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?
what is the first one?
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!
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.
ELI5, Why are resellers bad? Do they acquire the keys in a shady way?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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’d only buy grey market keys for AAA games, like the slop Ubisoft serves up every year.
Based RWS
How does g2a even work? I’ve bought a few keys there before and they worked. I assume these keys were given to someone from like a promo or something then they just resell it?
they buy keys using stolen credit cards and then resell them
They let people resell keys “no questions asked” (it reduces their liability to not ask questions). Some percent of the resellers they host use stolen credit cards to sell at a loss, and nobody knows what percent. It’s probably depressingly high, but (likely) still <50%.
Some percent of the resellers just buys games on sale, or in a cheap country to resell to expensive countries. It’s not uncommon when a game has a plummet sale (a $70 black friday sale for $20) that thousands of copies of the game show up for $30-40 on G2A as soon as the sale ends. Those are (generally) not in any way related to stolen credit cards.
G2a has given me more and more fake keys recently so I stopped using them all together, now I just buy the game or pirate it if I’m really unsure if I’ll ever play it but want to try like EU4.
I’ll do my best to stop using them.
They could also stop with the nonsense and make a price a price.
If a $30 game is pretty much always $12 35 weeks of the year across various platforms, make it $12, because you’ve said that’s your true price. Otherwise when I want to buy it and it’s still $30 I will go to a reseller instead
What’s the last one from the top row? The Pirate Bay? :)
It’s not the Pirate Bay logo so my bet would be that it’s representing internet piracy as a general concept!
Narh TPB is pirate ship. They’re just referring to pirating in general
Damn, straight up encouraging piracy and discouraging key resellers? Wow… 🤯
In their mind Piracy might kinda maybe theoretically sorta be a lost sale, but keys bought with stolen credit cards literally cost them money because of the fees from all the middleman payment providers. So not only does their bank account not go up, it goes down.
You’re right, and above that I’d say this:
Even if it didn’t cost them money, it would be purely enraging to meet someone who is making money on your hard work for nothing at all. Just pure parasitism.
At least pirates only want to play it.
Many piracy sites run ads though, don’t they? Unless everyone visiting runs ad blockers (unlikely) the people running those are making at least some money. Presumably it at least covers the cost of running the sites.
It’s probably just as the comment you replied to said: “stuff bought with stolen credit cards (and resold on those sites) actually costs us money, as opposed to piracy which merely ‘costs’ us money”.
How much money do you reckon sites get for showing ads?
Heh, good point. Also piracy = free advertising of their game and brand.
I was hoping they are OK with piracy also given the game genre… basically f*ck the system/anarchy, no?
Choice of “someone gets the game for free” or “someone gets rewarded for defrauding your customers”, that’s an easy one, yeah
Wondering if store credit for like PlayStation from eneba is of dodgy sourcing too… how can they have so many…
They buy with stolen credit cards, sell at a loss which is all profit to them. Cars are legit, but they didn’t pay for them. Markdown price is all profit
Damn, thanks, will stop buying from them
It’s a grey area (again, as I removeded elsewhere, because game companies are also against used sales and cross-region sales).
It can be stolen credit cards.
It can also be:
- Games purchased during an unprecedented sale, then resold at a profit still well below current MSRP. Big game companies hate this.
- Games purchased in one country to be resold in another, non-region-locked country. (note, my removed includes region locking)
- Games purchased in bulk directly from the company or from an authorized reseller. Can relate to #2 as well.
But because everyone involved is in a grey area, there’s not as much transparency from anyone exactly how many this is. G2A argued for years it was virtually zero, then admitted it’s a bit higher than that. Is it 10%, 50%, somewhere in between? We actually don’t know.
