People Keep Trying To Scam Their Way Into Free Video Games (kotaku.com) 104
An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an epidemic that has been affecting indie game developers for years. When a game launches, strange emails start coming in. Sometimes they claim to be reviewers for websites that don't exist. Other times, they pretend to work for major outlets, using misleading email addresses to con developers out of their games. The scams have grown increasingly elaborate over the years, and for small-time developers who don't have a ton of experience dealing with press, it can be tough to sort out which requests are legitimate. (The problem appears to be more common in the indie scene -- one PR rep working in big-budget games told me they don't receive any scam requests like this.)
Emily Morganti, who handles PR for adventure games like Thimbleweed Park and West of Loathing, said in an email that these key scammers have become a regular feature of her job, like yanking weeds out of a garden. "I have the benefit of working for a lot of different indie devs, so I notice patterns that a developer who's only putting out their one game wouldn't see," she said. [...] Last fall, someone who went by the name Dmitry Tseptsov sent several emails to Morganti to ask for codes, explaining that he operated a coffee shop in Ukraine where he'd give out video games as prizes for trivia. "Even 1 key will help me a lot, for which I will be grateful," he wrote. "The cafe opened quite recently, but has a demand, and many people go to us. I mean, for my part, I promise to advertise your game." The coffee shop did exist, but Tseptsov had nothing to do with it, and as one developer discovered, the story was full of holes.
Emily Morganti, who handles PR for adventure games like Thimbleweed Park and West of Loathing, said in an email that these key scammers have become a regular feature of her job, like yanking weeds out of a garden. "I have the benefit of working for a lot of different indie devs, so I notice patterns that a developer who's only putting out their one game wouldn't see," she said. [...] Last fall, someone who went by the name Dmitry Tseptsov sent several emails to Morganti to ask for codes, explaining that he operated a coffee shop in Ukraine where he'd give out video games as prizes for trivia. "Even 1 key will help me a lot, for which I will be grateful," he wrote. "The cafe opened quite recently, but has a demand, and many people go to us. I mean, for my part, I promise to advertise your game." The coffee shop did exist, but Tseptsov had nothing to do with it, and as one developer discovered, the story was full of holes.
Review copies (Score:4, Interesting)
Question:
Why would you not make "review copies" tied to an account that you can just turn off at any time, date-limited (i.e. terminate on the game's release), etc,?
If there's one use of DRM that seems worthwhile and valid, that's it surely? It doesn't mean to say that you'll need the same functionality in the final game, but at the very least you'd lock it down a bit, no?
And they wouldn't even need "the full game", you could purge have the level data, etc. remove the endings, splat "Review Copy" over the image output, etc. etc.
Anything else - like giving out free codes to competitions... that seems to me to be a bit pointless - a cybercafe in the middle of the Ukraine isn't going to generate anything in terms of measurable sales for you, but you could still track those still.
Re:Review copies (Score:5, Insightful)
We used to called those things "demo version". Anyone could download them so you didn't need to filter out scammers from legitimate reviewers.
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I miss game demos, especially those CDs that used to come with gaming magazines with demos of a bunch of soon to be released games where you could play the first level or so and get a feel of if the game is worth your while. Nowadays there's hardly any demos and betas which you have to pay for to play
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A "play level one for free" demo is how I first experienced Doom.
I bought the game, then several sequels and offshoots... I think Id got their money's worth.
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My older brother was at college and came home for a weekend and brought Diablo.
It had a Spawn copy feature. You could install a copy and it would let you play until you hit level 10, i think it was.
I hit level 10 and went to the game store and bought it. Like you, I bought several other Diablo games as well.
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A "play level one for free" demo is how I first experienced Doom.
I found my daddy's "demo" in his socks drawer. That is how I first experienced, um...
...several sequels and offshoots...
...yeah, that's it.
I think I got my money's worth.
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It became common knowledge among game devs that metrics proved game demos lower sales numbers. Why spend money to make a demo that's going to lower your revenue?
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Cry me a river....
Any game on Steam can be refunded anytime under 14 days, with less than 2 hours played. So effectively EVERY GAME has a "demo verson".
You didn't have that kind of convenience back then.... don't even lie... I played games back then too...
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A friend of mine is a reviewer, but for console only. This is how it works for him, he gets special reviewer games, the discs are always ugly, white labels with in big bold black letters 'REVIEW VERSION, EXPIRES ' on it. The disc is useless after the date mentioned on the disc.
Sure, every now and then he gets a limited reviewer edition, that contains a beautiful box and disk including special items (figurines, artwork, dvd disc, soundtrack cd, what have you), but he never asks for them.
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I would guess publishers, reviewers, and fans are all interested in having reviews available before the game is released to the public, which is not possible if the reviewer just buys the game.
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So what, you hand out a few passes to people who aren't actually reviewers because they run some bit about being a reviewer. So you get money from a few die hard fans a little earlier. Oh no! That would be terrible for the developer and the people involved. On the other hand, making everyone pay reduces those false reviewer scams by 99.9% instantly.
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You're saying a publisher can't give early access passes to allow the reviewer to buy the game?
I don't know, never heard of that.
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The review copies are distributed the same way the retail copies are. Through Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, eShop, etc.
Maybe on Steam there might be a way to separate review copies and do something like you're suggesting, but there certainly isn't on the consoles.
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It takes time to modify your games for that purpose. With modern game development being a point-and-click thing with few really good programmers, modifying your game leads to all sorts of trouble. For maybe 5-12 reviews these games actually get it’s not really worth it.
Large houses will often trim to only the “best parts” of the game. Hence many YouTube and modern reviewers (such as the late TotalBiscuit) will either deride or ignore trimmed versions.
The best thing is that people noticed a
Just give them the games already (Score:2)
Re:Just give them the games already (Score:5, Informative)
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Just want to emphasize this. Key reselling is a huge business, and it's not about "used games", for the most part.
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On Steam, download codes are infinite and people used to have your attitude. The problem here is that people caught on to that and took advantage of it. They just try to get as many codes as they can and resell them.
On consoles, you receive a finite number of download codes, and it's easy to blow through them all on legit reviewers. You have to prioritize who you give them to.
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Fewer customers with indie games, so ever key you give out is potentially lost revenue.
What's the world coming to? (Score:5, Funny)
Last fall, someone who went by the name Dmitry Tseptsov sent several emails to Morganti to ask for codes, explaining that he operated a coffee shop in Ukraine
If you can't trust a random email from someone claiming to be in a coffee shop in Ukraine, then who can you trust???
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I've had good luck with Nigerian Princes.
I'm gonna be real rich, any day now.
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When choice is between random dude in coffee shop in Ukraine and Kotaku, I'll take my chance with the Ukrainian dude. They at least brought us Stalker and Metro.
Kotaku is just an other shitty Gawker offshoot.
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Isn't this part of the cost of doing business? (Score:2)
While I'm sure its frustrating for the indie game developers, I would think that anybody asking for access to a new game is a positive to help it get traction in the market.
Looking at the last paragraphs in the TFA: “I’ve been doing PR since 2006 and always had a policy of sending a key to anyone who asked for one, no matter how small the site, but I’m a lot more suspicious now,” [Morganti] said. “The work involved in vetting people to figure out if they’re legit or not i
Re:Isn't this part of the cost of doing business? (Score:4, Informative)
99% of the people aren't playing or reviewing the game, they're just selling the key on a 3rd party site for cheaper than what the developer is selling it.
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How about making the keys linked to specific hardware that the game can detect? OS type, OS version, CPU model, system RAM, GPU model, GPU RAM, display model or at least native resolution, etc.
Much, much harder to resell a key if you need 100% the same computer as the person asking for the key. And since they should be reviewer keys, the game should expire after a X days or after a set date, such as 30~60 days after the launch of the game.
Or you could just make a limited demo version of your game available
Re:Isn't this part of the cost of doing business? (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea I've seen that looks promising is to have a key be something like "DEMO-ONLY-JFQ2-NG43-KFA4" (and include the expiration like you said). That way it's clear the purpose of the key if it's sold and people won't complain that the game they bought doesn't work anymore.
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If they weren't using someone else's key system (which they probably are), they could add an option to force a registration name as part of a demo key. The key would contain a hash of the name it was intended for, and refuse to validate if the name didn't match. Then at least the people buying the keys would have to see the same wrong name every time, so at least the scammer couldn't pass them off as regular keys. The regular keys would have none of this, just the ones requested from the company as review k
Not new, not unique (Score:2)
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You keep using quotes. I do not think they work like you think they work.
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You keep using quotes. I do not think they "work" like you "think" they work.
FTFY
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http://ergonomicsindesign.com/... [ergonomicsindesign.com]
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Pirating is too expensive for most people because they can't afford the big sailing vessel.
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Pirating is too expensive for most people because they can't afford the big sailing vessel.
Anyone buying a vessel for pirating doesn't know how pirating works.
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Most of these scams are for download codes to resell, not to keep. Some of the scams are for console games, where it's harder to pirate.
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Part of it is these people are reselling the download codes, so they get the profit instead of you.
Part of it is download codes for consoles are finite and it's easy to run out of them.
My uncle works at nintendo (Score:2)
And he told me i can get free nintendo games at this store!
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Explain Las Vegas.
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that doesn't mean that the vast majority of the population isn't worryingly immature and childish
The vast majority of the population have an adult level of maturity and act in an adult manner.
It's your shitty definitions of immature and childish that are at fault here.
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Or football. ....wait. I think I just reinforced their point.
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Re:All this for worthless games... (Score:4, Informative)
Get off your fucking high horse already.
Entertainment comes in many different mediums.
No one died and made you king to judge what is or isn't an "acceptable" form of entertainment.
--
Government is the Entertainment division of the military-industrial complex. -- Frank Zappa
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Get off your fucking high horse already. No one died and made you king
Maybe they did. Maybe he killed them in a game and so he's king there. Maybe he killed them in a game and so he's king HERE. Maybe he really IS the king right now. OMG I'M STUCK IN A COMPUTER GAME, SOMEONE GET ME OUT.
Oh, wait, I'm a NPC; that won't work, will it? Never mind.
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Learn to spell the word fuck if you want to use it.
Anyway, 50% of gamers are female, the majority of those adult. Kind of disproves your silliness.
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Grow the f..k up.
Why? Only growing old is compulsory. Growing up is voluntary.
Buy the game then review it. (Score:2)
Giving out free copies to reviewers only tarnishes the review, because they got it for free, and the pain of price rarely factors into the review.
Lets say I got a game for my PC and it cost me $10.00. And I found it to be enjoyable however the graphics may have some glitches, or its renders were not well done, or had some bad voice acting in it. Vs. the Same game that cost me $40.00. I would be much more harsh on my review of the same game which cost more.
Price really does matter in the review. While it
Re: Buy the game then review it. (Score:1)
This same concept is also a massive problem with Amazon reviewers who received the product at discount or for free just so they would review it.
It's almost impossible to avoid a biased review in that case.
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As a counter to that: Games are a gamble. A game may be good, or not. It may appeal to me, or not. I may play it, or not.
All of those are orthogonal, and lead to a very small percentage of the games I own getting most of my gaming time.
A game may be good, but I wont play it. It may appeal to me, but I wont play it. My purchase of the game represents an investment in the team that built a good game and an investment in developers creating games in that genre.
That investment pays off when I buy a game that's
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I don't think your premise is valid as your assumption is that the reviewer will place way to much emphasis on cost vs. value. I have objectively reviewed quite a few games on Steam and yes a very small part of the review is based on cost vs. perceived value and that usually only occurs at the high and low ends of cost. ie.. a 4.99 game that has great graphics/game play will be called out as great value for the money and the opposite for when a 40$ dollar title has graphics that look like from the early 2
Creds (Score:4, Interesting)
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Good luck with that. Because when organizations like the SPJ(society for professional journalists) got involved during Gamergate and pointed out these exact issues. The gaming press rallied their wagons around each other and started screeching "we're not journalists, we're bloggers." In many cases, just the week before sites like Kotaku, Polygon, RPS, and other ilk were stating proudly that they were journalists. It of course doesn't help that those same sites and their ilk have pissed off developers by
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In any major sporting event ... there is an established set of credentials to display.
You mean like FIFA? Be careful what you ask for. The solution may become worse than the original problem.
And don't forget that the certification authority has to be at least as reputable as the media organizations it certifies. That's not a small task.
This could be a GEICO commercial (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:1)
West of Loathing (Score:2)
Nice to see a West of Loathing nod pop up. I've loved their work since the Kingdom of Loathing days, and West of Loathing is also great. Funny, fun, and surprisingly deep.
People beg for free stuff... (Score:2)
...how is this in any way news?
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The amount of requests for free stuff that we received was pretty high compared to our (very limited) sales and exposure. I mean, seriously, people sending multiple sob-story emails, contacts, etc. just to get a $12 (at the time) CD. We would always try to compromise - like we'd send them additional CDs from our catalog if
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Got any T-shirts or cds left that you don't know what to do with?
(kidding, of course)
Pay for a game? (Score:2)
That gives me an idea. (Score:2)
The scams have grown increasingly elaborate over the years, and ... it can be tough to sort out which requests are legitimate.
They could develop a video game around these scams, but the results might be paradoxical.
hmm (Score:2)
Can't the devs have a list of review keys, a game mode with noticeable "review copy" mentions plastered all over it, and a time limit that'll force quit the game after an hour or two?
Then just hand to them to whoever asks?
Seems likely anyone paying money for those keys would refund it.
Demo version (Score:2)
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Wrong thread.
Why does "people posting comments in the wrong thread" keep happening?