Piracy > resellers

Unless you plan on implementing any other stronger DRM than the steam provided one. I wouldn't bother releasing a safe version.

It's brutally simple to crack steam drm on your own. You just need the clean files from cs.rin.ru/forum or something.

Unsafe cracks will be published elsewhere anyways if your game is popular enough.

I suggest you just don't add any DRM at all.

2. In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.

I've been doing this a lot recently. Back when i was a teenager i used to pirate a lot, but now that i'm older and have disposable income i've been buying a ton of the games o used to pirate then.

Which unfortunally leads to me having tons of games on steam with barely any hours played (yet), when they should be in the thousands already.

It's silly to assume all (or even the majority imo) of key sellers are fraudulent. How do you know resellers are costing you more money in chargebacks than they make you in legitimate purchases?

Edit: downvote away, but until someone provides some actual evidence of this instead of just "a few devs said so" I'm going to assume this isn't true.

The Gamestop NFT marketplace will hopefully allow creators like you to release games and collect a royalty for each re-sale

I’d be super interested in reading the full interview if you could point me to it? I’m not familiar with the “NiX” acronym

Not sure if this was intentional, but on mobile that text has no line breaks. Just one looooong line I gotta scroll sideways to read.

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.

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.

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.

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/

Darkwood went a step further in 2017:

https://www.destructoid.com/darkwood-devs-put-the-full-game-on-the-pirate-bay-out-of-guilt/

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

somewhere in 15 parts from 5 different filesharing websites

Why not torrent it?

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.

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 listed ones have contracts with publisher to get legit keys where the developer gets it share too

At a legitimate website, the developer(s) and publisher(s) make money for each key purchased and every key is legal to own, so there is little chance of a key being revoked and your account banned on your chosen storefront. At a grey market seller like G2A, they can sometimes get their keys illegally (credit card theft, stolen accounts, etc.). So because GMG, Fanatical, Humble, IndiaGala, etc. are all legitimate resellers, they buy their keys directly from the source (usually the publisher or storefront where they are redeemed, but that's just my guess). Apologies if that's not what you were asking.

Those are all official seller stores.

They'd fall under Steam.

G2A would technically fall under Steam too, except they have a history of buying stolen keys and reselling them (over and over again).

They buy keys from the devs/publishers directly or legit wholesalers who are known to get the keys from the devs/publishers. Wholesalers themselves don't popup on consumers' radar since they only buy and sell in bulk.

That's also where most other key sites get their keys from (mostly from bundles). It has been shown time and time again that keys being purchased with stolen credit cards is mostly a myth. Just look at the fact that Factorio, which never had a sale and never sold a single key in a bundle, is just as expensive on key sites as on Steam (Source. That wouldn't be the case if criminals where purchasing licenses with stolen credit cards and then selling them for cheap as a form of money laundering.

Where are criminals even supposed to purchase those keys? Only the developer (and publisher) themselves can generate keys. You can't obtain them through Steam.

You like buying and eating slop?

I'd still pirate them, from both sides it's more ethical

For indies, it prevents the chance of causing a charge back situation

For AAA companies, it prevents the chance of them profiting off of a potentially legitimate key.

Either way, pirating is just better.

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.

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 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.

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.

From prior experience gog sometimes cancels keys. Steam doesn’t seem to do so.

I have bought some games from resellers. I know they're bad, but sometimes I just really want to play that game online and the price is outrageous (a.k.a. I don't have the money at that time). Or in other cases I have bought an original game from steam, but the dlc's I want are not worth the money they're asking, which leads to me me using resellers again. For example I have bought cities skylines on steam, but most of it's dlc are from g2a, because they're selling the the game with 40% of it's functionality and other important shit is in overpriced dlc's

I mean, cdkeys.com doesn't allow third-party sellers and (supposedly) sources all their keys from verifiably legal sources, usually just region arbitrage. Considering they come into ownership of all the keys they sell, I'd think they lack all the "safe harbor" protections of the others.

Thing is, cdkeys.com is about the same price as the others. Which suggests to me that the "stolen keys" rate from those others is lower than some companies would have you believe. Remember, legal or not, the big label stance on all this is an extension of their stance on buying used, which is that they would rather you pirate something than support even a legitimate third-party or cross-regional market.

Their website.

runningwithsissors.com

They buy with stolen credit cards, sell at a loss which is all profit to them. Cars are legit, but they didn't pay for them. Markdown price is all profit

Narh TPB is pirate ship. They're just referring to pirating in general

It's not the Pirate Bay logo so my bet would be that it's representing internet piracy as a general concept!

Just a stand in for piracy in general imo

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.

they buy keys using stolen credit cards and then resell them

Same stuff as G2A.