Pirate our games, don't buy them from key resellers, say indies
bbc.com
bbc.com
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.
I mean, it seems like they are removing games purchased fraudulently, Steam notifies you when one of your games is removed for this reason, yet despite many G2A purchases I'm yet to have a game removed, is there any evidence that this is actually as rampant as is claimed?
More specifically, they said this practice serves as a very strong discouragement from indie games ever participating in bundles again, because the bundle economics depend on many (most?) of the keys either not being redeemed, or being redeemed by people who would otherwise not purchase the actual game. But when people who want the game are able, many months later, to pay a fraction of the price for a key sourced from a bundle, this really hurts sales for the game and makes the bundle a net negative instead of the positive it's supposed to be.
This isn't exactly a compelling argument in favor of having the bundles around.
That subset is going to be different for most purchasers.
I think this is a problem with the business model, rather than the problem with "unethical" resellers. So you either give up on the business model, as many game devs are doing, or you find ways to enforce it. Either start suing users who resell keys, or partner with the likes of Steam to create a system in which keys can't be activated individually.
If you resell the keys, you're breaking the bundle's terms of service and actively harming the developers involved.
That's exactly how stupid this idea is. I own the products I purchased, just because it's not a physical copy doesn't mean I have any less rights to it. I highly doubt their ToS would hold up, I consider it highly immoral to attempt to deny people the rights to sell or trade their own purchases.
It actually does.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-09-digital-ri...
It seems that the situation is currently unclear (at least in certain parts of the world), but not obviously illegal.
Even something as simple as a checksum of the game key needing to match the last digit of your steam id would solve the problem, and would be trivial for humble/steam to implement. Every time someone requests a key from their bundle, the bundler just had to find a remaining key that matches.
Edit: I originally speculated that perhaps it wasn't in Steam's interest to support this, but thinking about it, they're losing their cut of these dodgy sales.
The thing is, there's no guarantee that that is the case. I still have unredeemed keys from (year) old bundles that I intend to redeem, I just haven't got around to it because there are more important things to do with my time.
¹For the most part. It's not always good for 100% of the people involved, but on the balance it's supposed to be a good deal for everyone.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
You would never cut a software developer slack for putting "no reverse engineering, no exploitation" in the ToS and then being surprised when vulnerabilities are discovered, business people need to consider basic stuff like this too. Markets for things exist outside of yours.
Additionally, I never even agreed to a ToS buying the early Humble Bundles at least and a hidden ToS is unenforceable at best.
If a bundle company asks for 10000 keys and their bundles are clearly only selling 200 units each, their bundles are just a front for the real money. Legit operations return all unused keys. Dirty operations (the vast majority of bundles) will block your emails the minute you mention returning keys.
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.
Many years ago I experienced something like that with Paypal where someone bought a license for my software and then immediately made a chargeback claim. And on Paypal unless it is a physical delivery with a tracking number, buyer always wins. I lost some time while communicating with Paypal about the chargeback.
This is where most of fraud take place and game developers lose a lot of money on it.
Maybe a customer wouldn't buy the game at the full price, but since they're not pirating from the get-go, that shows they are a customer willing to spend money. Maybe they wouldn't buy the same game or as many games, but it's possible they'd still be spending some money on games through legal (but more expensive) means if they knew g2a was just piracy with more steps.
It damages their brand (vs. piracy, which unless you're using invasive DRM is net neutral at worst, and positive at best), generates negative sales additively (vs. net neutral to positive sales based on word of mouth advertising), and drains the development house's emotional and fiscal capital as they deal with the fallout.
I don't exactly see how this is worse than piracy. isn't it basically the same as "Customer A gets a game for free of {torrent site}. they tell all their friends about {torrent site} and their favorite bittorrent client."? the only way it's different is if most consumers have some moral objection to torrents. in my experience, very few people who work outside of software (or other IP-based industries) really care. they only pay if it's less trouble than torrents.
But buying a G2A code is almost as easy as buying from Steam. And a lot of people who wouldn't pirate for ethical reasons don't realize it's not legit. So G2A turns loses you sales from people who would otherwise have bought the game legitimately.
Maybe keys should be changed to secure hardware dongles.
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.
I tend to agree in general (also for films, songs...), but for expensive items like games the problem becomes that you then have to charge, in developing markets, prices that are simply too high. That incentivises piracy, which then eats up profits from your developED markets too.
I want people all round the world to play my games, not just those fortunate enough to be born where their dollar is strong enough to make it affordable.
Disclaimer: I don't really know anything about exchange rates or value of money across borders. Cost of living and average income rates are complex!
Note that lowering the price during a sale, and lowering the price over time are other forms of price discrimination. (Here, the seller wastes the buyers’ time in exchange for a monetary discount, so people with less money and more time tend to get bigger discounts).
Also, different regions have different costs of living, even when the currency is the same. In the Bay Area, a game on steam costs as much as renting an apartment for a few hours. In the middle of the country, that same game costs almost half a week’s rent for a comparable apartment. From that perspective, it really doesn’t make sense to charge the same amount, even in the same country.
For physical goods, the solution is simple: just charge different amounts at different stores, and hope the cost of shipping prevents arbitrage.
Also, for some reason people hate special discounts and coupons less than regional pricing.
I wonder if steam could start selling points in the form of account-locked gift cards that are discounted differently in different markets. Maybe people would hate that less. They’d need better support for blocking mass game reselling across regions, but I’d guess that can be fixed with fraud detection.
The same dynamic is true for markets generally and even economic thinking; truly sad facts!
One of the biggest problem with resellers is review-key fraud
1234-5678-90AB-CDEF
1234-REVIEW-5678-90AB-CDEF
3141-PLLANG-5926-5358-9793
--
[0] - So that you can't derive a key of one type from the key of another type.
For Void Bastards we often have multiple branches going out to different groups for different things.
This way, the player immediately knows he has bought an improper key, and can address this with the store it was bought. A journalist would not mind such a pop-up.
If the game stops working without warning after a few months, angry reactions are to be expected.
For example, you can buy a Russian key for 50% off, but it is a Russian version of the game with the audio/text to match.
But if you buy physical copies, then the Japanese market might be cheaper simply due to the greater supply of older games, and potentially the currency conversion of newer games.
There are a couple of Russian games out there with supposedly very good Russian VO, like the Stalker or Metro series.
(Well, OK, the copies of Fallout and StarCraft I had were both legit.)
Guess it's another instance of "why we can't have nice things".
No. This doesn’t make sense with digital goods. Everything is a copy. Nothing is being re-used. A second person is merely making an additional copy of bits. That person may not even download/copy the same bits as the first person if the game was updated.
Taken to the extreme a middleman exchange with infinite resells and instant transfers of ownership could limit total sales to peak concurrent users. I mean why should an American and a European each buy a license? They could just share a license and instantly transfer it back and forth when they want to play!
Gamedevs participated in bundles because it generated extra cash. Steam keys were an obvious way to distribute. A harsh lesson was learned. Going forward the fix is easy, don’t distribute keys. Assign the key to an account at point-of-sale.
The other lesson is to stop selling games and go free-to-play. It solves this problem completely! I hate f2p. But there’s a reason the industry is moved in that direction. Le sigh.
Downvote all you want. But digital goods which are infinitely reproducible and instantly transferable do not and should not follow the same laws as manufactured widgets. They’re covered by copyright law. And someone buying a copy of a thing does not grant them the right to let someone else make a copy of some vaguely similar thing 5 years later.
This can be mitigated by limiting transfer licenses by some days, i.e. after transferring you need to wait one month to transfer ownership again.
However, this wouldn't even be necessary. Just a process that is boring enough to do would avoid most non-malicious abuse. For example, to transfer the user that current has ownership of the key must went to a process of disowning the key first.
There is already better ways if you want to share your library with some trusted people: i.e. Steam's family share.
I believe that coupons should not be transferable once redeemed. Selling an unredeemed coupon is, of course, acceptable.
And honestly, I think its a shame, because regional pricing makes a lot of sense.
Selling a AAA game at 2 bucks a pop in the US doesn't make sense. You have to get back the 10s of millions of dollars you spent somehow (if the game is good!).
But that locks out underprivileged markets, who can't afford 60 bucks games. They'll likely just pirate it then. Regional pricing is a nice solution to that. Unfortunately then people abuse it.
That's why we can't have nice things.
"What the...? Why am I paying $60 for a game when I can buy the same game in Nigeria for $5!"
vs.
"Aw man, there's a cool Japan-only Fire Emblem game that I can't play because it only works on Japanese consoles..."
Good for the goose, good for the gander.
It's actually fairly difficult to just buy labor from another region without doing the equivalent of "buying a regional console" (i.e. building a local office/factory, where people actually speak the right language).
As for why we shouldn't be able to, there are two good reasons:
1. If everything is priced at a regular price, no one in "underprivileged" markets will be able to afford those games, so cue piracy.
2. If everything is priced at the price point of "underprivileged" markets, it makes zero sense to produce those games, as it would mean that the company will surely go broke by doing so.
If not directly, they still benefit indirectly from any downward pressure put on wages.
Piracy is inevitable. No matter how low of a price you set for it, there will be countless people who'd rather have it for "free".
Start at $69.99, in English only. Then add language localizations in order of decreasing mean disposable income for native speakers. Gradually drop the price by $5 per quarter, but also randomly put it on sale for 25% off for 36 hours at a time, to catch the folks who wishlisted the game and are watching the price.
Rich folks buy at $70 and play it right away. Poor folks wait 3.5 years and then get it for $5 .
Why would "poor folks" in other markets wait?
They could always pirate now, and then buy a catch-up license at a price they could better afford at a later time.
Poorer people have to wait, because the developers have high rent and daily expenses, and price discrimination helps the supplier capture enough of the trade value of their good that they can pay those expenses.
A software program is unlikely to have repeat buyers. It's not like corn or toilet paper, where you use one up and buy another. So, if you hypothetically line up every potential buyer by the price they are willing to pay, you can capture the maximum value of trade by walking down the line and selling one copy to each person at their price. Once you sell one copy to everyone in line, you're done. But buyers keep their price secret, or lie about it, and paying your walking salesperson would eat up all that extra money. So instead, you put your price up on a big board, decrease it over time, and when it drops below a buyer's price, they just step up to the counter and purchase.
Paying more allows a customer to buy earlier. Waiting in line longer allows a customer to pay less. How is this unfair? And if it is unfair, how is that the supplier's fault, rather than being inherent in the copyright system?
Here in Norway we travel to Sweden and buy mainly meat, tobacco and alcohol, due to lower taxes.
In 2017 it was estimated[1] to be about 2.6 billion USD worth. This is in a country with some 5.5 million inhabitants, many of which do not participate in this due to distance to border.
Businesses and the government aren't too thrilled about this, for obvious reasons.
[1]: https://www.svenskhandel.se/nyhetscenter/pressmeddelanden/20...
Plus in 5 years the company might not have the same sales and marketing teams, management or even owners.
I'm struggling imagining who can afford the equipment to run 'the latest tech' but will not be able to afford a game that uses it. I strongly suspect 'the latest tech' is important mostly to the privileged markets.
You might be right about the marketing. A hit game will probably be just as profitable later; maintaining or growing its own hype. The bigger problem I think is for games that are flops. Companies probably want to sell as many copies as possible before word gets out; and greatly staggering releases will result in a lot fewer copies being sold as you suggest.
Tech just doesn't make the gains it used to any more.
Back in the 90's a 4 year old machine would be lucky to even start a new released game, let alone run it at close to max settings.
If users can't or won't be able to afford it, they will pirate it. This cna be tempered with pricing strategies.
If it can't be purchased, people will pirate it (e.g. region locked games, even w/o localizations, or delayed releases by market) - pricing doesn't matter here - if users can't get it, they will just pirate it, sometimes especially because they know it's going to be released later, and that decision by the studio has made them feel second class.
If it's no longer available (abandonware, game developers that have gone out of business, etc) then people will pirate it. There are lots of platforms that are thriving on nostalgia right now because people want to pay for supported, working stuff. (For example, the resurgence of the Baldur's Gate and related games updates)
Take a look at any $streaming_service threads and you will see that anything that interferes with streaming service catalogs or pricing will yield shouts of "Arr" and people clearly stating they will pirate shows or use gray market streaming sites.
It's anecdotal but I suspect that most folks on this site are more comfortable with pirating movies or music, but often draw the line at video games because it is easier to relate to the development work done to make video games (even though modern blockbusters movies often have a lot of software development associated with them as well).
Indie markets work well with that model though. I've seen many indie games launch English-only and adding translations later on to sell to more users.
Why not get a copy in Nigeria, have a server hosted there, and just play it streaming.
Also out of order packets and drops.
> You have to get back the 10s of millions of dollars you spent somehow (if the game has a big budget!).
I did NOT mean that you spent 10s of millions of dollars to make any good games. That would be silly in a world of Hollow Knight, Cadence of Hyrule/Crypt of the Necrodancer, Dead Cells, Gungeon and more, where indie games are kings.
I got downvoted already, and honestly could've let that comment be, it's not that big an issue, and I think we see it similarly.
Also, I'm posting this to clarify my stance and remove any doubt.
...the word came into mind: I was nitpicking. Yes, I should've let that be. Cheers!
If I'm homeless in SF or NYC--despite being some of the wealthiest cities on this continent--maybe I should get that $2 regional pricing too rather than piracy (what me and plenty of others resorted to while living broke in uni).
If you want to sell your game to a wider market, don't go out of your way to make it harder for the wider market to access your product, just lower your price.
You'd be buying PC games as a homeless person?
The reason regional pricing makes sense is that costs for most things are lower in other regions, like rent and food, and therefore so are the salaries. That would mean a $60 game can cost as much as half a month's rent.
If you want more low income customers, set the worldwide price of your product lower. Don't arbitrarily ban entire countries from buying your digital game.
That would rapidly kick G2A off the credit card processing networks, assuming the allegations in the article are true.
Key reselling from giveaways could be mitigated if we somehow figured out a way to make keys expire shortly after the giveaway period (ie, keys expire 5 days after the giveaway ends).
I'm not aware if Steam or other marketplaces have this functionality yet.
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.
This is ultimately the reason I used to pirate software as a young person.
I grew up in a poorer northern UK town. Chucking 50 quid at a PlayStation game was, let's call it "highly impractical". So me, and most of my friends, would burn CDRs and mod the consoles.
I think the correct answer to this, ultimately, if you care about having the widest audience, is charging for the product, but not putting _too much_ effort into piracy being impossible.
The middle classes will still buy your stuff because it's the polite thing.
Not only polite, but easy. If you could afford the game, you buy it, it downloads, you play. Piracy is more work, but if you value that time spent as less than the price of the product, of course you will pirate.
I used to pirate a lot of music. I'd have to find the title on some tracker, download the album for a couple hours (shit internet at the time), import it, deal with metadata, deal with album artwork, import into my device. It was a lot of work, but I couldn't afford $1 a song! I definitely can afford $10 a month though, and spend probably 2 seconds finding a track on spotify to play it on any and all devices. Worth it. Easy. Affordable. But if you charge too much, don't be surprised when your users are willing to take the long way and get your stuff for free.
Nothing will ever be uncrackable, so why waste expensive engineering salary on the digital equivalent to the war on drugs?
Not everyone in Thailand is broke. There might be a lot more broke people in Thailand than in the U.S., and on average the sprawling land area of Thailand has less wealth than the land area of the U.S., but I bet there are a lot of people in the U.S. who, like their Thai working class counterparts, also can't afford a $60 game. Now the working class of Thailand gets a game that's right in their price bracket while the working class of the U.S. does not.
Averaging an entire countries wealth to set a price worked pretty nice for the people of Thailand in this example, but obviously burnt the poor in the U.S. pretty bad. If your goal is to get your game into the hands of the most customers, consider offering 'regional' pricing for all the homeless in central park who might live within a couple dozen feet of the most expensive apartments in the world. It turns out regional pricing kinda sucks because wealth isn't distributed evenly across any region.
The economy is global, not regional, there are rich and poor people everywhere in differing and ever changing proportions independent of how borders might be drawn on the map. If you want to make it affordable to an economic bracket, go ahead and lower your price or offer low income credit or something, don't make it so you can't buy your digital game while connected to the internet in an arbitrary country.
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.
The demographics that can't afford the game (e.g. certain overseas countries, or low-income individuals even in domestic markets and otherwise-more-affluent overseas markets) will be out of luck only until the game goes on sale (whether temporarily or permanently; older games tend to be cheaper than newer games).
In other words: setting a lower pricepoint for specific countries to attract more sales in those countries is a pretty major footgun when it comes to actual revenue from those sales. Better to keep the price even across all markets, then only drop the price if you want more sales (and in smaller increments than "here's a 90% discount just because you happen to be in Thailand"). Trying to establish different prices for different locales is a premature "optimization" at its worst.
The actual reason for separated national markets was that selling to a national market once upon a time involved actually getting a physical good (e.g. a cartridge or optical disc) to a customer in a different nation; for most game developers, it's easier to go through a distributor for that particular market than to try to tackle all the logistics themselves. Nowadays there's no physical good being exchanged, so there's really no point to dealing with that kind of market segregation.
I think this is the fundamental point where you'll win or lose people.
If it's a game made for fun without income being a goal: yea, totally. And many of these are free for that reason, or "sold" on name-your-price platforms.
If the game was made to make money: hell no. Games are not supposed to be affordable. Games are supposed to be profitable to the creator, the price is set to optimize that. If regional pricing cuts into it (i.e. due to resales) more than it makes, it should not be done. "Access to game X" is not in any way a right or necessity, there's no obligation to make it available everywhere.
One thing that many comments here aren't mentioning is that some regions have differing requirements to be able to sell in that zone. A common issue is the rating (MA, PG, R, etc). Once, when about to release in Germany (mid 90's) we had to change red blood to green in order to not get rated as R.
So it's not as though the developers can publish without strict regional forethought, so they may as well use a pricing model that satisfies the cost of living.
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.
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.
Why not just pirate it like the developers ask? Its cheaper for you and its not supporting people profiting off fraud.
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.
Stories like this hopefully inform more people of g2a's reputation.
The other issue is if 1 in 5 of the keys on g2a aren't real but the discount is 30% off it's still rational as a customer to buy from them if you buy in bulk. It off-loads most of the cost of fraudulently obtained keys onto the developer in support costs and charge backs for fraudulent key purchases. Highlighting that rational does not equate to moral or even ethical.
Also the problem doesn't need to be pervasive across games to be devastating for a developer. If only 1 in 100 developers have this issue with g2a that doesn't stop it from possibly being a business destroying issue for that developer while it's a minor issue for the others.
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.
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).
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.
Remember, we're not talking about the equivalent of selling used digital games. Once someone redeems a code, they can't resell it.
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?
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).
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.
There are also stolen or leaked keys, but those are likely to be the minority of cases (though they may be greater in volume due to the sheer amount of keys they might have).
Not sure I'd trust the word of the company in question, especially when they try to bribe people to post articles in favor of their company.
https://twitter.com/SomeIndieGames/status/114820168714175692...
I should also note that I would trust numbers that indie developers are putting out. If things were working the way G2A claims, indie developers would be getting paid in the initial transaction and they wouldn't have a problem with key resellers to begin with. No incentive for them to lie in this situation.
(not that anyone is implying that they shouldn't trust indie devs: but in case anyone is wondering where a more credible source for information is, I feel like that's a good place to look given the lack of incentive for them to be lying about this)
As in G2A is not accountable for fees and penalties if a user fraudulently sells a key.
G2A recently got busted by trying to get positive stories posted without attribution https://twitter.com/SomeIndieGames/status/114820168714175692...
I suppose it could be an issue if the keys were being bought directly from the developer's own website, but G2A is offering to reimburse the developer for 10x the cost of the chargeback in such cases, and the developer in the original article is claiming the real problem is with fraudulent keys being bought on Steam, not on the developers' own websites.
You either buy it directly to your account, or gift it directly to a friend. Either way, it's locked to an account at the point of purchase.
Steam does allow developers to generate steam keys, which the developers can sell elsewhere (or give away). But then steam isn't handling the payment processing, and whoever is, often developers, is responsible for handling chargebacks.
ie - chargeback occurs and they disable the game for that key?
In short, G2A pretends that the problem isn't big enough, but indie developers disagree. It's taking them far too much time and money to deal with the abuses from their side, and G2A caters to AAA titles (that can afford to deal with these issues) in order to downgrade the size of the problem.
Edit: Hi G2A employees! This comment went from +5 to 0 in like five minutes.
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.
To be clear, the only thing in the article about this is the direct quote from G2A's representative about this. The article didn't present any independent information to confirm this.
Which means we only have G2A's word that the volume is very low and punishable.
I personally don't fully trust G2A in this scenario, though I'm probably biased.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe, maybe not. DRM costs money and imperfect DRM can cost future customers, so in the case of an indy developer, it might be a net loss.
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.
I'm pretty sure I costed Microsoft money when I was younger and poorer, because I knew how to download most security updates for my pirated Windows without getting caught, so I costed then bandwidth and payed nothing.
Maybe they let that happen or did not work as hard as they could have to prevent it because they figured they'd recover their investment when I grew up and became a paying customer.
The marginal cost on infrastructure is like the marginal cost on bandwidth: really small.
Ah, you could have just said it's a matter of wording. Yes, what I meant is you could sell, and make a loss. So in order to drive up sales hoping that it will actually start a positive feedback loop where the growing community attracts more buyers, you could sell your software at different prices. You probably noticed even some cloud services sell for different prices depending on country (MS gives you some cloud things 20% more expensive in Germany as opposed to US).
And saying the infrastructure is just bandwidth is like saying you just a keyboard to code. Random example, I assume many big name games face similar challenges. [0] I think we can agree maintaining a setup that allows players all over the world to play in good conditions while preventing cheating, and many, many other services costs and involve quite a bit more than just the net link.
[0] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2895129/big-data-and-ba...
Yes, there are lots of other costs for running a network service besides bandwidth. But those are heavily if not completely independent of the number of users. Your anti-cheating effort costs about the same regardless of whether you have a million users or ten million users.
So you can sell the game at a loss meaning once your sales have dried up you haven been able to make a profit or even cover your costs. And you can "sell at a loss in one country" meaning you're willing to let that one country not cover its share of the predicted income (meaning if you sold everywhere like that you'd go bankrupt fast) just because you can get more market share. And some other region will compensate.
I'm sorry you would rather nitpick on the wording instead of the point being made, which I'm sure I explained pretty clearly. And this already exists in practice so obviously the logic behind it is sound.
> But those are heavily if not completely independent of the number of users.
So what if the number of users/sessions hosted increased by 3 orders of magnitude, right? The databases, the game servers, the login servers, the web servers, security, management, and everything else that also has to be geo-located will just balloon to accommodate the extra users or markets at no cost as all IT infrastructure tends to do.
Again, here are some random numbers from almost a decade ago for a game that's probably far less demanding than anything today [0]. Having x US servers vs. having 3x US servers and 5x Asia servers is not quite "independent" of user numbers and location.
[0] http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdceurope2011/slides/Ma...
It's easy to "win" an argument if you just label all information that would make you wrong as "irrelevant", isn't it?
It’s perfectly valid to talk about overall profitability when accounting for non-marginal costs, but that’s not the phrase you use to talk about it, and saying that some units are sold at a loss while others are not is nonsensical in that context.
Yes, and that is the error. The number of copies is not static, and might as well be considered infinite. With digital goods there is effectively no limit on the number of copies which can be produced at near-zero marginal cost, so cost per copy is a meaningless metric. Unlike physical goods where you need to recoup your variable costs for materials, labor, and capital on each item sold before you can even think about offsetting the fixed cost of R&D, every sale of a digital good contributes to the bottom line regardless of the price.
The single most expensive game to develop to date was apparently Star Wars: The Old Republic at $200 million[1]. If each of the 7.7 billion people on the planet had a copy, however, the development cost per copy would only be about $0.026, affordable even for the most limited budgets. Say that 5% of the population would be interested in trying it out at a price of just $0.25 per copy: that's $481M in revenues, or $281M profit. Or they could choose to make it a monthly subscription service at prices attractive to just 1-2 million players and lose money overall while charging subscribers $100 apiece. Same development cost, different distribution models. There is no predetermined cost per copy below which they are selling at a loss and above which they are selling for a profit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
This isn't pedantry, this is discussing the actual topic of the conversation.
If the answer to your question was "no way" then software would be the one guaranteed way to swim in money.
Most of markets segments I can think of (pharmaceutical, automotive, SAAS) do it in one way (direct price discrimination) or another (separate products for a region).
Just about any commodity would qualify. Oil companies aren’t giving discounts to poorer countries or selling them a cheaper inferior product.
Lots of indie software makers can’t be bothered to put in the effort to target individual countries, and just sell at one price worldwide. I believe both Apple’s and Google’s app stores work this way, with no ability to set a different price in different countries.
Google play supports setting different prices by country.
I’m saying, the fact that they don’t proves that it’s not necessary.
These two statements are perfectly compatible with each other.
Again: I’m not arguing for or against price discrimination. I’m just saying it’s not a need.
To draw on the bakery allegory in another comment, I think we can agree it would b nonsensical for the bakery giving away free leftover bread to homeless people to put controls in place that prohibits them from sharing their bread with others.
But in this case its the exact same product. If I'm a bakery owner and I give fresh out of the oven bread for cheaper/free to homeless folks, and I watch them turn around and sell it to my own customers, well, that freagin sucks.
- Keep giving bread and lose an indeterminate amount of business from my target audience
- Limit the rights of the people who I gave the bread to
- Stop giving bread at all.
If #2 is not possible, then it's either "I take a business hit for trying to provide a service to the less fortunate" or "Fuck the less fortunate".
So now with that said, how I feel about it? Yeah, I think being able to limit the rights of the people I give the bread to is the best of all options. A real world example of this is low income housing, where the recipient isn't allowed to sublet their place, because that would be all sorts of fucked up. Obviously a game key is not anywhere near as big of a deal, but it is a similar principle if we want businesses to be able to open up to as many markets as possible (not just for their own sakes)
Its basically the Airbnb scenario.
It's a bogus argument - any American struggling to afford the high cost of medication in America will tell you that geography is a very poor predictor of affordability. And anybody who has a sizable Steam library can tell you how the summer and winter sales get very expensive, very quickly.
Healthcare should be relatively cheap. Entertainment should be relatively expensive. Prices should be globally stable.
That's not going to work, people are more willing to spend for a higher standard of healthcare than they are a higher standard of entertainment. In fact the dollar value of one additional year of life is virtually unlimited, if not to the state, to the person whose life it is.
If a game is too expensive, you move to another game or other cheap entertainment. If a drug is expensive, you pray that there's a cheap generic, which in some cases there isn't.
The idea that prices should be globally stable works in the imaginary world where currency conversions hold real income constant, but that's just not true.
Luxury items are already sold using value-based pricing rather than cost-based pricing. If I make $100 and have to pay $10 for a game, that's the same relative value as if I made $1000 and paid $100.
Of course, that doesn't mean you don't feel ripped off if you're paying the higher price. I certainly do when I get charged €60 for a game that in the US costs $60 (which should be €53.54 at current exchange rate).
> how is it ethical to price discriminate against Western consumers when it comes to video games, but unethical when it comes to prescription drug costs?
Because you will not die without the hot new video game.
And honestly, although I think charging individuals different drug prices is ethically suspect, I'm ok with charging national health systems (modestly) different prices for drugs. It seems fair to me that relatively rich countries pay more of the R&D costs, because that way we get more drug development in total, which benefits everybody.
That logic applies even more so to entertainment. Whether you set a single global price high or low, you reduce the amount of money available for development costs, meaning fewer and worse games. (And if you set it high, you pointlessly prevent a lot of poorer people from having fun.)
Could you expand on this? If we are looking at pricing discrimination that still allows them to buy it, then they aren't going to die either way. If it is immoral to use their life to make money, then selling it at any more than cost is immoral, and potentially even selling it at cost is immoral since that cost includes some amount of niceties that aren't required to produce the drug. (does the person making the drug really need to earn that much, couldn't they do with a bit less pay?)
Also, given that even if you fully minimize costs and sell the drug exactly at cost, there are still some who can't afford it, so if you want to maximize the number of people who can afford the drug then pricing discrimination is still preferable. If upping the price in one region lets you lower the price in another (remember, we are already selling it exactly at costs), and the people in the first region has more income to spend on drugs, is that not the far more ethical than demanding it be equal costs to everyone even when people in poorer areas end up being denied the drug due to pricing? In effect, the pricing discrimination is a tax on the richer individuals buying the drugs to allow poorer individuals to buy the drug (within the hypothetical where you are selling it at cost).
I guess even deeper then is the question if the person making the drugs should even be profiting off the work. They need to eat and have a place to sleep, but if they require more than the bare minimum salary possible aren't they now increasing the cost to product the drug, resulting people having to pay more to live, just so they can have more money?
Of course, there is the issue that if they can't make enough money to attract them, then they'll pick a different line of work. Is it wrong or immoral for them to do that? To demand a certain level of compensation or they work elsewhere, even though they could survive off of less money while making the drugs at lower cost? If the end worker can demand a premium despite the impact on the lives of those who depend upon the drug, why can't others involved in the production of the drug?
Overall, it makes a nice sound bite, but I don't understand the actual reasoning implied.
However, one can't price gouge on games. There are infinite games to play, many of them free and a great many more are inexpensive. If people don't get a particular game, they will not die or live a terrible life. So game sellers can price as they please and set reasonable terms without any big ethical issues.
I don't see anything unethical in offering health insurance at a loss (taxpayer funded) only to poor people.
Pricing the different regions differently also "leaves money on the table", as there are wealthy people everywhere. Ideally you'd extract the maximum people are willing to pay, regardless of location.
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...
Indies will continue to seek profits via traditional means; I expect the Switch will be a mainstay for much of the next decade.
Not necessarily. Many gamers have huge libraries of games that they have never played, or played for a little and then never played again. You could argue that it's silly for those gamers to buy those games, but it happens a lot.
> 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.
Also, they have no way to check the status of the keys. So, if a user doesn't report an issue, they'll never know about it. Given that the article says that most users don't notice keys being revoked, it wouldn't be surprising at all if the majority of issues never get reported.
Every time that's happened to me (for example, a time-limited version of a game or a beta), Steam presents a notification that the game has been removed from my library.
https://content.invisioncic.com/r273030/monthly_2017_05/Unti...
Are you basing this off the recent stunt they tried to pull getting people to publish favorable articles for them?
That was unacceptable of course but also I see why they are desperate to improve their reputation given the recent smear campaign against them.
Do you have examples of other instances where they were shown to be dishonest?
A bunch of esports teams dropped them as sponsors years ago after realizing they not an honest business. Their buyer protection service (G2A shield) is a scam. There's also this fun AMA they did https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rg9mo/we_work_for_g2...
There's more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/keyresellers
So yeah if I bought some small indie game form G2A and it gets revoked 3 months later, chances are I'd never notice.
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.
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.
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...)
https://i.imgur.com/faOpBWE.png (Slightly different wording with reference to third party sellers, yellow instead of red border.)
No matter how non-shady any secondary market attempts to operate, the systems that would have to exist for them to actually reduce these problems would require business cooperation with the very companies that seek to kill the First Sale Doctrine through technical means.
Humble gets their keys from the developers. GMG, so far as I know, does, too.
G2A doesn't get them from the devs. They're a lot cheaper because the dev isn't setting the price. Whoever is obtaining the keys (illegally or otherwise) is setting the price there.
I look at it this way: If the price is too good to be true and you don't already know the site, it's probably not legit.
They're all okay, but shady.
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.
The industry needs rather a proper fix. How this would look like, I have no idea.
I previously had my mostly empty UPlay account hijacked by someone with a Kazakhstan IP. As I recall they renamed the account and added new friends and had been playing a game I'd received free, but didn't change the password. Mostly just spurred me to switch everything feasible to 2FA.
2. (unrelated to article) My gaijin.net (warthunder) account has been hacked ages ago, and since I didn't spend a single euro on it, I never really cared. I just observe where people log in from (I get an email for every weird login), and it's quite interesting.
3. most likely changing the password would have required email access
3. This I didn't consider.
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.
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?
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)
The devs gets nothing and pays fees on top, the trader just goes poof and the end user is pissed because their game was removed from their steam library.
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.
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.
> The site said it would also start offering developers refunds worth 10 times the sum lost if they could prove keys had been sold on G2A after being bought with stolen credit card details.
The developer interviewed in the original article claims that doesn't matter because the stolen keys are being bought on Steam, not on the developer's own sites:
> Mr Rose responded saying most developers relied on sales via Steam and other third-party stores rather than their own sites, so G2A's refund offer was a "red herring".
But again, shouldn't Steam be the one dealing with the problem in that case? Why do the developers care?
What is it, specifically, that devs are having to do when a fraudulent key gets used? The article doesn't make that very clear.
A problem that costs 30% of revenue is something that I would consider a hard problem to deal with.
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.
The fact that indies are saying they'd prefer the game to be pirated than bought through G2A should tell you all you need.
No. The article clearly points out the following scenarios:
1. A game is priced differently in different markets / geographies, and they only want to prevent reselling from a cheaper market to a more expensive one. (The obvious solution is to price everything at the highest price point, but if you think that's good for either sellers or buyers you're very confused.)
2. A game is purchased, re-sold, and refunded via a credit card chargeback. The issue is not with reselling but with voiding the original sale.
> if this is really such a big problem, just track where your keys are being used
I suspect developers don't have access to this, as these are e.g. Steam keys. (And again, "Avoid Steam and implement your own copy-protection" isn't good for anyone.)
Thanks for the strawman. I actually think what they should do is:
"Avoid steam and not use copy-protection"
If their game is good, it will sell; if it doesn't, it's just not good enough. But at least people who pirate a game may still buy it at some point; once they buy the game, even from an illegitimate source, how likely is it that they will buy it again for the full price?
I’d say the null hypothesis is that pirates won’t rebuy. I don’t think there’s evidence that pirates rebuy on a scale that matters. Not worth optimizing for.
Instead you aim to price the product and ensure availability in a way where the friction is low and the value is high for the price so you can maximize revenue. Fortunately, app stores like Apple’s have created a safe haven for this sort of thing.
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.
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.
Although bundle sellers, like Humble Bundle, have been a popular target of credit card fraudsters:
https://developer.humblebundle.com/post/147806409802/humble-...
(Genuine question. It sorta seems to me like one appeal of this market is it doesn't weigh on the conscience like piracy.)
These time limited keys would be (almost) worthless.
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.
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.
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".