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Comment by lelima | Hacker News Reader

"I am a developer and I have no problems with pirates because nobody is losing money or time. I have a problem with key resellers because they cost me time while they earn money for something I made with my time."

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.

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Quite a few keys are bought with stolen CCs. So when this is discovered the developer is on the hook for the charge back and penalties. This can be costly to smaller developers. So they lose less money if you just steal their game.

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...

Why is the developer on the hook for the penalties? Shouldn't that be Steam's job?

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.

Why wouldn't the developer be on the hook? If Steam doesn't want to be, they're in a powerful position where they can say, "You are liable for chargebacks. If you don't like it, don't sell here."

The developer wouldn't be on the hook because Steam is the one handling payment processing. If they don't handle CC fraud and just pass the buck to the developer who happens to be the one whose game was purchased fraudulently, that sounds like a pretty serious problem with Steam IMO.

Steam doesn't sell keys.

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.

Bingo, now I understand

Can the developers retract Steam activations?

ie - chargeback occurs and they disable the game for that key?

Steam doesn’t pass chargeback on to developers. The developers are getting hit with chargebacks when they generate Steam keys to sell on their own store, which are then targeted for fraud.

My bad. I edited it to make it hypothetical.

Chargebacks. So the idea is that the unethical agent buys the keys (either themselves or with a stolen card), sells them to a key reseller, and then initiates a chargeback to get their money back (either for themselves, or the person who had their card stolen does it to understandably get back the money stolen from them from the illegal purchase).

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.

thank you! this should be the TL;DR version of this issue :)

"Easy" solution: 3D Secure. It will affect conversion rate but that's still better than high chargeback rate which can cause you to lose the ability to process altogether.

May I suggest Jim Sterling's video on the problem? If you can get past his snarky way of addressing the problem, that is: https://youtu.be/twor6RYVtdQ

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.

> but the article/g2a says is very low amounts and punishable.

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.

I understand if the purchase were illegal but the article/g2a says is very low amounts and punishable.

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...

Agreed. This is a case of an untrustworthy "authority." It is in G2A's extreme best interest to pretend there's not a problem, I wouldn't trust any numbers that they put out as if they are authoritative.

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)

A lot of these keys are obtained through scams where the scammer pretends to be some famous YouTube or Twitch personality promising to review your game. When you're an indie struggling to make a living, sometimes you go for things that sound too good to be true. Also, giving a smaller YouTuber one or two keys isn't much skin off a gamedev's nose, if legitimate.

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).

It isn't even so extreme. As soon as you start to sell something you get people trying to get free keys from you for all sorts of reasons. They say they are students, from a poor country, going to review it, trade you for other keys, and on and on. Then people will also buy it and complain immediately about anything to get the money back. Basically people start trying to scam you from day 1.

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