The latter option does leave you with the game in your Steam account though, which is infinitely more convenient than downloading a repack made by some Russian somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
...I mean, I assume. It's not like I've ever bought a game... or several games... from resellers
downloading a repack made by some Russian somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
Never had this problem with fitgirl but rinru users unfortunately end up using some awful rate limited site usually. It's always a pleasant surprise when it's a drive link tho
The latter option does leave you with the game in your Steam account though
This is why I use them. Someone hosted a zomboid server on here but it's set to steam only, I don't want to give any money to valve if possible and I'm definitely not buying the game a third time at full price so I just used a gift card and got it for ~$7.
Honestly if I end up in a similar situation I'll probably just do it again
It's even better when you click through all the captchas and countdowns and get that juicy, juicy link only to be greeted by "This file can be downloaded by Premium Users only"
- Show
Thankfully I haven't encountered that in forever but I always get multi-part 5gb download thats capped to 1mb/s and takes 5 hours
I almost always buy games from resellers as long as it's the best price. I'd rather have something cataloged in my Steam/Epic/Origin/etc library than deal with having to deal with the installation manually.
I usually end up buying from resellers in cases where I've been waiting for one of the big Steam sales for a game, only to discover the price not discounted as much as I'd hoped.
Or, in the last case where I used cdkeys.com, I waited until the last day of the Steam Summer Sale to get a game but found out that game's discount had already ended, presumably due to timezone shenanigans or something. Went to check cdkeys and the game was still there with the discounted price so yeah, I ended up getting a grey market key.
Does cdkeys.com really count as grey-market? AFAIR, they directly purchase all their keys from legal sources. Unlike G2A and the like who shove fingers in ears and say "we're just a key marketplace".
That's actually nice to hear. I just assumed it was a Kinguin-style operation from their pricing
somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites
Why not torrent it?
I don't have a VPN, which is apparently a requirement to torrenting games, movies and TV shows in this day and age.
I do still torrent things, but I try to stick to older/obscure stuff. Guess I'm averse to getting disapproving letters from the copyright police
That sucks :/
One of the upsides of not living in the G7 countries is easier piracy, I guess.
That's quite true but still, in my case I only pirate if it's the best way to experience (and keep long term) a given piece of content.
The old school pirate philosophy. Pirate the game. If you like the game, buy it. If you loved it, pay full price. The best games are being released by indie devs that could use the money.
I wonder where sites like GreenManGaming, Fanatical, Humble and IndieGala fit into the mix as I understand it are legit keysellers?
I do not understand why publishers don’t cancel the keys. Why do they allow that parasitic industry to exist? Surely they know which key corresponds to a chargeback?
I don't think the majority of those keys are from stolen credit cards. A lot of them are just purchased in countries where the game is extremely cheap then resold for a profit.
Yeah the devs are still making their money. Just not the big first world money they want.
The indie dev behind Factorio spoke out about the grey market resellers in their blog. They talked about G2A, where they had received a bunch of fraudulent purchases, and had to pay fines to the credit card processor for each chargeback... Effectively making reseller sales cost the developer money instead of earning it. Here's the 4 blog posts talking about the issue.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-304
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-348
It pushes the price of games up in countries where the median income is a small fraction of places like the US. So it either takes away the gaming experience or encourages piracy from people who would have loved to support the developers and enjoy the game that way.
Fair enough. But devil's advocate: presumably they're still selling it there at a profit?
When it comes to individual copies of games, there's not really an "at profit" price. Either it sells enough copies to cover the development costs, or it doesn't. Like let's say an indie game cost $100k to develop, and after taxes and the storefront (i.e. Steam or the PlayStation store) the net revenue for the dev is 50% of the sell price.
Using Pizza Tower's regional pricing as an example, it's $20 in the US Steam Store and ~$0.80 in the Argentina Steam Store. So with those numbers (i.e. $10 revenue for US sales and $0.40 revenue for Argentina sales), you'd need to sell 10k copies to become break even if all sales were in the US compared to 250k copies in Argentina.
So if people all over the world are using the cheaper country's price, it becomes a lot harder for the game to become profitable, and if that abuse of the system is widespread enough, the devs will either need to raise the price so that it's no longer affordable for people in countries with lower incomes, or remove it entirely from that region. Most devs would rather people have a reasonable, legal way for people to play their games, and key resellers can make that harderProfit for game industry is relative to sales, because the cost per digital game is practically $0, it's all paid upfront.
You can sell a game for 1 cent and if all people on the planet buy it, it will probably still turn a profit.
Nothing is ever bad as places like this make it out to be. Reddit had (probably still has) the same propensity for hysteria.
Apart from the other stuff about cross country reselling, cancelling them can bring a bad image to your company although it's not even your fault.to begin with.
I mean there a number of big publishers who don’t seem to give two fucks about their image if there’s profit in it…
Here's a dev explaining it: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2618947
Apparently they do chargebacks, which costs the gamedevs money.
This is something that should have been in the opening post.
It explains why using these sites actually causes harm.
Instead of getting a game at a reduced rate without harming the dev much (just losing a sale) you're actually harming the dev.This is something I didn't know and now I'll look more at discounted games on official platforms instead of these key sites.
That's why I stopped using those sites. The only reseller I buy from now is Humble Bundle, but most things I just buy direct from the Steam Store.
Yes.
They steal a credit card, buy the game with it, and sell the game. Then the owner of the credit card (or the credit card issuer) discovers this and demands a refund from the game seller. Processing this refund requires extra work and additional money from the game seller.
For a longer explanation, with successful results, you can read https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303 .
I sorta blame big media companies for this. They have been trying to kill used movie/game sales for decades, moving to these (should be illegal) licensing models, etc. In doing that, they have failed to allow an infrastructure to form that would keep used or third-party purchases "legit" so you end up with sites that have no choice but to live in the grey area, even cdkeys.com that (allegedly) sources their keys 100% first-party legitimately.
Ultimately, credit card fraud will always be a risk. Someone installed a barcode copier on a local gas station machine a while back, and they bought 5 PS4s on it before the Bank got wise. It's a little easier in other countries because there's no physical shipping to deal with, but it's not really creating the market. As a defrauded individual, you just can't chargeback a playstation that was sold anonymously on ebay and already shipped.
Well, that makes me feel marginally better for never having bought keys in gray market sites like my friend who doesn't pirate because he's afraid of viruses, but then does that to get "amazing discounts".
What about Instant Gaming ? Is it also a website that only resales keys or do they have some kind of partnership with game devs?
Do we have any intel concerning the percentage that the editors gets in the best and worse case ? I'm wondering if it would be okay to buy AAA on such websites (or more like the company behind a game has enough money) but small editor games on official platforms...
If it's EA or Take2 my personal codex would so: Go wild.
This is no legal advice
How does g2a even work? I've bought a few keys there before and they worked. I assume these keys were given to someone from like a promo or something then they just resell it?
They let people resell keys "no questions asked" (it reduces their liability to not ask questions). Some percent of the resellers they host use stolen credit cards to sell at a loss, and nobody knows what percent. It's probably depressingly high, but (likely) still <50%.
Some percent of the resellers just buys games on sale, or in a cheap country to resell to expensive countries. It's not uncommon when a game has a plummet sale (a $70 black friday sale for $20) that thousands of copies of the game show up for $30-40 on G2A as soon as the sale ends. Those are (generally) not in any way related to stolen credit cards.
And then the owner of the card issues a chargeback, so they lose more money (chargeback fees can be $25-$100) than if you'd have just torrented it.
Technically they could revoke the key as well, but that tends to cause a bit of fuss and bad PR so they don't often bother.
So the lesson is clear. Buy your keys on G2A with stolen credit cards.
Agreed. Customer service on G2A has replied and solved issues faster than from “real” services
