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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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