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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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