Indie solo video game dev here.
I am okay with gamers “requisitioning” games if they truly can’t afford it. While it is my livelihood, it’s also my attempt at art and I want people to enjoy it. I even plan on releasing a safe cracked copy for the next game.
If you pirate a game, there are ways to help support us starving devs if you like the game.
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Spread the word far and wide that you like the game. A little effort on your part can save us marketing budget and trigger new sales.
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In the future if you have the financial ability, buy a legit key on sale. Even at 75%+ discount it helps.
But please don’t cost us additional money. It costs time and money to process chargebacks triggered by the key resellers selling keys procurred with stolen credit cards.
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.
Running files you downloaded from a Russian website, what could possibly go wrong
cs.rin.ru is very well regarded in the piracy community and quite a few cracks originate there. You can also learn how to crack yourself on that site.
how to crack yourself
now you got my attention
“Very well regarded in the piracy community” isn’t a phrase I thought I’d see today 🤣
- 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.
I will also use this excuse to justify my huge backlog of steam games bought on deep discounted sales that I in all likelihood will never ever ever actually play.
I’m just making up for my middle school years That’s the ticket…
Lol, yeah, i do that too…
But with these old classics it’s even harder to resist for me. They usually have the biggest discounts, and how can i say this game that gave me so many hours of fun isn’t worth 2 fucking dollars?
The Gamestop NFT marketplace will hopefully allow creators like you to release games and collect a royalty for each re-sale
Sounds kinda sus man
What’s sus about creators receiving royalties for their own work?
The sus part is the royalties being tied to unregulated, highly risky “assets”
I don’t think your opinion is wrong, just misinformed/uninformed. I share your opinion mire generally about blockchain tech, as it’s clearly been used for scams and bullshit.
We’re not talking about Bored Ape fake trading card nonsense. We’re talking about Game Publishers and re-sellers who want to verify provenance of a file. The publisher (creator) wants to get a cut of a forward sale of the game. That’s the speculated way that this would work. Whether it’s tied to Gamestop is irrelevant. NFT technology will serve this purpose for all forms of digital media.
Gamestop is just the only service currently offering this benefit when minting your NFT (or was… Maybe it changed)
Fuck no. Nobody wants NFTs.
I am not really all about NFTs but they are not going away… They are the perfect tool for digital capitalism. They create a kind of artificial scarcity
In the case of the Gamestop policy, at least creators get paid for their work as long as its remains popular/desirable
Only if you can put the license itself on the blockchain, and guarantee the blockchain is robust enough to last beyond Gamestop’s bankruptcy. Or survive past the day Gamestop decides they can make more money by destroying the current blockchain and “upgrading” the system.
The blockchain has nothing to do with Gamestop’s solvency as a company (which is not in doubt, BTW). It’s Ethereum blockchain.
The last sentence of your comment sounds like you don’t actually understand blockchain technology at all…
I don’t think anyone can say that Gamestop will definitely be around longer than people want to use these licenses they sell. And I hope the license isn’t just a pointer to some Gamestop website that stores the licenses (re: standard NFT). But I don’t trust any corporation to do something like this without building in some sort of backdoor to revoke licenses. Especially Gamestop.
Your comment makes me think you don’t get how the technology works. Ethereum blockchain will continue to exist whether Gamestop does or not…
It doesn’t matter if the blockchain is eternal, if this is a traditional NFT, it isn’t stored in the blockchain. All you’re buying is a link to a website where the NFT is stored. It doesn’t matter if it’s a license key, or a shitty computer generated picture of an anthropomorphic ape. When Gamestop decides to shut down the server (it will happen eventually), you lose access to your license key. If Gamestop allows you to copy your license key, you still lose access to your software when Gamestop shuts down the licensing server. I’m not sure the technology works the way you think it works.
Uhm… Sorry but you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this tech works.
NFTs are stored in a “wallet”, the address is recorded on the blockchain. As long as you know your seed phrase (or other recovery key) it will be yours eternally. The NFT market is only a place to put buyers and sellers in the same spot. Even “in the market”, the NFT lives at a blockchain address, someone else’s wallet.
That’s why Gamestop can say “we’re shutting down our wallet service. Get your recovery key and restore your NFTs elsewhere”
Gamestop doesn’t run a licensing server and probably won’t. That’s for publishers. Also, NFTs make licensing servers redundant.
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.
So, those resellers listed have been known to hold and sell keys that are linked to stolen credit cards and other unauthorised payment methods. The keys are bought up cheap during sales using the stolen credentials then posted on the reseller sites. A few things happen when the victim notifies their bank or institution of the fraud. Steam or whatever site cancels those keys, meaning the person who purchased the key on the reseller site is out a product, the dev/publisher then has to front the cost of the charge back for the fraudulent purchase, or at least the 70% cut they get. Knowing that sometimes the keys you purchase dont work the resellers also offer a service, for an extra fee, to ensure that your key will work.
In essence, the reseller makes money from the purchase of the key, the fraudulent posters of the keys make money from the sale of the key, the legitimate store and the dev lose money due to the chargeback caused by the fraudulent sale, and the user who purchased the key is out money and a product. There are legitimate resellers who dont operate this way but the ones pictured are not those ones.
Thats not even the fact that the reseller wouldn’t be selling the key for less than they bought it so the customer is giving more money to someone else rather then the dev. So sure, the dev may have been paid for the keys at sale price, but the end user is paying more which goes to someone else.
I understand the theory, I’m looking for evidence that this is a problem that makes resellers a net negative income for devs. I’ve used resellers plenty of times for games I otherwise would not have purchased and I have never once had this happen to me, which makes me think that this is an unproven talking point based on outliers.
It’s not like it’s a straightforward calculation, it’s hard to distinguish between regular sales and sales made to resellers, as well as regular chargebacks and chargebacks made to resellers. So until someone actually puts effort into proving this, “because the dev said so” isn’t a good enough answer for me.
G2A made an offer years ago to any video game devs that they would compensate any devs if they and an external investigation could prove that the keys were illegitimate.
Wube the company behind Factorio was the only one that took them up on the offer and they were right, the keys were illegitimate.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/g2a-and-wube-software-settle-usd40-000-chargeback-dispute
Official announcement from G2A: https://www.g2a.co/g2a-strikes-anti-fraud-agreement-with-indie-developer-wube-software/
About the issue from Wube: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
Follow up [last section]: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-348
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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.
What shits me off is the number of people who defend these key reselling sites.
I’ve been utterly lambasted for likening kinguin with G2A in the past. Like really? Their arguments literally fall apart with a small amount of scrutiny, but thet chalk it up to “they say they aren’t like other resellers so they aren’t” FFS you literally cannot prove that and that’s my point. And that’s why you DO NOT TRUST THESE SITES.
It’s really fucking common in YouTube comments specifically. Especially with youtubers who have been sponsored by these sites in the past.
I have literally unsubbed from youtubers that have advertised these stinkers, the problem is when the likes of MrBeast starts advertising it, people start to think that it’s ok.
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.
NiX:
I love you guys and postal series, but I’m not made of money, if I can get a game for cheaper I’d rather pay less than more.
Running With Scissors:
Which is why we’re telling you to pirate our games instead of paying a scammer who will cost us money and probably even get your key revoked Our games are cheap right now through official sites. Is saving a few cents worth lowering the chances for releasing another POSTAL game?
NiX:
Isn’t pirating illegal? You want your fans get fines and shit? Now they are on sale so I might pick up some but normally i still rather get the game of g2a for cheaper
Running With Scissors:
You can’t get fines if the owners of the IP give you permission to download. Just know that by getting on G2A, we not only get no money, we also have to pay for the chargeback, that’s the core of the problem and it means no new games in the future and no more RWS
Edit: fixed formatting.
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
It was part of a twitter thread that I’m too much of a luddite to figure out how to link. Last comment: https://twitter.com/RWSstudios/status/1671832971601408000#m
Wow that guy was kinda a dick
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.
Try Infinity for lemmy, it formats the comment correctly.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
they buy keys using stolen credit cards and then resell them
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.
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
They could also stop with the nonsense and make a price a price.
If a $30 game is pretty much always $12 35 weeks of the year across various platforms, make it $12, because you’ve said that’s your true price. Otherwise when I want to buy it and it’s still $30 I will go to a reseller instead
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Agreed. Customer service on G2A has replied and solved issues faster than from “real” services
