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"Just buy the game on Steam": Indie publisher behind a recent banger that sold 300k copies in its first week warns against key resellers after canceling hundreds of scalped keys (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 6 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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[–] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 49 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Old advice, but probably still true: Either buy from legitimate vendors or pirate it. Buying from shady sites creates extra work and costs for developers.

If you can’t afford or don’t want to buy our games full-price, please pirate them rather than buying them from a key reseller. These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more.
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) June 30, 2019
https://www.techdirt.com/2019/07/09/indie-publishers-tell-gamers-to-pirate-instead-buying-keys-through-reseller-g2a/

[–] EnsignWashout@startrek.website 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Good advice.

Of course, some developers circumvent this by not adding DRM to their game.

Can't waste dev time fucking with an esoteric key system if they don't first waste dev time writing an esoteric key system.

[–] RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

The steam key is used for verification of the purchase and adding the game to the user's library. Some games on steam do not have DRM and will continue working after the game gets removed from the user's library.

With or without DRM, and whether or not the platform/devs spend the time to remove fraudulent purchases from user's libraries: if the game gets first bought with stolen cc info, then someone will after a few weeks have to deal with the chargeback administration and pay the chargeback fees.

Afaik, least work and least unpredictable costs for the Devs would be to sell only on platforms where the platform pays the chargeback fees and handles removing the game from user libraries (or not). Which would mean that the game is only available through large platforms like steam/epic/gog, which take a large % cut.

[–] DNKski@lemmy.world 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well... Yes, but actually no. I mean, they've revoked many, many keys. Some of them may be from scalpers / stolen credit cards / cheaper regions.

But... There is key selling store, Green Man Gaming. Publishers are deliverying keys to GMG, only them. Perfectly legal keys. And they still revoked that keys.

Links:

  1. https://nitter.net/aNichiporchik/status/2086944850767691795
  2. https://steamcommunity.com/app/3812600/discussions/0/588434705716610750/

My suggestion for tinyBuild is, if you want to get rid of scalpers, just dont sell game outside of storefront. Like Steam/EGS/GOG. If you want extra cash from stores like GMG/Fanatical, live with it.

[–] Neocorporation@lemmy.world 23 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The publisher sold keys to GreenManGaming (and probably other stores ) and then the developers unilaterally revoked all serials without first checking if they were legitimate?

Sounds like the developers are running their company out of a shed and are immature.

[–] DNKski@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Don't know why, but yes. Now, they are trying to fix that fiasco, with GMG support, but leaves bad taste.

[–] Neocorporation@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I think the bad taste in my mouth is the 300k copies they sold and the need to then do this? Stepping over pounds to save pennies etc.

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 34 points 6 days ago (2 children)

To make his gripes here clear, he shares a news story from 2016, where tinyBuild says it lost $450,000 due to key resellers

The assumption being every one of those users would otherwise have bought the game at full price.

As is the case with the same argument against piracy, most of them weren’t and you can’t really count those numbers as ‘lost sales’

[–] Obituarykidney@lemmy.world 29 points 6 days ago

That's fair, but the point of piracy is that it's free. This is just someone else making money off of their work now.

[–] Wrufieotnak@feddit.org 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Meh, for piracy I agree, but here the users were willing to fork over money for the product. So its not unreasonable to assume at least a significant part would buy it normally as well. Not all obviously, so it would be better to name it "up to xxxx $" or something like that.

[–] gedfromgont@piefed.ca 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Agreed but there is a price difference to take into account to. Likely the key resellers sold the key for much much cheaper than Steam, that's the whole appeal, isn't it? So maybe some people would have still bought it on Steam but others may have been put off by the price. Now if the game on Steam went on discount later for the same price as the key reseller sold it for, you could definitely argue for lost profit since no one would buy the key twice.

[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (2 children)

scalpers bought copies on Steam priced cheaper in certain regions. If you release a game on Valve's store and don't set the price in each region individually, universal pricing creates discrepancies where this can happen. These were then being sold on less regulated marketplaces.

This could be prevented by not doing regional price discrimination.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 9 points 4 days ago

The idea is to offer the game at a lower price in regions with poorer purchasing power, so the price is more proportionate and people there can also afford the game.

Not doing that means poor regions likely won't be able to afford the game. Not sure if that's better.

[–] alphabethunter@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Regional Pricing is fundamental if steam wants to have a proper presence in less affluent markets. Before regional Pricing, people from outside developed countries would just pirate games, because the price was just insane. To give you a perspective, an AAA game priced at 60 dollars without regional Pricing costs 1/5 of a monthly minimum wage salary in Brazil. A 100 dollar deluxe edition costs about a third of minimum wage here. And okay, if you move past minimum wage earners to people of middle class income, usually from 3 to 5 minimum wage salaries of monthly income, a full priced game still is a fairly steep purchase, roughly equivalent to how much a 4-person family would pay in utility bills if they don't use their AC often

[–] popetackler@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 days ago

I wasn’t expecting to add a cozy game about fixing electronics in Tokyo to my rainy Sunday gaming plans but here we are.

Oh, bundled with a game about managing a post office as a cat, Steam? Yoink.

[–] SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

The game is repair shop sim ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago

Fuck scalpers.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Why do the keys even exist? If it's such a burden, don't generate or sell keys, just rely on the official store fronts standard purchase process.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago

A lot of official store fronts provide steam keys with your purchase because Steam is so universal.

[–] absquatulate@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Damn - got mine on loaded as they sometimes have them a bit cheaper than steam and in my local currency. Now I feel bad.

Though part of me wonders if this scandal is just because they got a little greedy and it backfired.

[–] oyzmo@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago

I prefer physical game media.

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This works because we don't own our games. They have an equivalent to key resellers for physical media, it's eBay.

Crazy that I'm supposed to think some random gamer that bought a perfectly legal key from a "shady" website is at fault here.

[–] zurohki@aussie.zone 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

a perfectly legal key

That's the thing, they were bought with stolen credit card details in the first place, so they aren't really legal keys.

[–] Grimy@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

No they weren't. None were stolen or bought with stolen credit cards according to the article.

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