Indie solo video game dev here.
I am okay with gamers “requisitioning” games if they truly can’t afford it. While it is my livelihood, it’s also my attempt at art and I want people to enjoy it. I even plan on releasing a safe cracked copy for the next game.
If you pirate a game, there are ways to help support us starving devs if you like the game.
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Spread the word far and wide that you like the game. A little effort on your part can save us marketing budget and trigger new sales.
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In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.
But please don’t cost us additional money. It costs time and money to process chargebacks triggered by the key resellers selling keys procurred with stolen credit cards.
- In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.
I’ve been doing this a lot recently. Back when i was a teenager i used to pirate a lot, but now that i’m older and have disposable income i’ve been buying a ton of the games o used to pirate then.
Which unfortunally leads to me having tons of games on steam with barely any hours played (yet), when they should be in the thousands already.
I will also use this excuse to justify my huge backlog of steam games bought on deep discounted sales that I in all likelihood will never ever ever actually play.
I’m just making up for my middle school years That’s the ticket…
Lol, yeah, i do that too…
But with these old classics it’s even harder to resist for me. They usually have the biggest discounts, and how can i say this game that gave me so many hours of fun isn’t worth 2 fucking dollars?
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It’s silly to assume all (or even the majority imo) of key sellers are fraudulent. How do you know resellers are costing you more money in chargebacks than they make you in legitimate purchases?
Edit: downvote away, but until someone provides some actual evidence of this instead of just “a few devs said so” I’m going to assume this isn’t true.
So, those resellers listed have been known to hold and sell keys that are linked to stolen credit cards and other unauthorised payment methods. The keys are bought up cheap during sales using the stolen credentials then posted on the reseller sites. A few things happen when the victim notifies their bank or institution of the fraud. Steam or whatever site cancels those keys, meaning the person who purchased the key on the reseller site is out a product, the dev/publisher then has to front the cost of the charge back for the fraudulent purchase, or at least the 70% cut they get. Knowing that sometimes the keys you purchase dont work the resellers also offer a service, for an extra fee, to ensure that your key will work.
In essence, the reseller makes money from the purchase of the key, the fraudulent posters of the keys make money from the sale of the key, the legitimate store and the dev lose money due to the chargeback caused by the fraudulent sale, and the user who purchased the key is out money and a product. There are legitimate resellers who dont operate this way but the ones pictured are not those ones.
Thats not even the fact that the reseller wouldn’t be selling the key for less than they bought it so the customer is giving more money to someone else rather then the dev. So sure, the dev may have been paid for the keys at sale price, but the end user is paying more which goes to someone else.
I understand the theory, I’m looking for evidence that this is a problem that makes resellers a net negative income for devs. I’ve used resellers plenty of times for games I otherwise would not have purchased and I have never once had this happen to me, which makes me think that this is an unproven talking point based on outliers.
It’s not like it’s a straightforward calculation, it’s hard to distinguish between regular sales and sales made to resellers, as well as regular chargebacks and chargebacks made to resellers. So until someone actually puts effort into proving this, “because the dev said so” isn’t a good enough answer for me.
G2A made an offer years ago to any video game devs that they would compensate any devs if they and an external investigation could prove that the keys were illegitimate.
Wube the company behind Factorio was the only one that took them up on the offer and they were right, the keys were illegitimate.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/g2a-and-wube-software-settle-usd40-000-chargeback-dispute
Official announcement from G2A: https://www.g2a.co/g2a-strikes-anti-fraud-agreement-with-indie-developer-wube-software/
About the issue from Wube: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
Follow up [last section]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-348
I’d still be very interested in knowing whether or not this was a net negative income for Factorio, as the question wasn’t “does fraud exist on G2A”, it was “is pirating better for devs than resellers”. For pirating to be better than resellers, resellers have to provide net negative income, and to know that we need to know the total revenue from resellers. I didn’t see that in the links provided (just seeing that 198/321 chargebacks were fraudulent), but let me know if I just missed it.
Thanks for the links though! This was a super interesting read, and honestly big props to Wube and G2A for being so transparent about the process. Honestly not sure why more game devs wouldn’t take G2A up on this offer, 10x the cost of chargebacks with zero risk??
198 chargebacks mentioned cost Wube $20 per chargeback, on top of losing the sale. They mention this in the linked blog post.
So instead of earning $20 (minus various cuts), they lose $20. So they urge people to avoid using key resellers, and instead just pirate their game if you can’t afford to buy it properly.
What he’s trying to say is that if there were 198 fraudulent copies sold on G2A, but G2A also was responsible for 500 non-fraudulent sales, then Wube might have still netted a profit off G2A from people who would not have bought Factorio full price. Since nobody has ever shown that anywhere near a majority of keys are fraudulent, it is entirely possible for most games that they still make more money even after chargebacks than if G2A didn’t exist. There are, however, definitely going to be games where that’s not the case.
The better argument, honestly, is that G2A being unwilling to police fraudulent sales is helping the scam industry, and is responsible for us getting more Microsoft Support, Amazon Refund, etc scams in our inboxes. I do not hold the negative view most do on key resellers because most of the reason big media hates on them has nothing to do with the fraud… but honestly companies like G2A should be doing more (something) to own and police their shit. I personally think a majority of G2A’s keys are legit because there are a lot of ways to legally gets keys much cheaper than MSRP. I frankly support that behavior because I’ll never be a fan of the IP price controls and treating game purchases as “licenses” instead of purchases.
For pirating to be better than resellers, resellers have to provide net negative income, and to know that we need to know the total revenue from resellers.
Unless you plan on implementing any other stronger DRM than the steam provided one. I wouldn’t bother releasing a safe version.
It’s brutally simple to crack steam drm on your own. You just need the clean files from cs.rin.ru/forum or something.
Unsafe cracks will be published elsewhere anyways if your game is popular enough.
I suggest you just don’t add any DRM at all.
Speaking of cs.rin.ru, unfortunately most of the clean steam files are not available anymore there right now.
Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong
cs.rin.ru is very well regarded in the piracy community and quite a few cracks originate there. You can also learn how to crack yourself on that site.
how to crack yourself
now you got my attention
“Very well regarded in the piracy community” isn’t a phrase I thought I’d see today 🤣
Why not, after you clicked on a post in a piracy community?
Well, it’s not like people that know what they are doing, download from any random site they come across. There are sites that are well regarded and many that are not (like piratebay)
The Gamestop NFT marketplace will hopefully allow creators like you to release games and collect a royalty for each re-sale
Only if you can put the license itself on the blockchain, and guarantee the blockchain is robust enough to last beyond Gamestop’s bankruptcy. Or survive past the day Gamestop decides they can make more money by destroying the current blockchain and “upgrading” the system.
The blockchain has nothing to do with Gamestop’s solvency as a company (which is not in doubt, BTW). It’s Ethereum blockchain.
The last sentence of your comment sounds like you don’t actually understand blockchain technology at all…
I don’t think anyone can say that Gamestop will definitely be around longer than people want to use these licenses they sell. And I hope the license isn’t just a pointer to some Gamestop website that stores the licenses (re: standard NFT). But I don’t trust any corporation to do something like this without building in some sort of backdoor to revoke licenses. Especially Gamestop.
Your comment makes me think you don’t get how the technology works. Ethereum blockchain will continue to exist whether Gamestop does or not…
It doesn’t matter if the blockchain is eternal, if this is a traditional NFT, it isn’t stored in the blockchain. All you’re buying is a link to a website where the NFT is stored. It doesn’t matter if it’s a license key, or a shitty computer generated picture of an anthropomorphic ape. When Gamestop decides to shut down the server (it will happen eventually), you lose access to your license key. If Gamestop allows you to copy your license key, you still lose access to your software when Gamestop shuts down the licensing server. I’m not sure the technology works the way you think it works.
Uhm… Sorry but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this tech works.
NFTs are stored in a “wallet”, the address is recorded on the blockchain. As long as you know your seed phrase (or other recovery key) it will be yours eternally. The NFT market is only a place to put buyers and sellers in the same spot. Even “in the market”, the NFT lives at a blockchain address, someone else’s wallet.
That’s why Gamestop can say “we’re shutting down our wallet service. Get your recovery key and restore your NFTs elsewhere”
Gamestop doesn’t run a licensing server and probably won’t. That’s for publishers. Also, NFTs make licensing servers redundant.
hasn’t that been coming any day now for like two years or something?
just drop the bags and move on with your life man
The Gamestop marketplace has been operational for a while. Not sure what you’re on about…
Sounds kinda sus man
What’s sus about creators receiving royalties for their own work?
The sus part is the royalties being tied to unregulated, highly risky “assets”
I don’t think your opinion is wrong, just misinformed/uninformed. I share your opinion mire generally about blockchain tech, as it’s clearly been used for scams and bullshit.
We’re not talking about Bored Ape fake trading card nonsense. We’re talking about Game Publishers and re-sellers who want to verify provenance of a file. The publisher (creator) wants to get a cut of a forward sale of the game. That’s the speculated way that this would work. Whether it’s tied to Gamestop is irrelevant. NFT technology will serve this purpose for all forms of digital media.
Gamestop is just the only service currently offering this benefit when minting your NFT (or was… Maybe it changed)
Ok, I’ll hear you out but explain to me how the developers and teams get money from it
Why not just give them financial incentives? Why shoehorn a cryptocurrency derivative into financial incentives?
The publisher mints the NFT. As the creator of the NFT, their wallet will automatically be given a percentage of future sales through smart contracts.
When it goes mainstream, it won’t feel shoehorned at all. You probably won’t even know you’re using the technology unless they decide to emphasize it in marketing materials.
Right now, how would you re-sell a digital game and verify it’s an authentic originally purchased copy? Blockchain tech allows for this. That’s the incentive for end users. They can know where the file originated and trust the seller. You’re not buying a stupid trading card, you’re buying digital media with a certificate of authenticity attached.
Edit to add: I’m pro-piracy and generally anti-blockchain (especially as currently used, where we all pretend it’s stonks).
The company’s wallet, not its NFT market. The recent ruling with Ripple and SEC made it appear that running both an exchange AND a wallet would be considered a violation of securities law.
Gamestop wallet users can move their digital items to any compatible wallet
The future
Will be a dark place, mostly
Their NFT website doesn’t even work anymore andyou still out here shilling garbageThat’s just not true.
Oh my bad. It did load after connecting to a UK VPN, seems like they block my region from accessing it.
The part about shilling garbage still stands however.
Fuck no. Nobody wants NFTs.
I am not really all about NFTs but they are not going away… They are the perfect tool for digital capitalism. They create a kind of artificial scarcity
In the case of the Gamestop policy, at least creators get paid for their work as long as its remains popular/desirable
How does it been an NFT stop piracy?
Honestly, I don’t think it does, but it makes re-sale of digital media possible. Right now you can’t return a crappy game to the shop where you bought it. If you want a refund through Steam or something, there’s a limited time. If. you accidentally buy the wrong version of a game, it’s a lot of hassle. If you get tired of the game, or just don’t really like it, it’s basically stuck in your library forever
Attaching the files to NFTs will make these things possible and even easy.
You probably won’t even know you’re interacting with NFT technology
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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.
What shits me off is the number of people who defend these key reselling sites.
I’ve been utterly lambasted for likening kinguin with G2A in the past. Like really? Their arguments literally fall apart with a small amount of scrutiny, but thet chalk it up to “they say they aren’t like other resellers so they aren’t” FFS you literally cannot prove that and that’s my point. And that’s why you DO NOT TRUST THESE SITES.
It’s really fucking common in YouTube comments specifically. Especially with youtubers who have been sponsored by these sites in the past.
I have literally unsubbed from youtubers that have advertised these stinkers, the problem is when the likes of MrBeast starts advertising it, people start to think that it’s ok.
There is absolutely no issue with it as it doesn’t harm the creators
I have bought some games from resellers. I know they’re bad, but sometimes I just really want to play that game online and the price is outrageous (a.k.a. I don’t have the money at that time). Or in other cases I have bought an original game from steam, but the dlc’s I want are not worth the money they’re asking, which leads to me me using resellers again. For example I have bought cities skylines on steam, but most of it’s dlc are from g2a, because they’re selling the the game with 40% of it’s functionality and other important shit is in overpriced dlc’s
I mean, cdkeys.com doesn’t allow third-party sellers and (supposedly) sources all their keys from verifiably legal sources, usually just region arbitrage. Considering they come into ownership of all the keys they sell, I’d think they lack all the “safe harbor” protections of the others.
Thing is, cdkeys.com is about the same price as the others. Which suggests to me that the “stolen keys” rate from those others is lower than some companies would have you believe. Remember, legal or not, the big label stance on all this is an extension of their stance on buying used, which is that they would rather you pirate something than support even a legitimate third-party or cross-regional market.
What’s the last one from the top row? The Pirate Bay? :)
Narh TPB is pirate ship. They’re just referring to pirating in general
Damn, straight up encouraging piracy and discouraging key resellers? Wow… 🤯
That’s like literally what the post says.
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?
It’s not the Pirate Bay logo so my bet would be that it’s representing internet piracy as a general concept!
Just a stand in for piracy in general imo
Yes, I have seen Coherance and it’s really different, it is more philosophy and history focus. As history major, I loved it.
Had to switch :(
what is the first one?
Their website.
which is?
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
And then the owner of the card issues a chargeback, so they lose more money (chargeback fees can be $25-$100) than if you’d have just torrented it.
Technically they could revoke the key as well, but that tends to cause a bit of fuss and bad PR so they don’t often bother.
So the lesson is clear. Buy your keys on G2A with stolen credit cards.
I use G2@ to ea games, better get the % off or just piratbuy
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.
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We are literally on a post with game devs explicitly asking you to pirate rather than purchase stolen keys from resellers. It has nothing to do with “dealers,” it has to do with the effects on the developers who have to deal with the fallout of the stolen keys. This isn’t hard to understand, it has been repeated by several indie devs throughout the years and I’m pretty sure they know more about their problems than you do, pal.
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People use stolen credit cards to optain those keys and often the developer is left with a ton of chargebacks aka wasted time and money!
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The game and future games from this developer? You may not want to throw coins into their goldbag, but at least don’t hurt them by paying another scum that results in bills for them.
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Based RWS
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
Darkwood went a step further in 2017:
https://www.destructoid.com/darkwood-devs-put-the-full-game-on-the-pirate-bay-out-of-guilt/
Most of the keys are obtained illegally (stolen accounts and/or credit cards) so eventually the money gets taken back. So not only was the game stolen but the indie has to go through processing the takeback which costs them money on top of it.
And since the takeback issue can occur the person purchasing could lose their game without even realizing it and then complain to the devs when it wasn’t even their fault.
You’re basically double-dipping and ensuring that actual costs are involved.
edit: brain fuzzy. Chargeback is the word.
I’ve also heard that this is a myth, and while there might be some fraudulent purchases, the majority are just picked up in other regions where games are cheaper and maybe during sales. Devs who tell you to pirate their game instead of using resellers may be actually making more money off resellers than they think, but there isn’t really any way to confirm it. Without a mass study.
It’s hard to know because both sides are arguing that it’s 100% their side. Game companies are claiming it’s basically all pirated keys. G2A (in court) used to argue that it was basically no pirated keys. The truth is somewhere in the middle but nobody is talking.
In some cases, the fraudulent purchase route is less profitable than just buy-selling across countries and abusing sales. I can’t imagine in those cases that we’re looking at fraudulent purchases.
Exactly, devs need to prove that resellers are an overall net negative on their income before they can use this as a talking point. Fraud happens in every industry, the existence of fraud doesn’t make a service net negative overall.
For what it’s worth, I’ve used G2A plenty of times for games I otherwise wouldn’t have purchased and I’ve never had an issue once.
…Do they?
I feel like if the person is telling you to pirate the game, a method that is 100% confirmed to provide no money to the dev, they probably are already actively feeling money drain from the other method
Like telling someone to pirate your game is a pretty extreme argument against resellers. I don’t think it’s a myth, and while a mass study would be good, there’s just more evidence against at the moment. I think the resellers have more to prove than vica versa.
Unfortunately that’s spotty evidence at best. Game developers generally don’t sell their own keys, they sell them through distribution platforms like Steam. Gamers and resellers both pick up keys from distribution platforms. A percentage of these are legit, a percentage are fraudulent, however the game dev has no way to actually tell:
- How many legit sales are to resellers
- How many fraudulent sales are to resellers
Distribution platforms don’t make you check a box that says “I’m a reseller”, so there’s no way to know if the net income from legitimate sales to resellers is less than the cost of fraudulent sales to resellers. The only thing game devs have to rely on is signal from chargebacks, and a chargeback makes a lot more noise than a legitimate sale.
I think it’s very possible that the few devs that tell you to pirate instead of using resellers are misinformed, and of course they are, because they don’t own their own distribution line. Fraudulent sales cause more noise than legitimate sales which causes people to jump on the “pirate over resellers”.
But regardless of which side of this argument is correct, telling people to boycott an entire sub-industry based on claims with speculative evidence is ridiculous.
I mean,
I still feel that a dev willing to take a lost sale over a resale, still says more than just saying they’re misinformed.
And at the end of the day, resell is supposed to be a cheaper way to say “I bought it”. And at the end of the day, devs are saying “If anything, it’s worse for us”
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think resellers are more needing to prove their legitimacy in this case.
The thing I find most ridiculous honestly, is that you seem to be under the assumption that the devs aren’t already getting noisy chargebacks. Like this whole thing sprouted from nothing.
Hotline: Miami devs supported people in The Pirate Bay threads and said aussies to get their game anyway since it was banned here, iirc.
I remember devolver telling aussies it was cool tonpirate but i thought that was the extent of it.
the movie “the man from earth: holocene” was released by the film makers onto the piracy websites. They’d prefer people see their film for free than not see the film at all.
I have that movie on my Plex! Yes, I pirated it. Is it worth watching? How about the first one, for that matter?
The first one is beautifully done, I have watched it multiple times over, the second one is okay, a bit leaning over religious too much.
Have you ever seen the movie Coherence? Is it similar to that in tone?
the first one is better, but the second one is far from bad also. I’d say they’re both worth the watch.
They made another? I loved the first one. Have watched it many times.
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 about Instant Gaming ? Is it also a website that only resales keys or do they have some kind of partnership with game devs?
Same stuff as G2A.
Do we have any intel concerning the percentage that the editors gets in the best and worse case ? I’m wondering if it would be okay to buy AAA on such websites (or more like the company behind a game has enough money) but small editor games on official platforms…
They get none of the money because its purchased with stolen credit cards and the payment is charged back. I wouldn’t lose any sleep screwing over a studio that has way too much money anyway, but you’re also supporting the key reseller that is actively exploiting indie devs. Just stay away from them.
If it’s EA or Take2 my personal codex would so: Go wild.
This is no legal advice
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.
Eneba is selling pirated keys?
