Pirate Our Games, Don't Buy Them From Key Resellers, Say Indies (bbc.com) 97
Small video games studios are asking the public to stop buying their titles from "unauthorised" markets, saying the sales cost them more than they earn. From a report: Several have said it would even be better if consumers pirated their games rather than purchased discounted unlock codes from the "key resellers." One label is running a petition calling on the biggest such market -- G2A -- to halt sales of indie games outright. But G2A has defended its business model. It said the indies benefited from its policy of sharing a cut of sales made by third parties. "Hundreds of developers earn money from selling their keys through marketplaces such as G2A," head of communications Maciej Kuc told BBC News.
"We don't plan on taking away that possibility anytime soon, as it would be hurtful not only to our customers but also to the many developers who use our platform to their benefit." He added that G2A already took measures to tackle illegal sales. And he said developers were partly responsible for some of the scams on its site because of the "thousands of free keys" they had created for giveaways. The campaign's organiser, however, has dismissed this defence. "They are harming our industry and the value of our games," Mike Rose, from the Manchester-based publisher No More Robots, told BBC News.
"We don't plan on taking away that possibility anytime soon, as it would be hurtful not only to our customers but also to the many developers who use our platform to their benefit." He added that G2A already took measures to tackle illegal sales. And he said developers were partly responsible for some of the scams on its site because of the "thousands of free keys" they had created for giveaways. The campaign's organiser, however, has dismissed this defence. "They are harming our industry and the value of our games," Mike Rose, from the Manchester-based publisher No More Robots, told BBC News.
GOG and indies (Score:1)
If you're an indie you should be releasing on GOG.
It doesn't piss off your customers like Steam does and you get legit paid.
You want to support an indie game and the indie scene as a customer, buy from a legit DRM-free online store like that or the several GOG competitors out there.
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Steam may not piss you off, but GOG is a better platform if for no other reason that the games don't have DRM, so if ever the service goes under, you still have access to what you bought. There's no promise of that with Steam.
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Not only "no promise of", but people have lost their Steam accounts for nebulous reasons that Valve has refused to spell out.
Now maybe that was justified and those people were doing something "wrong", and maybe it wasn't justified. We simply have to take Valve's word for it. Still, it has demonstrated that you do not own the games you bought on Steam. Valve does.
As you say, once you buy a game on GOG, nobody can stop you from playing it in the future. And it still supports the game authors! Piracy isn't
Re:GOG and indies (Score:5, Informative)
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Most games in steam are DRM free actually, you just install then via steam and they work fine without any steam running. Just a few bigger games use steam DRM and even smaller list used third party DRM
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GOG is also apparently the only platform that ensures that their contracts with developers/publishers ensure that a purchased game cannot be removed from their platform, just removed from sale. Ref: Minecraft Story Mode: https://www.minecraft.net/en-u... [minecraft.net] https://www.pcgamesn.com/minec... [pcgamesn.com]
This. GOG is my preferred platform. If it's a choice between GOG and Steam, I'll take GOG FTW.
Steam, by and large manages to avoid pissing off their customers by simply working and being non intrusive. Sure their customer service can leave a little to be desired, but a few minutes on the Steam forums will reveal most of their customers can best be described as whiny little bitches complaining over nothing.
GoG's forums will feature similar customers... some people are never pleased.
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I'm sorry but if Valve, one of the largest game publishers worldwide, goes under? I think we may have bigger things to worry about than not being able to play call of dooky, like another market crash like 1929. Because when you look at their financials?
Plenty of major game companies have gone out of business. Where are Atari, Westwood, or THQ these days? Admittedly Valve is in a pretty good position right now, but any company can be but a few missteps away from failure. A decision to bank on a bad idea compounded by a competitor (Epic?) coming in capitalizing on their mistake could be all it takes to send them on their way out.
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That's right. Why, Valve is practically Too Big To Fail.
Just as Lehman Brothers was.
Just as Bear Stearn's was.
Just as Enron was.
Just as Kodak was.
Or Worldcom, Arthur Andersen, etc. All of these companies that once dominated their respective fields, yet perished without a 1929-style full economic collapse. I weathered all those scandals just fine, but would have been pretty pissed had my library, the things I had bought and paid for, simply disappeared.
Never tie your fate to a single company, that is the #1
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Sigh, it just doesn't matter WHAT platform is in use. Let's say they release on GOG for $10.
Someone uses a stolen CC to get unlock keys ("GIFT CODES") on GOG "paying" $10 (but the card is stolen purchases don't care), and then sells these for $5. (100% profit). G2A sells the key for $6, it makes a profit, the user pays $5 for a key and things they're getting a good deal.
THEN the CC fraud catches up, the publisher realizes, the key gets invalidated, and the user, who thinks they've bought a discount code,
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The cc owner get his money back in a chargeback. That money comes from g2a and theres also a chargeback fee.
No, the chargeback refund would come from GOG, as that's where the credit card was used.
The real loser in cc fraud is the shop but you dont hear g2a complaining.
This is because they didn't take the card payment and thus don't have to refund it.
So long as places like g2a exist publishers can't charge ridiculous prices in developed countries and that's good for the gamer.
That doesn't however justify failing to address credit card fraud or other scams that damage gamers and the companies trying to give them a great experience.
... And share your pirated games with your friends (Score:2)
so we can sue you for triple damages.
Arbitrage (Score:5, Insightful)
Play stupid regional pricing games, win stupid regional pricing prizes.
Right to resell (Score:4, Insightful)
These developers sold their products en masse and cheap. They dumped them in bundles and buyers resell what they don't need. The ones to blame here are the devs. They devalued their products by flooding the market. Why should they have special protections for their products? It's the same bullshit when big brands try to restrict who can sell their products.
Why is it suddenly okay to fight consumer rights just because it's games?
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It's their own fault for not allowing used games (Score:5, Insightful)
If there was a legitimate market for used games, the companies could control their keys and verify them for each sale. The whole reason these resellers exist is because there is no resale market allowed for digital assets. Back when you bought the physical media for a game, you could sell it when you were done paying for it and people that wanted to wait longer and pay less to play it could buy it from you.
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And I got some of my most favorite games this way. Short on cash, I'm passing on all the brand new games which probably wouldn't have worked on my older system, so browsing in the bargain bin or at a reseller. Usually it was an older game anyway and the shine was off; these days it seems to take much longer for the prices of older games to drop. There are periodic sales of course, such as on Steam, but when no sales apply the prices for some of these seem much higher than you would have seen in the old d
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That's possible because digital selling has no shelves to empty so that higher-margin items can be placed there. The flipside is that you can easily find (and keep selling) a game that would've been long gone in the physical sales era.
I must admit it pisses me off since I don't care for new games a
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Last time it was even proposed, it was shot down hard by gamers. Even the competition mocked the compa
These are unused keys only (Score:2)
These key resellers sell keys that haven't been redeemed yet. They're not a substitute for used games, since after using the key you can no longer sell it.
The problem with G2A in particular is that they don't care how someone got a bunch of game keys. If someone gets a key for a game from a promotion or a gift and they don't want it, that's a legitimate reason to sell that one key. But how does someone get dozens of keys for the same game? Often with stolen credit card information, it turns out. But they're
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Correct! the issue is that most of this "used keys" are acquired using stolen credit card... later the indie studios will have to return those sells, but the sold keys are still valid and they still have to pay steam and other digital platforms for the key activations... so they end losing money on each of those failed sold keys. Bigger studios have better protections, key management and contracts, so they are usually less hit by this, but for smaller studios, it is a big problem.
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This is clearly a false narrative by publishers. If it were the case these key sites would not exist as the majority of users would have bad experiences when their purchased keys were cancelled and would not re-use the services.
In addition to regional pricing developers/publishers are putting huge numbers of keys into circulation via Humble and other promotions. https://www.pcgamesn.com/g2a-m... [pcgamesn.com]
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would have bad experiences when their purchased keys were cancelled and would not re-use the services.
That is assuming they did something where they could reasonably revoke keys. Not all developers may have planned that far ahead. The amount lost to chragebacks may not have been considered enough to make sure they had a link between a product key and enough credit card info to correlate the chargeback to what gets revoked. They may not want to be seen as the bad guy for shutting down a copy of the game that, from all appearances, looked legitimate to the person who bought from G2A. In the ideal world, t
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Of course, so long as the party that did the key used fraudlent credit card numbers to do so, they can/will just keep sending a player keys until the customer ends up with a key that doesn't get caught at having used an fraudlent card number.
Yes a chargeback would ruin their business model, but they effectively can have no-cost replacements to satisfy a customer. The customer would have to be angry enough to care more about punsishing the vendor with a chargeback than they would want the game at the cheap
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That is assuming they did something where they could reasonably revoke keys.
Given most games are sold through online stores like Steam that hardly seems like a meaningful part of the keys on the sites we're talking about.
This is basically a solvable problem, provide an API for the key sites to validate a key, and register the key to a user. With these key sites ought to be able to eliminate any fraudster using their service.
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That would be if someone paid G2A with a fraudulent credit card.
The issue is that whoever published that key *to* G2A may have used a fraudulent card number to buy from the developer to resell the key.
The sequence:
-Organization has a stock of stolen card numbers
-Same organization lists product keys they know they can acquire directly from publishers or similar sources on various grey market sites for software
-Some user uses their *valid* credit card on G2A or similar site to place an order for a product key
The reason for DRM in games (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the reason why so many game publishers have gone with DRM. It's not for copy protection at all, because everyone knows that the games will be pirated. Instead this is a direct attack on legal resellers, discounts, trading, regifting, and so forth. They do not want any copies sold unless it is directly from them, and this allows them to keep their prices high.
It's fine for publishers to go after illegal sales but it's only harming the consumers to attack legal sales. There is a big difference between "illegal" and "unauthorized". The problem is that these companies are indeed selling the product at lower prices (such as in China) but then are upset that these are turned around and resold in countries with higher prices (US, Europe). This is a classic case of DRM being used to restrict where you can use a product.
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and this allows them to keep their prices high..
But prices for PC games are as low as ever. With the ability to buy older games at a discount in all but the AAAA cases. I get 3/4 of my games on things like "steam sales" less than a year after they come out.
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No, they're really not that low. Where are the premium games that now sell for under $10 because they're two years old?
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The prices for new games have plummeted over time. If they had kept up with inflation, the AVERAGE cost of a new game would be about $110, with high-profile high-demand titles going even higher.
Reverse psychology (Score:1)
They just want the consumer-base to think they are more pissed than they would be from pirating, which is just stupid - there's no way in hell, no loophole, no technicality that would make selling keys worse than pirating copies.
They just want to shut that business model down, so they can move to piracy afterwards, which is infinitely harder for indies to tackle. The only time piracy lost was when BIG everyone decided to gang up and throw money at the problem using a mix of law-shenanigans and corporate spa
Re:Reverse psychology (Score:5, Informative)
>They just want the consumer-base to think they are more pissed than they would be from pirating, which is just stupid - there's no way in hell, no loophole, no technicality that would make selling keys worse than pirating copies.
Well, this is where you show your ignorance on the matter, I'm afraid, as do a number of other commenters here.
The problem arises from people using stolen credit cards to buy game keys. They then sell those keys on sites like G2A. The people whose cards have been stolen, discover this and reclaim the money/cancel the purchases through chargebacks. This hits the developers who have sold the keys and costs them more than a simple refund, so they lose money. The credit card thief, meanwhile has a nice tidy profit form their G2A sales.
So, it's a little more complicated than people would have imagined and results in real financial losses for the little indie developer.
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The devs of Factorio documented exactly this scenario [factorio.com] a while back.
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That was an interesting read. The 5% charged by Humble feels a tad high but it's basically outsourcing the merchant functions (including payments handling, fraud prevention and key delivery) so there's clear value there.
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That doesn't help.
The complaint is about credit card fraud chargebacks. When a merchant is hit with a chargeback, they are on the hook for *more* than they received. This is before even counting negative sentiment if they did revoke the key and other hard to quantify effects.
In fact, while revoking the key may be the thing they want to do on principle, it may be bad in practice. A customer buys a product key from a seller that obtained it fraudulently. If that key gets revoked and doesn't work, they con
No accounting for customers needs, SW freedom (Score:2)
As I've pointed out in a previous post, that's no justification for proprietary software which treats the customers badly (and which is the root of the problem at the heart of every DRM scheme). It's ironic that the enforcement mechanism, even on its own grounds, doesn't appear to work—DRM systems eventually fail or are turned off and eventually leave paying customers unable to use the software. Or perhaps the proprietors simply
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As someone else pointed out, the credit card fraud facet hits non-DRM equally badly.
In fact, none of the complaints by indie developers have even in theory a fix relevant to DRM. Whether the keys are crossing borders, resold *unused* from giveaways, or obtained through credit fraud, the result is still a valid key to feed into a DRM or non-DRM storefront.
Sure, plenty of room to complain about the fragility of DRM and the undesirable control the store runners have over past purchases, but not particularly a
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you fail to understand that there are 2 sells here:
- some guy with stolen cc buys the indie game directly, get keys
- that same guy put those keys to sell in g2a
- a valid end user buy the keys with a valid cc
- valid end user get the game, the first guy gets the money
- valid user activates the key in steam, indie studio gets charged by the key activation
- indie studio finds that the cc is stolen and lose the money for that sell
End result: first guy have the money, end user have the game, steam and g2a get the
Re:Reverse psychology (Score:4, Informative)
there's no way in hell, no loophole, no technicality that would make selling keys worse than pirating copies.
Well, there is at least one.
Someone uses a stolen credit card number to purchase key from the developer.
They do this because they know they can put these keys up on G2A and get some money out of it.
When said credit caurd fraud is discovered, the developer eats a chargeback fee, In one article: "Every dollar lost to chargeback fraud costs you an estimated $2.40.". The credit card companies will get their pound of flesh.
In this scenario, even in theory all they can do is revoke the keys, which in the short term only pisses off the player, the actual fraud people already had theirs. Longer term this could eventually reflect poorly upon G2A and perhaps collapse the market to make it unappealing, but there are a large number of fraudulent card numbers that will never get caught, and those people can afford to reissue dozens of keys before finding a legit one and *still* come out ahead (since they paid $0 to acquire the keys).
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Millennials can afford games, it's the generation after them that's got low/no income and is trying to maximise their access to entertainment for minimal cost.
Pretty much the same thing I did as a teen and in my early 20s, along with my friends and everybody else I know.
via Kotaku (Score:5, Interesting)
via Kotaku: Shady Market G2A Offers To Pay Journalists To Run Pre-Written Article Defending Them [kotaku.com]
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Yeah, it's not like G2A could actually be super-shady.
If they give you permission, then it's not pirated (Score:3)
A little of each (Score:2)
Seems like both things are true. Don't want those keys out there? Don't hand 'em out. I get all my indie games from humble bundles anyway... which is part of the assloads of keys they generate.
These indie devs whine like Metalica (Score:2, Troll)
Except, as they are developers with no sense of the business side of things, they fail to realize that being a publisher/distributer is subject to risks like credit card fraud. It is entirely their fault that they didn't research the existence of those risks and come up with management strategies to minimize them before jumping into that side of the business. The world is not an
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This is probably the most informed criticism of the publishers that have gotten bitten by the credit card fraud facet of this.
This applies if Steam commits to eat any chargebacks due to fraud and the *huge* percentage is a part of that. I don't know if this is the case or not, but it would go a long way toward justifying their large cut.
Of course, the fact that the credit card companies don't do enough to mitigate fraud and then push the cost of fraud signifiicantly onto the merchants may not be the best s
Why is this a problem (Score:1)
Mostly because G2A Allow keys that are stolen to be sold on their website and has no way to verify then. They don't even cooperate with developers as well. Many attempts by many devs went down the hill or G2A simply ignored them. Thats one of the reasons developers go public with G2A, G2A doesnt seem to help
At least they removed their G2A shield but the fact for many years they didnt listen to customer complaint is unacceptable. Also, their HQ is in Hong Kong. Just ask yourself why is their HQ over there wh