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.
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.
> 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.
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.