if that abuse of the system is widespread enough, the devs will either need to raise the price so that it’s no longer affordable for people in countries with lower incomes, or remove it entirely from that region. Most devs would rather people have a reasonable, legal way for people to play their games, and key resellers can make that harderProfit for game industry is relative to sales, because the cost per digital game is practically $0, it’s all paid upfront.
You can sell a game for 1 cent and if all people on the planet buy it, it will probably still turn a profit.
Nothing is ever bad as places like this make it out to be. Reddit had (probably still has) the same propensity for hysteria.
The problem is not wether the majority of sellers aren’t selling keys like that. It’s the possibility that some sellers ARE. These reselling sites are massive, and even if it’s 10% that are using stolen credit cards - that can put a huge dent in the sellers wallet.
It can even hurt the one who purchasing thinking it was legit if the seller decides to revoke the keys - which they can do at their discretion.
Yet these sites take no responsibility, don’t really police or vett the users selling on their site beyond doing just enough to say they are in court, and even happen to offer a subscription model for “buyers protection”, essentially allowing them to profit the most off of these sites. I know G2A specifically has been caught making it super hard to cancel these subscriptions as well - it’s just super fucking shifty and slimy.
Apart from the other stuff about cross country reselling, cancelling them can bring a bad image to your company although it’s not even your fault.to begin with.
I mean there a number of big publishers who don’t seem to give two fucks about their image if there’s profit in it…
From prior experience gog sometimes cancels keys. Steam doesn’t seem to do so.
Based RWS
What shits me off is the number of people who defend these key reselling sites.
I’ve been utterly lambasted for likening kinguin with G2A in the past. Like really? Their arguments literally fall apart with a small amount of scrutiny, but thet chalk it up to “they say they aren’t like other resellers so they aren’t” FFS you literally cannot prove that and that’s my point. And that’s why you DO NOT TRUST THESE SITES.
It’s really fucking common in YouTube comments specifically. Especially with youtubers who have been sponsored by these sites in the past.
I have literally unsubbed from youtubers that have advertised these stinkers, the problem is when the likes of MrBeast starts advertising it, people start to think that it’s ok.
I mean, cdkeys.com doesn’t allow third-party sellers and (supposedly) sources all their keys from verifiably legal sources, usually just region arbitrage. Considering they come into ownership of all the keys they sell, I’d think they lack all the “safe harbor” protections of the others.
Thing is, cdkeys.com is about the same price as the others. Which suggests to me that the “stolen keys” rate from those others is lower than some companies would have you believe. Remember, legal or not, the big label stance on all this is an extension of their stance on buying used, which is that they would rather you pirate something than support even a legitimate third-party or cross-regional market.
I have bought some games from resellers. I know they’re bad, but sometimes I just really want to play that game online and the price is outrageous (a.k.a. I don’t have the money at that time). Or in other cases I have bought an original game from steam, but the dlc’s I want are not worth the money they’re asking, which leads to me me using resellers again. For example I have bought cities skylines on steam, but most of it’s dlc are from g2a, because they’re selling the the game with 40% of it’s functionality and other important shit is in overpriced dlc’s
There is absolutely no issue with it as it doesn’t harm the creators
Well, that makes me feel marginally better for never having bought keys in gray market sites like my friend who doesn’t pirate because he’s afraid of viruses, but then does that to get “amazing discounts”.
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what is the first one?
Their website.
which is?
Choice of “someone gets the game for free” or “someone gets rewarded for defrauding your customers”, that’s an easy one, yeah
