> 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.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/faOpBWE.png (Slightly different wording with reference to third party sellers, yellow instead of red border.)
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...)
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.