
Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48908726
======
tialaramex
The claim is that G2A acts as the equivalent of a fence.

Let me explain. Many crooks want money. A lot of illegal activities generate
what looks like value but it's hard to turn into money and unless you do it's
useless. A stolen television is valuable but why would I pay 60% of retail
price to some geezer in a lock-up at 2am for what is obviously a stolen TV?
The Fence buys stolen things from crooks for a fraction of their value, then
operates a seemingly legitimate business which sells those things to ordinary
punters to collect the difference.

Being a Fence is a crime. "Receiving stolen goods" we call it in most places.
You're guilty if you know or should reasonably have known that the goods you
got were stolen.

The argument against G2A is that logically the stuff they're buying for cheap
can only exist if it's being obtained by crooks. A week after a game is
released for $25 the _only_ reason somebody wants to sell 100 codes for $5
each is that they used stolen credentials to get those codes and are cashing
out.

~~~
smsm42
But unlike stealing the TV, if somebody stole a bunch of codes, isn't it the
same as pirating the game? However the devs claim it's actually worse than
pirating - it actually costs them more when codes are resold. Why? Where the
additional cost is coming from?

~~~
cas8
If I use a stolen credit card to buy a code for your game, eventually there is
likely to be a chargeback/refund processed when the credit card owner/company
realizes that it was fraudulent. Chargebacks/refunds can sometimes be things
that have real penalties associated with them and that can require time
investment from you the developer to deal with.

Another, less concrete cost is that of incentivizing bad behavior. If I cannot
sufficiently move a certain type of stolen goods, I'm less likely to attempt
to steal that type of good again in the future. However, if people choose to
pirate a game instead, the bad actor is not rewarded and might realize that he
can no longer move that type of product.

~~~
smsm42
Yeah true but the problem with chargeback happens regardless of whether
somebody bought the codes or not - unless they bought the codes with stolen
credit card, and then the store selling it, not the developer, gets the
chargeback. So I don't think this scenario applies here. Developers usually
have publishers to deal with things like credit card charges.

~~~
Tyr42
But paying the people who steal the cards can only encourage them.

------
Legogris
In order to have a conversation about this, we need to separate the different
scenarios conflated here:

1\. Actual second-hand reselling of bought games

2\. Tactically/strategically reselling keys legitimately acquired cheaper
(giveaways, review keys, differentiated pricing between markets)

3\. Fraud and money laundering (e.g. stolen credit cards)

I think that the reasonable position and that of anyone not being incentivized
to say otherwise would be that 1 should be allowed while 3 is already illegal
and should be cracked down on.

On the 2 my position is that this is not something that should be addressed by
regulation but that it's the responsibility of the publisher. Don't want to
see review keys ending up on second-hand sites? Put in restrictions (like
limited time) on those licenses. If the second-hand market for keys you ave
away for free ends up eating at your margins, maybe you gave away too many
free keys or price too high.

As for regional pricing, IMO it's both counterproductive and futile to keep
national markets separated.

~~~
ggggtez
>IMO it's both counterproductive and futile to keep national markets
separated.

So, developers in the USA should simply not sell their games overseas then?
Let's say an indie game costs $10 in the states. In Thailand, the average
monthly income is ~$220. So someone in the US could work 1 hour and buy the
game, but someone in Thailand would have to pay more than a day's salary for
the same game!

The game is supposed to be affordable! Regional pricing can help a developer
charge less for a game in a country that has lower standard of living. Maybe
$1 instead, so it's more like 1 hour of work for the average person. But if US
consumers can buy the game for $1, why would they spend $10? If US consumers
did that, the developer would suddenly be making 10% or less after fees. There
is no way they could profitably develop games after taking that kind of hit.

I'm not saying you're not wrong with it being futile to keep separated, but
there is a very good reason for it.

~~~
sb057
I think that's called rent-seeking.

~~~
ghkbrew
It's call market segmentation.

A seller want to sell their good to every buyer at exactly the highest price
that buyer is willing to pay. The seller can't do that if they give everyone
the same price so they look for ways to segment the buyers into groups which
have similar valuations and charge each group a different price.

If you pay attention, most pricing schemes are about market segmentation.
Region locked items is obviously one. Most digital goods are sold at prices
that decrease over time: it's basically segmenting the market by time. Buyers
with high valuations buy first, those with lower valuations buy later, etc.

------
caymanjim
G2A sounds like one of those sleazy companies that knows people are using
their product to perform fraudulent sales, earns profits from those fraudulent
sales, even encourages them, and then tries to hide behind the "common
carrier" defense, ala Megaupload. There's a complex argument in these
situations about principles of freedom, who's to blame, whether technology or
laws and regulations should be used to solve the problem, etc. At the end of
the day, we all know that they're sleazy, though, just like Kim Dotcom.
There's no moral defense, only legal tactics. Patronizing sites like this
makes you part of the problem, unless and until they start eating the fraud
costs themselves or otherwise make an honest effort to prevent it. Things like
the Steam code friend-account bot show how instead they intentionally commit
the fraud.

That said, I also think the regional pricing needs to go. If publishers want
to charge me more so they can subsidize cheap sales in another market, they're
free to do that, but they don't get my sympathy when that backfires on them.
G2A is still sleazy for facilitating it, but the publishers created that
problem themselves.

~~~
cloakandswagger
If the problem is as pervasive as the devs portray it, these sites will
quickly cease to exist--G2A would quickly gain a reputation for selling keys
that will be useless after 2-4 weeks, and the benefit of getting the game for
cheaper would be outweighed by the risk of the key going bad.

That doesn't seem to be happening though. I don't buy the argument that a huge
number of G2A customers simply never notice that they've lost access to the
game (not to mention what that implies about the quality of your game).

I'd never heard of G2A before this, but I'll be checking them out the next
time I'm considering buying a game.

~~~
dkersten
> I'd never heard of G2A before this, but I'll be checking them out the next
> time I'm considering buying a game.

Why not just pirate it like the developers ask? Its cheaper for you and its
not supporting people profiting off fraud.

~~~
caymanjim
The developers don't want people to pirate their games. They're just saying
that pirating is less loss to them than the key resellers are, because the
latter actually cost them time and effort on top of the lack of sale. Why not
buy the game the honest way like a decent human being?

~~~
dkersten
Right, but the person I replied to said they will now buy from G2A. My comment
was specifically a reply to the text I quoted.

I didn't say they should pirate instead of buying from the dev or a legit
store, I said why not pirate instead of buying from G2A. Personally, I don't
understand why people who can clearly afford it would pirate (or buy from G2A)
at all, so I don't exactly condone it, but if they said they would do the
exact thing the devs said not to, then why not do the other option that the
devs said they'd prefer?

> Why not buy the game the honest way like a decent human being?

I do. I haven't pirated any games since I was a student, about 15 years ago
(and have even bought most of the games that I did pirate, since then). I feel
like my comment was taken out of context.

------
eridius
Is there any legitimate reason for a site like G2A to exist? Reselling unused
digital purchase keys isn't equivalent to reselling used games; once you
redeem a key, you can't transfer it to someone else, so these are keys that
have never been used. And people generally don't purchase a digital game for
themselves, then change their mind and look to resell the key without having
redeemed it.

Which is to say, as near as I can tell the only three real sources for keys on
a marketplace like G2A are:

* Keys resulting from theft of fraud (such as buying with stolen credit cards)

* Keys purchased from region-limited discounted markteplaces and transferred into regions without the discount, such as described in the article

* Keys resulting from bundles, which are not supposed to be redeemed by anyone except the bundle owner

None of these three sources are "legitimate". Is there anything I'm missing
here? Why would anyone have a digital key, which they have the full legal
right to transfer without violating the terms of the store or bundle they got
it from, that the paid for but never got around to redeeming? Having written
that out now, the only real scenario that comes to mind would be something
like Kickstarting a game, then changing your mind later on and selling the key
you get once the game comes out, but I would wager that keys sourced in this
fashion are so rare that they're not even a rounding error on a marketplace
like G2A.

~~~
greycol
Personally I don't have a problem with the second region limited sale issue as
a source. Plenty of businesses are built on arbitrage between regions.

However if these keys are not fit for purpose because they're region locked
G2A should be pointing out explicitly in clear view what region a key it sells
is from and they should be being forced to give refunds if it doesn't match.

Personally I'm against region locking and believe it's especially hypocritical
in larger businesses (that say outsource their customer support to a cheaper
region but do not allow customers to outsource their purchase to a cheaper
region). But legally a company can license their software like this and G2A
shouldn't be able to co-mingle explicitly different keys if they are licensed
this way. I do concede there are good arguments (though not convincing enough
for me in the general case) that companies will just not sell in a market if
they can't stop resale of their items.

I do completely agree that G2A is a bad actor though. One 'simple' fix for
their bad key issue is they could refuse to pay the same account (i.e. bank or
paypal,etc not g2a account) for more than 1 key of any given game and rate
limit keys sold to g2a from an account to 1 per day (which would limit the
profitability of any stolen card before the associated payment option is
blacklisted).

~~~
eridius
That "simple" fix won't solve the problem where G2A makes bundle economics
completely unsustainable for indie games.

~~~
mindslight
Why does the business model of bundling invalidate the business model of
reselling keys?

There is a thriving business of people buying up Dewalt cordless tool combos
(at a deep discount, especially when they're on sale), and then parting them
out on eBay. Should Dewalt be able to prevent this by enclosing some faux
contract alongside their tool bundles?

We should be moving towards a world where a "key" has properties _more_ akin
to a physical item, rather than less.

~~~
eridius
Because the business model of reselling keys is built entirely upon a
combination of fencing stolen goods and encouraging people to violate the
terms of service of the stores they're buying keys from. There's no legitimate
market here, and thus no business model worth protecting.

Remember, we're not talking about the equivalent of selling used digital
games. Once someone redeems a code, they can't resell it.

~~~
mindslight
Yes exactly. We're not even talking about the equivalent of selling used
digital games, but rather the equivalent of reselling new in box merchandise.

You didn't address the core of my argument, which is why should "terms of
service" be able to carry post-transaction restrictions meant purely to
implement a tenuous business method?

~~~
eridius
A digital key is not the equivalent of "new in box merchandise". A digital key
is a technical means by which to add a purchased item to your digital library.
The ideal behavior is to not have a key at all but rather, once you purchase
the item, to just have be added to your library automatically. That's the
model that digital purchases are working towards.

Physical merchandise exists before you purchase it. It costs money to produce,
any unsold units are a negative for the company, there's a high overhead to
buying a physical item in e.g. China and bringing it to the U.S., it's
difficult for individuals to deal with large bulk amounts of physical items,
and actually selling the items also involves physically transporting it to the
buyer. All of this means it's rather difficult to do something like buy 1000
physical copies of a game in China for cheap and resell them to buyers in the
U.S., or even to just buy 1000 physical copies of a game using stolen credit
cards and then resell them.

Digital keys on the other hand are ephemeral, they don't exist until you buy
the product and they stop existing the moment you redeem it. The key is just
to facilitate the process of going from purchase to having the game in your
library. In some cases the keys are indeed separate entities you're allowed to
resell (I'm thinking like you kickstart a game at a tier that gets you
multiple digital copies, so they just send you several keys you can do
whatever you want with), but that's not really the standard model. And yes, if
you buy a game from a store and they give you a key, normally you are allowed
to resell it, but there's usually limitations, such as games bought in China
are supposed to be redeemed in China. And there are plenty of key sources,
such as bundles, where you're not allowed to resell it at all, there's just no
technical means of enforcing this (largely because services like Steam have no
incentive to provide a technical means of limiting this; Steam doesn't care
where you got the key, just that you put it in your library and thus increase
usage of Steam).

------
lelima
"I am a developer and I have no problems with pirates because nobody is losing
money or time. I have a problem with key resellers because they cost me time
while they earn money for something I made with my time."

How is that possible if you received the money from the first sale, is better
to see your games in "The piratebay"?

I understand if the purchase were illegal but the article/g2a says is very low
amounts and punishable.

Maybe I don't fully understand the problem or how the key's are generated.

~~~
EdgarVerona
Chargebacks. So the idea is that the unethical agent buys the keys (either
themselves or with a stolen card), sells them to a key reseller, and then
initiates a chargeback to get their money back (either for themselves, or the
person who had their card stolen does it to understandably get back the money
stolen from them from the illegal purchase).

Suddenly, keys were "generated" for money that no longer exists. The key
hopefully gets deactivated at this point, but then someone buys one of those
keys and it doesn't work. Support calls and angry customers ensue.

~~~
quelltext
"Easy" solution: 3D Secure. It will affect conversion rate but that's still
better than high chargeback rate which can cause you to lose the ability to
process altogether.

------
saint_fiasco
If you sell a product with huge fixed cost and tiny marginal cost you need to
have price discrimination.

If you sell for the same price in China, Latin America, Africa and Europe
imagine how much money you are leaving on the table.

Even if you believe optimizing your revenue to that extent is unvirtuous, you
should still support price discrimination because it lets millions of people
in poor countries enjoy your product. There is no way they could afford
US/Europe prices.

~~~
mikeash
You don't _need_ price discrimination. You can make money without it. You
_want_ price discrimination to make even more money.

Edit: a lot of people seem to be confused about what I'm saying and are
telling me how price discrimination is good. I'm not saying it's good or bad.
I'm saying it's not a _need_. Existence proof: many companies that don't do
it.

~~~
saint_fiasco
You also want price discrimination to let poor people use your product.

Some people care about that sort of thing even if it costs them money. For
example a bakery might choose to give away their leftover bread at the end of
each day, so poor people can eat. This costs them money because some people
might choose to get bread for free when they could have bought it at full
price.

~~~
mikeash
Nothing says you can't charge the poor people price for everyone. You want
price discrimination to get wealthier people to pay more.

To take your bakery example, they'd ideally like to charge more for their
bread when the customer is rich, but that's not practical, so they're stuck
charging the same price regardless. Many businesses work around this,
imperfectly, by using coupons or sales.

~~~
saint_fiasco
But importantly, the bakery can't charge the poor people price for everyone or
they'd bankrupt.

I think many indy artists are like that, that's why they say they'd rather you
pirate their games. They could have used more strict DRM instead, if they only
cared about money.

~~~
nybble41
> But importantly, the bakery can't charge the poor people price for everyone
> or they'd bankrupt.

In this situation the bakery is basically running a charity funded by the
extra money they're getting through price discrimination. That's separate from
their role as a business.

The minimum sustainable price in the absence of price discrimination would not
be the "poor people price" or the price paid by the rich, but rather the cost
of material, labor, and capital which lies somewhere in between. Price
discrimination and the absence of arbitrage allow the bakery to charge rich
customers more, but it's entirely their choice to use that extra income to
provide goods at a loss to those of lesser means. They could instead just keep
the extra revenue for themselves.

------
0xcde4c3db
Among people who pay attention to G2A, it seems to be pretty widely accepted
that many sellers are using it to launder money rather than selling
legitimately obtained keys. I wonder if any law enforcement agency has
investigated this yet. G2A's people say that they will give proven fraudulent
accounts' personal data to the authorities, but they also seem to stop short
of saying that this has ever actually happened. It would be interesting to
know what the practical disposition is there (e.g. if law enforcement leaves
G2A alone because they catch a lot of sloppy carders).

------
schnevets
The developer's gripes are with Steam as a slow-moving juggernaut that they
have to rely on. One particularly cruel detail - these are the studio's
working with a more traditional "buy it and you own it" model instead of F2P,
DLC, Loot Box-y money-driven insanity. Games that are adopting modern industry
trends are more self-reliant and profitable.

I don't know what the next decade of PC Gaming is going to look like, but I
feel like things are going to change dramatically. Steam is losing its power
as the market leader, but we also can't have 10+ applications serving as
walled-garden marketplaces. Cloud Gaming like Stadia may be the best solution,
but it's also the always-connected, DRM-dystopia consumers have been dreading
since the 90s...

~~~
dleslie
More SaaS, definitely. Every major player is positioning themselves toward
streamed content for every vertical.

Indies will continue to seek profits via traditional means; I expect the
Switch will be a mainstay for much of the next decade.

------
cosarara
Why aren't the keys revoked when there is a CC chargeback? People buy from G2A
and the like because the keys _work_ , make them stop working and the problem
is solved.

~~~
Ajedi32
They are. One of the developers claims:

> In other cases, Mr Rose said, dealers cancelled the credit card transaction
> with which they had bought a key, after selling it on.

> By the time Steam chased this up and voided the sale, gamers may have tried
> the title out and moved on, never noticing they had lost access as a
> consequence, he said.

So maybe the chargeback process just needs to be faster. Or the games need to
be longer maybe. I'd be curious to know how long the current process takes.

~~~
tinodotim
> By the time Steam chased this up and voided the sale, gamers may have tried
> the title out and moved on, never noticing they had lost access as a
> consequence, he said.

That is not true. For years now (or maybe even forever?) you get a big fat
notification popup [0] when a license gets revoked in Steam, which you also
have to acknowledge by checking a box and pressing a button.

> By the time Steam chased this up and voided the sale

Also, I'm pretty sure the revocation of a license is more or less
instantaneous. So that also seems untrue. It's not even Steam's job to chase
this up, but the developers.

1\. Developer detects fraudulent transaction

2\. Developer matches game key to that transaction.

3\. Developer revokes key/license on Steam.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/R4OL8ki.png](https://i.imgur.com/R4OL8ki.png)

~~~
Ajedi32
> It's not even Steam's job to chase this up, but the developers.

That's only for keys purchased on the developer's own website though, right?
Surely if the key was bought directly from Steam, then Steam would handle
voiding the key?

Worth noting that G2A claims to compensate developers "10 times the sum lost"
if the key was bought on the dev's own website, and the dev in the article is
claiming that isn't really the issue.

~~~
tinodotim
> Surely if the key was bought directly from Steam

You can't buy keys directly from Steam. There is steam gifting to gift games
directly to accounts, but that got heavily restricted over the years. (You
can't "hoard" gifts anymore in your account without activating them - on
neither end, you can't gift when the price difference is too big between
regions, if you decline a gift it automatically gets refunded for the giver,
and so on...)

------
jsgo
I see G2A mentioned, but kind of wish they'd list okay but similar services or
if they're shady as well. Are Green Man Gaming, Humble and things of that
nature okay or are they hurting developers in some manner? I'm pretty sure GMG
and Humble are selling keys akin to Walmart selling physical copies (just as a
storefront working with vendors/publishers), but there's really no way of
telling as a customer for sure.

~~~
Neoshadow42
Humble is not a key re-selling store: The developers are the ones that make
the choice to put their games there.

------
bstar77
I purchased a few games from G2A in the past, but they were always additional
copies of games I already owned. The morality of the situation doesn't come
into play (for me) if I'm just trying to buy a copy of a game I want to play
with my son.

That said, they do seem to be a bad actor in this space. I think the dev in
the article is overstating things a bit, but G2A is being disingenuous with
their rebuttal. There clearly are a portion of keys acquired fraudulently but
they know devs will not be able to prove that G2A is complicit. We also don't
know to what extent this is happening.

I'm just going to avoid G2A in the future. If anything, I'm going to give the
devs the benefit of the doubt on this one.

------
Bishonen88
banning G2A, kinguin etc. won't stop those resellers. In Poland, there's a
polish version of ebay (allegro.pl). Typing in any game and sorting by the
price shows games being sold as shared accounts (xbox/ps4), or with ridiculous
prices similar to those found on G2A and alike. And even if G2A were stopped
from selling those keys, a new site would appear overnight.

The industry needs rather a proper fix. How this would look like, I have no
idea.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
> The industry needs rather a proper fix. How this would look like, I have no
> idea.

How about they stop being so obsessive and controlling and just accept that

A) People have a right to re-sell games

B) We live in a global world; you can't sell stuff 4 times cheaper in another
country and expect to be able to prohibit export

C) When you give keys to an influencer (fake or not), the keys will be given
away for free anyway; whether its on G2A or through some twitch giveaway does
not impact your sales in any meaningful way. Unless you were expecting that
the giveaway would reach mostly people who otherwise wouldn't have bought the
game, in which case, you should have done some research on said "influencer"
anyway.

D) Many people buy games _only_ because they can get them for cheap. Of course
this doesn't apply to 100% of transactions on sites like G2A, but a
significant percentage of them.

E) If your game is good, people may pirate it and later buy it if they think
you deserve the money. Harsh DRM drives would-be pirates into the hands of
key-resellers; and once you "own" a game, through whatever means, you're less
likely to buy it "again" from the actual developer.

All in all, I'd say that the big game developers are steering people into the
wrong direction (DRM, inflated prices, etc.); away from pirating and possibly
eventually buying the game, towards key-resellers; and it's the indie
developers who suffer the financial consequences of it.

~~~
geofft
Developers are in fact accepting E, they say as much in the article.

D is basically the model of set-your-own-price stores like Humble Bundle, and
more generally the model of sales (in any industry): you temporarily sell a
product at a discount to catch the people not willing to buy at full price.

For B, is your preferred solution that games are sold at US prices worldwide?
Who does this benefit?

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
> For B, is your preferred solution that games are sold at US prices
> worldwide? Who does this benefit?

For one, me in Europe xD

Joking aside though, stuff made in expensive countries is usually _too_
expensive in cheaper countries.

The only difference is that, once you make a game for an expensive country,
there's no added cost to selling it (for a lower price) in cheaper countries
as well; so devs try just that.

I don't have a _preferred solution_ to this; I just think that trying to
impose their own restrictions on international trade is certainly the wrong
solution. (Yes, governments do this, that's not my point)

------
falcolas
There has been some really delicious controversy against G2A of late. My
favorite was the “unbiased report that [they] wrote to show how stolen keys
don’t actually happen, want to put it up on your site without attribution?”

------
leoc
Team Fortress 2 keys used to have a resale value a long way below what Valve
actually sold them for. There was speculation that this was because a
significant proportion of all keys being bought were actually being paid for
with stolen credit cards then flipped on quickly. Whether or not this was
actually true I don't know: unfortunately, hardly anyone in journalism (gaming
or otherwise) seemed to be interested in investigating this anomaly at all.

------
DarkWiiPlayer
So game developers want to keep their users from re-selling what they have
bought. If you ask me, the bad guys are the devs who want to make this
impossible, not the platform that allows it.

But hey, if this is really such a big problem, just track where your keys are
being used; if thousands of chinese keys are activated every day in, say,
europe, you might have a point.

But empty accusations without proof won't convince me that they are in the
right about wanting to shut down such a platform.

~~~
vvanders
Did you read the article? There's a non-zero cost for devs dealing with all
the chargebacks and finding out if a user bought a legit key. That's not a low
touch interaction.

Plenty of proof and devs talking about it in the article and on Twitter. Rami
Ismail is well known and has been pretty clear about how much overhead these
types of a abusive companies cost them.

It's hard enough to be an indie without having to deal with this.

~~~
adnzzzzZ
It's not that hard at all, actually. The reason why stores like Steam charge a
30% fee for their services is so they deal with issues like this for you. I
released my game only on Steam and had to deal with zero chargebacks because
Valve handles it for me. What these indie developers complaining do is release
their games on their own store, attach a Steam key to it (which you can
generate for free), and then sell their game + Steam key externally. This
means they get to circumvent Valve's 30% fee at the cost of having to deal
with things like chargebacks.

~~~
SkyBelow
>It's not that hard at all, actually. The reason why stores like Steam charge
a 30% fee for their services is so they deal with issues like this for you.

A problem that costs 30% of revenue is something that I would consider a hard
problem to deal with.

~~~
cloakandswagger
Which is why I'm having trouble finding sympathy for the devs. They're
complaining that they can't have the best of both worlds:

They want to sell their game through their own storefront to avoid the
platform fees, but they don't want to deal with chargebacks or fraud.

They want to give away hundreds or thousands of free keys, but don't want the
keys to be resold and don't want to exercise due diligence when giving the
keys away.

They want to recoup their losses when fraud does occur, but don't want to
expend the effort of sending G2A evidence of the chargeback to get the 10x
refund.

This is called being a business--each dev needs to decide whether avoiding
Steam's cut is worth the headache of being your own seller. Trying to fight
the entire concept of reselling itself is a much more time-consuming and
futile effort than just choosing one option or another.

------
csdreamer7
Perhaps a solution for indies is to disable key generation and for Steam to
allow people to rent games for 20-40% of the price?

Piracy of rented copies, in the context of the current article, really doesn't
matter.

If most people never play again after paying 60% for a fake key maybe renting
is a very good option. If they buy the game within two weeks of renting the
rent costs serves as a credit towards full purchase of the game.

------
Dextro
For steam at least I think the problem would just go away if Valve would allow
trusted third parties to activate a key without ever revealing it to the user.
Then publishers could sell on any marketplace and the key would never be
visible.

Sure, it's "fixing" the problem by making a massive move to control the market
but if the games industry in general really wants it it's the only way I
reckon.

~~~
opencl
Valve already had that feature years ago and got rid of it. I know at least
Humble Bundle was using it for a while.

------
SimianLogic2
This is mostly a problem for devs who do bundles. A users pays $20 for 10
games but only wants 3 of them, so they sell the other 7 keys. G2A has done
some shady things (including trying to buy favorable press coverage), but I do
think it's a bit fishy that Mike at No More Robots is stirring up controversy
juuuuuust before he's got a game releasing.

~~~
Someone1234
That's a separate issue. This is about credit card fraud and people using key
reseller sites to launder/clean the money.

Although bundle sellers, like Humble Bundle, have been a popular target of
credit card fraudsters:

[https://developer.humblebundle.com/post/147806409802/humble-...](https://developer.humblebundle.com/post/147806409802/humble-
fraud)

~~~
hedora
The article conflates many different issues, including cc fraud, and key
resale arbitrage.

------
edf13
Never heard of g2a... how many others hasn’t before but will now go looking
for cheap s/w?

~~~
geofft
Do you feel better about paying a small amount of money for dubiously-
legitimate software than none at all for definitely-illegitimate software via
well-established piracy channels?

(Genuine question. It sorta seems to me like one appeal of this market is it
doesn't weigh on the conscience like piracy.)

~~~
buildzr
G2A is mainly useful for things like multiplayer games where piracy isn't an
option. That's the main reason I use it at least and I pirate everything else.

~~~
geofft
(This is a fair and informative answer to the question I asked, I'm not sure
why it was downvoted. I upvoted it.)

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Tepix
Why don't the developers issue time limited keys to influencers and game
testers? If an influencer ends up playing the game (and thus promoting it),
they can issue new keys periodially.

These time limited keys would be (almost) worthless.

~~~
arkitaip
Imagine having to re-issue keys because the beta has been going on for too
long, or because you released a new DLC after a year or two. Too much manual
labor.

------
a3n
"Steal This Book"
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book)

------
duxup
Is it feasible to just abandon keys altogether and sell only directly through
a given platform (Steam, An appstore of some sort, etc)?

~~~
Robadob
When developers generate Steam keys, it allows them to sell their 'game on
Steam' elsewhere (their own website, HumbleBundle etc).

This means Steam doesn't take a cut of the sale price. But the developers
still get the benefits of Steam community, Steamworks drm, and potentially
having a unified update/distribution channel.

Similarly, some gamers prefer to have games 'on Steam' rather than DRM free so
that they have a single unified game library.

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ev0lv
Why not put an expiration token inside of the key? Reselling a key takes time.

------
qplex
It's pretty funny that pirated games often work better than the legal
versions.

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tokai
Isn't it the devs that have control over key creation?

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g00s3_caLL_x2
Such angst.

So hipster.

If you don't want money for your games, or better yet, don't want a retailer
making money from 'your game' then just give it away or sell it via the web
only.

Don't be douchey about it.

~~~
klez
Uhm... I think you should give a second read to the article.

They're not saying "don't buy on Steam, GOG or humble bundle". They're saying
"don't buy from the scummy websites because chargebacks cost us money, while
pirating, at least, costs us nothing. Or buy from Steam, GOG or HB".

~~~
g00s3_caLL_x2
Fair enough.

