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Comment by buildzr | Hacker News Reader

Many of those codes are readily available via legitimate means - indie games often get published in bundles and the codes get resold, GPU makers and developers often do giveaways with free game keys, etc. There are many cases in which the keys are obtained in perfectly legitimate ways.

I mean, it seems like they are removing games purchased fraudulently, Steam notifies you when one of your games is removed for this reason, yet despite many G2A purchases I'm yet to have a game removed, is there any evidence that this is actually as rampant as is claimed?

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Reselling keys from bundles is also a problem. I don't have a link handy but I was reading just the other day some indie developer complaining that they're seeing more keys from Humble Bundle being redeemed many months after the bundle that had them than actual sales on Steam, and they claimed G2A was the cause (being a means by which people could sell their old bundle keys that they didn't want).

More specifically, they said this practice serves as a very strong discouragement from indie games ever participating in bundles again, because the bundle economics depend on many (most?) of the keys either not being redeemed, or being redeemed by people who would otherwise not purchase the actual game. But when people who want the game are able, many months later, to pay a fraction of the price for a key sourced from a bundle, this really hurts sales for the game and makes the bundle a net negative instead of the positive it's supposed to be.

> this practice serves as a very strong discouragement from indie games ever participating in bundles again, because the bundle economics depend on many (most?) of the keys either not being redeemed

This isn't exactly a compelling argument in favor of having the bundles around.

What do you mean? Bundle terms usually forbid redeeming of the keys by anyone other than the bundle purchaser, but that generally can't actually be tracked (I know Humble Bundle always tells me that the steam keys should only ever be redeemed by me, but ultimately they're just keys with no technical means of enforcing that restriction). The fact that people are breaking these terms and selling the keys doesn't mean the concept of bundles is flawed. In the absence of marketplaces like G2A key reselling isn't a big deal because you really need the marketplace to find someone else who's willing to pay for it.

The fact that people are breaking the terms of sale doesn't necessarily mean the concept of bundles is flawed. The fact that the economic viability of bundles depends on the bundled products being purchased almost exclusively by people who don't want them does indicate that the concept is flawed.

Not at all, I have bought a few bundles, I've no interest in playing all the games, just a subset of them.

That subset is going to be different for most purchasers.

I'm not talking about like "buy Awesome FPS 2, get Awesome FPS 1 in a bundle for $1 more", I'm talking about bundles that collect a bunch of disparate games. People buy these bundles because they only want a few of the games. And then companies like Humble Bundle sell bundles where you don't even know what they contain until you buy them, so it's entirely possible to buy a bundle where you end up not playing any of the games in the bundle.

Bundle operators and game developers engage with consumers on the grounds that the keys won't be resold individually. However, they have no way to control this. So they make reseller/G2A responsible for complying with terms of an unenforceable honor code. Seems a little arbitrary to me. It's akin to a grocery asking you not to sell eggs individually from a carton you just bought from them. (How are they gonna enforce it?... And as a consumer, are you even OK with not having full control over what is now your property?)

I think this is a problem with the business model, rather than the problem with "unethical" resellers. So you either give up on the business model, as many game devs are doing, or you find ways to enforce it. Either start suing users who resell keys, or partner with the likes of Steam to create a system in which keys can't be activated individually.

The problem with resellers like G2A is there's no large legitimate source of keys to resell. They may not be responsible for stealing the keys / breaking terms of service on key sources themselves, but they are acting exactly like a fence for stolen goods, and they know the keys they're selling are almost certainly not legitimately allowed to be sold in this way.

If I bought that key in a bundle, I own it fair and square and I'll do what I want with it. If resellers are helping with that, I view that as a positive.

Except you don't. Every bundle I've been a part of says you can't resell the keys. That's kind of the whole point of the bundle; you're not expected to actively want to purchase every item in the bundle, but the value you get out of it is still worth more than you paid for it, and the developers of the software get to reach users that otherwise wouldn't have bought the game anyway, thus gaining a bit of money from those users and, hopefully, causing increased word-of-mouth sales, or for a multiplayer game causing the player numbers to go up and thus produce better network effects.

If you resell the keys, you're breaking the bundle's terms of service and actively harming the developers involved.

Imagine if they sent you each game on a separate CD and told you "but don't sell the ones you don't want", you'd think that was ridiculous, right?

That's exactly how stupid this idea is. I own the products I purchased, just because it's not a physical copy doesn't mean I have any less rights to it. I highly doubt their ToS would hold up, I consider it highly immoral to attempt to deny people the rights to sell or trade their own purchases.

> just because it's not a physical copy doesn't mean I have any less rights to it

It actually does.

There are surprising legal precedents on keys resale:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-10-09-digital-ri...

It seems that the situation is currently unclear (at least in certain parts of the world), but not obviously illegal.

It seems odd that there's no way to track this, seems a trivial thing for steam to add.

Even something as simple as a checksum of the game key needing to match the last digit of your steam id would solve the problem, and would be trivial for humble/steam to implement. Every time someone requests a key from their bundle, the bundler just had to find a remaining key that matches.

Edit: I originally speculated that perhaps it wasn't in Steam's interest to support this, but thinking about it, they're losing their cut of these dodgy sales.

For a short while, you could only redeem games on steam by linking your account with Humble Bundle. They would redeem the key with a server side API. This didn't last long, though, and they reverted back to just giving you the keys manually.

> Reselling keys from bundles is also a problem. I don't have a link handy but I was reading just the other day some indie developer complaining that they're seeing more keys from Humble Bundle being redeemed many months after the bundle that had them than actual sales on Steam, and they claimed G2A was the cause (being a means by which people could sell their old bundle keys that they didn't want).

The thing is, there's no guarantee that that is the case. I still have unredeemed keys from (year) old bundles that I intend to redeem, I just haven't got around to it because there are more important things to do with my time.

The responsibility for that one lies solely on the developer deciding to put the game in a bundle. Indeed I'd say that was a bad decision on their part.

It's not supposed to be a bad decision. Bundle economics actually work¹ in the absence of key reselling. Bundle keys are not allowed to be resold by the terms of any bundle I've ever looked at, so it hardly seems fair to blame the developers when the users are the ones breaking the ToS, and marketplaces like G2A are actively soliciting this behavior.

¹For the most part. It's not always good for 100% of the people involved, but on the balance it's supposed to be a good deal for everyone.

So basically, bundle economics work if you ignore the existence of the market for those games.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

You would never cut a software developer slack for putting "no reverse engineering, no exploitation" in the ToS and then being surprised when vulnerabilities are discovered, business people need to consider basic stuff like this too. Markets for things exist outside of yours.

Additionally, I never even agreed to a ToS buying the early Humble Bundles at least and a hidden ToS is unenforceable at best.

A lot of those game bundles intentionally underpromote the bundles so that they get maybe 100 sales, then they resell the keys for higher margins with no cash going to the dev.

If a bundle company asks for 10000 keys and their bundles are clearly only selling 200 units each, their bundles are just a front for the real money. Legit operations return all unused keys. Dirty operations (the vast majority of bundles) will block your emails the minute you mention returning keys.

Why do devs do business with a huge number of fly by night minor bundlers with no reputation?

Because a lot of them have reputations for having released successful bundles in the past. That's precisely why you shouldn't trust them. :)

I'm afraid to say it, but would blockchain tech improve provenance tracking of these codes and reduce fencing?

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