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Piracy > resellers
(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Piracy
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Ive never seen a company have this take. Interesting
Key resellers are really, truly awful. In many cases the keys are purchased from legitimate sites using stolen credit card numbers. The key resellers plead ignorance as to where the keys come from, but it's an open secret at this point. If you don't want to pay the Steam/Gog price, piracy is less awful because you won't be fueling a criminal enterprise and there's no chance your Steam/Gog account will get a stolen key revoked.
Credit card fraud and software keys actually ends up being paid for by the rest of us. Fraudulent transactions and chargebacks lead to higher merchant fees, and those costs end up getting passed on to legitimate purchasers.
The only time I used a key reseller was to get a cheap digital copy of GTAV as I already had multiple copies for 360 and X1 on disc.
I've used them and will continue to use them. In Australia half the games here have a premium added to them just because fuck us. I'll buy the cheaper option every time
Just pirate games then.
I do that too, but some shit cant play online when cracked
I see this all the time which makes me wary of buying from there, but surely the gaming industry would push for removal of these sites, no? Is there any proof of these allegations?
Indie game developers have been getting hit with chargebacks for years. To be clear, not every key on the resellers' sites are illegitimate. There are lots of legitimate reasons to want to resell a key, for example a key for a game you're not interested in that's received as part of a Humble Bundle or something. However when someone uploads 1000 keys for a newly launched game, it's highly unlikely that those are legit but the key reseller sites don't ask any questions about where the keys come from. The resellers just want to sell the key and take their cut, and they don't give a shit if it was purchased with a stolen credit card because the original key seller is the one left holding the bag when a chargeback occurs.
Most of the keys are obtained illegally (stolen accounts and/or credit cards) so eventually the money gets taken back. So not only was the game stolen but the indie has to go through processing the takeback which costs them money on top of it.
And since the takeback issue can occur the person purchasing could lose their game without even realizing it and then complain to the devs when it wasn't even their fault.
You're basically double-dipping and ensuring that actual costs are involved.
edit: brain fuzzy. Chargeback is the word.
I've also heard that this is a myth, and while there might be some fraudulent purchases, the majority are just picked up in other regions where games are cheaper and maybe during sales. Devs who tell you to pirate their game instead of using resellers may be actually making more money off resellers than they think, but there isn't really any way to confirm it. Without a mass study.
It's hard to know because both sides are arguing that it's 100% their side. Game companies are claiming it's basically all pirated keys. G2A (in court) used to argue that it was basically no pirated keys. The truth is somewhere in the middle but nobody is talking.
In some cases, the fraudulent purchase route is less profitable than just buy-selling across countries and abusing sales. I can't imagine in those cases that we're looking at fraudulent purchases.
Exactly, devs need to prove that resellers are an overall net negative on their income before they can use this as a talking point. Fraud happens in every industry, the existence of fraud doesn't make a service net negative overall.
For what it's worth, I've used G2A plenty of times for games I otherwise wouldn't have purchased and I've never had an issue once.
....Do they?
I feel like if the person is telling you to pirate the game, a method that is 100% confirmed to provide no money to the dev, they probably are already actively feeling money drain from the other method
Like telling someone to pirate your game is a pretty extreme argument against resellers. I don't think it's a myth, and while a mass study would be good, there's just more evidence against at the moment. I think the resellers have more to prove than vica versa.
Unfortunately that's spotty evidence at best. Game developers generally don't sell their own keys, they sell them through distribution platforms like Steam. Gamers and resellers both pick up keys from distribution platforms. A percentage of these are legit, a percentage are fraudulent, however the game dev has no way to actually tell:
Distribution platforms don't make you check a box that says "I'm a reseller", so there's no way to know if the net income from legitimate sales to resellers is less than the cost of fraudulent sales to resellers. The only thing game devs have to rely on is signal from chargebacks, and a chargeback makes a lot more noise than a legitimate sale.
I think it's very possible that the few devs that tell you to pirate instead of using resellers are misinformed, and of course they are, because they don't own their own distribution line. Fraudulent sales cause more noise than legitimate sales which causes people to jump on the "pirate over resellers".
But regardless of which side of this argument is correct, telling people to boycott an entire sub-industry based on claims with speculative evidence is ridiculous.
I mean,
I still feel that a dev willing to take a lost sale over a resale, still says more than just saying they're misinformed.
And at the end of the day, resell is supposed to be a cheaper way to say "I bought it". And at the end of the day, devs are saying "If anything, it's worse for us"
I don't think it's ridiculous. I think resellers are more needing to prove their legitimacy in this case.
The thing I find most ridiculous honestly, is that you seem to be under the assumption that the devs aren't already getting noisy chargebacks. Like this whole thing sprouted from nothing.
Claims made without evidence do not have to be disputed with evidence. The burden of proof is on the party making the claims.
Everything else you wrote has already been addressed in my previous comment, did you actually read it before responding?
the movie "the man from earth: holocene" was released by the film makers onto the piracy websites. They'd prefer people see their film for free than not see the film at all.
I have that movie on my Plex! Yes, I pirated it. Is it worth watching? How about the first one, for that matter?
The first one is beautifully done, I have watched it multiple times over, the second one is okay, a bit leaning over religious too much.
Have you ever seen the movie Coherence? Is it similar to that in tone?
the first one is better, but the second one is far from bad also. I'd say they're both worth the watch.
They made another? I loved the first one. Have watched it many times.
Hotline: Miami devs supported people in The Pirate Bay threads and said aussies to get their game anyway since it was banned here, iirc.
https://gamerant.com/hotline-miami-pirates/
I remember devolver telling aussies it was cool tonpirate but i thought that was the extent of it.
Darkwood went a step further in 2017:
https://www.destructoid.com/darkwood-devs-put-the-full-game-on-the-pirate-bay-out-of-guilt/