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Comment by Legogris | Hacker News Reader

In order to have a conversation about this, we need to separate the different scenarios conflated here:

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.

View on HN

>IMO it's both counterproductive and futile to keep national markets separated.

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.

Well, whether you can afford something or not doesn't have to be a matter of nationality.

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.

>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?

It's a pretty clumsy system because it's putting a physical constraint on a digital product that's otherwise possible to get everywhere on earth, provided some asshole in a boardroom doesn't throw a fit (which is evidently what happened when region locking games became common). It's a physical constraint that doesn't even work as intended, in fact it probably harms the brand and the product more than anything.

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.

I think that's called rent-seeking.

It's nigh impossible for a video game to be rent-seeking, since games are completely optional and often worse to play than not play. Only the few games that infect a whole culture can be thought of as needs subject to rent-seeking due to social pressures.

It's call market segmentation.

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.

Well, maybe just price the game 5$ for everyone and let ALL poor people pirate it as they please...

Okay, so in this scenario, either 1) the developer is losing money on every sale to a Thai customer, or 2) the developer is overcharging US customers. Either way, the developer does indeed seem to lack any incentive to have separate pricing for Thai customers; why take on those support costs for a fraction of the revenue when you still have Americans paying full price?

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.

Books and cartridge games had regional pricing simply because it optimized profits. It isn't a moral question.

>The game is supposed to be affordable!

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.

> IMO it's both counterproductive and futile to keep national markets separated.

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.

Regional pricing usually means the product is encumbered with region-locking DRM... and honestly it makes sense but I hate region locking DRM.

"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..."

I'd rather feel ripped off, but have access to a game, than to not have access to the game at all. Of course, its easy to say that now and in reality it probably drives people to piracy. Its a difficult problem.

Wouldn't it make sense to region lock cheaper versions, while keeping the "fully priced" version for non-underprivileged markets unlocked? AFAIK that's how it is done, and it makes some sense. However, I admit, I thought through the scenario for a grand total of 5 minutes, so I probably have missed something.

The companies have no issue in using labor from "underprivileged" markets, so why shouldn't we customers be able to buy from wherever?

Good for the goose, good for the gander.

I get it that this is a joke, but more seriously I'd argue most labor is "region locked". Likely to within a few dozen miles of where you live.

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).

A bit of a sidenote before I address your point directly: do you have a source confirming that all those companies that favor regional pricing for their games use labor from "underprivileged" markets?

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.

>do you have a source confirming that all those companies that favor regional pricing for their games use labor from "underprivileged" markets?

If not directly, they still benefit indirectly from any downward pressure put on wages.

> so cue piracy

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".

Say hello to my leetle VPN.

Instead of price discrimination based on location, do it by time.

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 .

That's Steam sales, modulo the localisations.

Other people speak English too.

Why would "poor folks" in other markets wait?

They don't have to, but it's probably because they don't have enough in their entertainment budget to buy at the higher price.

They could always pirate now, and then buy a catch-up license at a price they could better afford at a later time.

That is basically already the reality of Steam with the discounts, albeit it timed, in addition to regional pricing.

Why should people in underprivileged markets have to wait years before they can play the game?

Why should a development studio have to wait years before they can pay off the costs of production? The only people who have some inherent right to enjoy their product are the ones who created it. Samuel Clemens directed that the Autobiography of Mark Twain be published 100 years after his death, which was 2010. Why did we have to wait for that? Because of intellectual property laws.

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?

Just make it localized in the region language only for that price. Ok, doesn't work with Nigeria, since they speak english. But it would work in Asia, and in a lot of other African and south American countries.

Now you are conflating geography with language.

On that note: why not just skip geography entirely? Just sell the localized versions worldwide, which each translation being priced according to what the users of the respective languages would on average be willing/able to pay.

Yes but it can be a useful business approximation depending of your target.

Well, that's just not true. It can be, but most stores I know just focus on limiting your pricing based on geographical location, while making it harder to spoof your address. DRM just isn't a factor here.

This isn't limited to digital goods.

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...

That same game will be $30 in a year, $20 on sale shortly after that, and eventually you can probably find a sale for $10 while the game is still somewhat fresh. Why not schedule regional releases to coincide with the changing price floor in privileged markets?

Because you'll get a lot more sales in developing countries at $10 when the game has the latest tech, is freshly released, has load of buzz and is being heavily marketed, than you would 5 years later for the same price.

Plus in 5 years the company might not have the same sales and marketing teams, management or even owners.

I think your time table is questionable. Within a year, a $60 game will generally be $30, and $20 or less a year after that. I don't think you have to get total price parity for a regional release. Fewer people in the privileged markets are going to bother seeking out the game in another region to save $5 or $10 than they are to save $40 or $50.

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.

Latest tech is far less important for games these days. I have a laptop that is 4 years old currently (admittedly it was pretty top end when I brought it) and it still runs latest games perfectly fine, and I'm still not really seeing any need to replace it. Last year's Farcry 5 ran at close to max settings.

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.

Because anything that impacts availability will result in piracy.

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).

Because no one wants to wait, so they’ll just pirate it. This isn’t judgmental. It’s just fact. That’s how consumers behave. If you don’t make something instantly available, people will pirate. Pricing is a mechanism you have to affect that given that you can’t sell at the lower price everywhere and the higher price will lock out people in certain places.

Piracy ain't forever, though; eventually folks (myself included) might end up buying the game for various reasons (chief among them being the relative bugginess of pirated versions, incompatibility with mods, inability to use online features, or sometimes even just feeling guilty).

For single player games that works. Artwork gets out of date, but hardly a dealbreaker (perhaps in VR?). However multiplayer games might become less popular over the course of 2 or 3 years. To the point where they're less fun.

Revenue over time is basically a log graph. Some games are practically worthless a year after release (see: yearly AAA junk)

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.

I wonder how services like Stadia will play into this moving forward.

Why not get a copy in Nigeria, have a server hosted there, and just play it streaming.

latency

Latency.

La cy ten

Also out of order packets and drops.

latency

Stadia will completely avoid the issue of key resellers since I would imagine they are completely removed from the system of keys issued from publishers. They also have only announced plans to launch in US and Europe currently and it may never make economical sense to have an African datacenter for Stadia.

latency?

  > You have to get back the 10s of millions of dollars you spent somehow (if the game has a big budget!).

FTFY. Or, FTFE. Numerous examples.

You read this wrong. I was specifically mentioning AAA games with large examples to make the point more obvious. I then mentioned "if the game is good" because if it isn't you shouldn't expect to get your investment back.

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.

Creeping up to that 100M mark for AAA at this point.

I feel "if the game was big" would've been more fitting than "good". Reading it (can) imply any game that didn't spend money is bad.

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!

It does make sense but the implementation doesn't at all. There are plenty of people in underprivileged markets in the US who can't afford a $60 game. Plenty of people in Lagos who can comfortably afford that $60 game as well.

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.

> If I'm homeless in SF or NYC

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.

Homeless people can own PCs and cell phones, believe it or not. But homeless, broke, college student, single parent, paycheck to paycheck, medical bills, etc. lots of reasons why a $60 game can be completely out of reach for a lot of people in the U.S., so why can't we have subsidized low income pricing here as well, if the whole point of regional pricing is to get games into the hands of people who can't afford to spend $60 on the title?

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.

There's plenty of middle ground between $60 and $2, and it ain't like a $60 game can't go on sale every once in awhile to attract people who would otherwise be unable to afford it. Most games also get cheaper as they age, giving more permanent opportunities for it to be affordable to a broader and broader base.

> 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.

Market segregation is somewhat mitigated by selling per-language keys.

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.

Wow so if I learn Russian I can save a lot of money on video games?

I could save a ton of money on video games if I learned Japanese, considering the import copies tend to be way cheaper than the limited-production English runs of many niche JRPGs.

Depends on the game and how you buy it. In general, buying digital is easier and cheaper in the US, due to more PC releases and aggressive price cuts and sales. Japanese digital stores have much less frequent and less generous sales, and older games don't get their base prices reduced by much.

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.

Learning Russian just to save money on videogames is a pretty bad strategy when you account for opportunity costs - though I accept people sometimes find great amounts of motivation in silly things.

Well, it has the added benefit of "still knowing the language" after you finish the game.

That's why I said just. The "knowing the language" part can be leveraged in other ways for great benefit, both spiritual and financial.

It's how I mostly learned English! Tho local versions often being censored [0] was a major motivating factor for that.

There are a couple of Russian games out there with supposedly very good Russian VO, like the Stalker or Metro series.

[0] http://www.dorkly.com/post/80945/germany-censorship

New startup idea: learn foreign languages by playing pirated copies of foreign language games.

Would you guess how I learned English?

(Well, OK, the copies of Fallout and StarCraft I had were both legit.)

You joke, but there are thousands of thousands people learn language this way.

Another, somewhat depressing, way of looking at it is that we all could have learned half a dozen languages in the time we spend browsing and posting to no real end on forums and various other media such as this. And e.g. learning Russian would make you feel good at the end of it. Whereas when you look back at the years of social media (which, again I would include sites such as this) it all seems like quite a tremendous waste of time. Yeah, we're totally changing the world by expressing and sharing our views, values, and opinions. /s

I read HN for the articles.

Another piracy incentive for people who prefer the original over the typically low-effort translation. Even applies when the original is in a third language, the English translation tends to be higher quality (for a multitude of reasons).

Guess it's another instance of "why we can't have nice things".

Not an expert, but surely regional pricing makes sense for countries with a much lower average income (or the reverse).

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!

It has been proven again and again that price discrimination leads to better market efficiency (more people get to use the product, and the seller makes more), but it is also true that pretty much everyone viscerally hates it.

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.

> ... price discrimination leads to better market efficiency ... but it is also true that pretty much everyone viscerally hates it.

The same dynamic is true for markets generally and even economic thinking; truly sad facts!

The problem with review keys being done with limited time is that once the license expires, its the game and developer that get blamed and get poor reviews.

One of the biggest problem with resellers is review-key fraud

I wonder why Steam and others don't support extra field in keys that's fixed, but affects the generation algorithm[0]? So instead of:

  1234-5678-90AB-CDEF

you'd have

  1234-REVIEW-5678-90AB-CDEF

and for regular keys (say, with language discrimination):

  3141-PLLANG-5926-5358-9793

This way it would be clear at the point of sale whether or not you bought the kind of key that was advertised. Steam and others could spam the press to proliferate information about what "REVIEW" vs. "xxLANG" vs. "ANYVER" vs. whatever means, so buyers using reselling platforms would be educated and could push the problem back to where it was created in the first place. Similarly, sellers of keys couldn't cheat and pass review keys as regular ones.

[0] - So that you can't derive a key of one type from the key of another type.

You can send a key out that will only unlock a Review "branch" of a steam game. The game itself can be clearly marked as a review copy and can even be a cut down copy of the game if you want.

For Void Bastards we often have multiple branches going out to different groups for different things.

This seems easy to address: when the game is first started with a review key, show a pop-up informing the player that this is a review key with certain limits.

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.

>2. Tactically/strategically reselling keys legitimately acquired cheaper (giveaways, review keys, differentiated pricing between markets)

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.

a simple datestamp? Not sure I've seen coupons without this functionality why would keys be different?

I would be surprised why game developers and publishers don't cancel out old keys from free giveaways to prevent hoarding and reselling then.

Steam has a page that lets developers query whether a key has been redeemed, but it only lets you query one key at a time. This makes it a pain to discover unredeemed keys. You also have no way of knowing if an unredeemed key is held by a legitimate potential player or someone trying to hoard and resell.

There is a complicating factor in that the way credit card companies operate, combined with how key sellers operate, allows for money laundering, such that the keyseller is not exposed to risk but the game seller is.

>IMO it's both counterproductive and futile to keep national markets separated.

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.

IMO regional pricing helps indie / smaller devs greatly rather than AAA studios. With regional pricing, the original price of 20$ game can be brought down to 15-10$, which can help middle class from developing countries. For AAA games, they may already have reputation and even at high price there are still fans that'll buy them.

For the case of credit card fraud, I wonder how hard it would be for developers to band together to provide a service that automates chargebacks against g2a, and maybe offers a discount code for each successful chargeback.

That would rapidly kick G2A off the credit card processing networks, assuming the allegations in the article are true.

i agree on your points. how option 2 would come about could imo only be a self inflicted would, like you said, give away too much, then complain later it hurt your margins, and even asking people to boycot a service due to your own misjudgements, that would be bad move from indie devs. (let's hope its not that :-))

Thanks for this insight. It's a good reminder that reality is nuanced and complex.

> Actual second-hand reselling of bought games

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.

> 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!

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.

One isn't buying/selling the copy of the digital good, though, they are buying/selling a license to make copies for themselves from Steam's servers and to play said game.

They’re buying/selling a one-time redeemable coupon. Gamedevs have learned to stop distributing those coupons for a variety of reasons.

I believe that coupons should not be transferable once redeemed. Selling an unredeemed coupon is, of course, acceptable.

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