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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, how do these illegitimate keys get obtained to begin with? Is it some kind of payment fraud where keys are obtained through fraud and the payments then get reversed? If so why don't the keys get invalidated when the associated payment is disputed?

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I could imagine:

1. Mr evil uses stolen credit cards to buy game licenses.

2. Mr Evil sells those game licenses on this marketplace to Alice.

3. Alice has paid her own money for this game, starts playing it, maybe buys a few in-game items.

4. The original card owner disputes the charges.

5. Now, if the game manufacturer disables the game remotely, they will take a PR hit from Alices vocal complaints on twitter. Yet if they don't disable the game remotely, they continue to loose revenue.

Exactly this.

Typically the keys come from legitimate promotions such as the Humble Bundle, but purchased (as you said) with stolen card details.

Also, don't forget that the stolen credit card charge back incurs fees to the developer. So not only do they lose (potential) revenue, they actively lose money.

One common route is game bundles. They’ll ask for 20000 keys “just to start” and pay you 10% of total bundle revenue.

Surprise surprise, the bundle sells 150 units, you make $5, and suddenly you have 50 copies of your game being activated everyday for the next year.

Just a note to indie devs out there: unless it’s a colossal site like Humble Bundle, all game bundles are scams. Ask them if they can return unused keys to you after the bundle finishes and they’ll suddenly stop replying. Legitimate sites have no problem doing this if sales really ended after the bundle did.

There's nothing wrong with this. Someone who legitimately buys keys from a bundle should be able to resell them.

I'm pretty sure the comment you are replying to is talking about the group/company/person that runs the bundle. They ask for 20,000 keys, sell 150 legitimately, and then sell the rest of the 20,000 on the gray/black market. Reselling a key you bought legitimately isn't the issue here AFAICT.

I think the point is that the people -running- the bundle are reselling all of the keys that didn’t sell as part of a bundle. Not the end customer who purchased a bundle.

Yes, lots of stolen credit cards and automated account creation in Steam. I understand that the publishers had to ban the accounts by hand to invalidate the keys.

As well as credit card fraud, I believe some shady key resellers buy keys in poorer countries where the game's price is low, and make a profit reselling the keys in richer countries, for a price somewhere between what they paid for the key, and the legitimate price in that country.

If the game is on sale in the poorer country, all the better for the reseller.

With the Internet, I imagine this is all very easily done.

Perhaps this is a game dev stealing keys from their employer and reselling?

A couple of ways I've seen are:

Pretending to be an "influencer" so you get free press keys

Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region

Buying a bunch of keys during a sale, then reselling them a couple of months after the game is no longer on sale

All of those are completely above water, legally speaking. There's even a term for that: arbitrage.

The first is probably Fraud by False Representation if you do it in England and Wales. ("Made a false representation, dishonestly, knowing that the representation was or might be untrue or misleading, with intent to make a gain for himself or another, to cause loss to another or to expose another to risk of loss.")

Though note that Factorio never goes on sale.

Is it the same price everywhere in the world though?

It is not.

Steam has lower prices in some countries. Factorio sells for the equivalent of $12 in India while it sells for $30 elsewhere. Most games are similarly discounted. That said, someone who buys it from Steam can't gift the game (or presumably extract a key) to someone in a different country. If you bought the game in India, only an Indian account can play it.

You can see the prices per region here:

https://steamdb.info/app/427520/

> Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region

Notice that companies can do that with labor and buildings and tax evasion, and it's 'situation normal'... But when real humans try to, its bad and illegal and horrible.

Hmm.

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