this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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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
Ok. So. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.
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 harder
Profit 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.
The problem is not wether the majority of sellers aren't selling keys like that. It's the possibility that some sellers ARE. These reselling sites are massive, and even if it's 10% that are using stolen credit cards - that can put a huge dent in the sellers wallet.
It can even hurt the one who purchasing thinking it was legit if the seller decides to revoke the keys - which they can do at their discretion.
Yet these sites take no responsibility, don't really police or vett the users selling on their site beyond doing just enough to say they are in court, and even happen to offer a subscription model for "buyers protection", essentially allowing them to profit the most off of these sites. I know G2A specifically has been caught making it super hard to cancel these subscriptions as well - it's just super fucking shifty and slimy.