Postal Devs ask fans to pirate games instead of using key resellers, giving explicit permission to fans

Gaming@beehaw.org – 153 points – 1 years ago

Running With Scissors:

Key reselling websites hurt indie developers like us. There are many ways to obtain our games and we STILL prefer piracy over people buying from those websites.
Illegaly obtained keys are a source of money for scammers and it could even affect you as the customer in some cases.

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

You are viewing a single comment

View all comments

Hold on a minute. Developers need to generate the keys so third parties can resell them. And they can revoke or disable them if they were obtained fraudulently.

What is the point of all this? Just disable the keys and fuck the scammers.

Ain't as simple as "just disable them". G2A acquires keys through buy-one-get-two deals, using stolen credit cards, money laundering, stolen keys (mass mailing the devs for "preview" keys, which they then flip on G2A) etc.

So there's no way to know the origin of keys in G2A. By the time you know it's stolen keys, they've been sold out, and G2A has a notorious history of not giving a fuck about the situation.

You could just arbitrarily disable all keys, but you'd affect >90% legitimate customers.

They don't know the keys on G2A and the like unless they buy them themselves. And these unauthorized key sellers aren't in the business to cooperate with them, since the money laundering is their bread and butter.

They don't know the keys on G2A

But they should. Someone at RWS generated those keys and then sold them to resellers. Even if they don't personally keep track of the keys, Steam probably does.

I guess they don't want to affect users who already paid for a key even though they have the right to do so.

Honestly, I've had keys revoked from my account before, and it sucks to waste money on scammers, but any rational person would understand that's not their fault.

How would they know which keys are on G2A? They're bought through an intermediary before being resold on G2A.

The keys were given in plain text to this intermediary at some point. A copy of said text should exist.

The Steamworks Documentation explicitly recommends tagging the keys to keep track of them and potentially prevent this kind of issues.

I checked better because they mentioned chargebacks.

The "reseller" on g2a is actually a scammer who is using stolen credit cards for purchasing steam keys from the developers website, so even if they void it, they will incur a $30 chargebacks fee from each "sale"

Correct. Once the charge ack occurs however, the key is revoked. The key is revoked and the customer goes to g2a who refuses refunds (unless you pay an extra cover charge fee now I think).

Yes they were given to an intermediary like green man gaming who then sold it to what they believed was a customer but was actually a credit card scammer laundering money

False positives. If some of them are legitimate customers

Afaik you can't disable individual keys but the whole batch

Aside of what was already said, there's also no gain for revoking the key. Say you do, the owner will be pissed and likely just pirate the game, maybe even give a bad rating/review in frustration. To believe they buy the game again for full prices is, humbly, naive.

Yeah... I hadn't heard of G2A before now, but after reading up a bit, it seems like a bit of a convenient scapegoat for developers.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/g2a-and-wube-software-settle-usd40-000-chargeback-dispute

Some quotes

The debate over the site was triggered by No More Robots founder Mike Rose, who claimed it was better for gamers to pirate titles than buy from G2A since "devs don't see a penny either way."

Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail agreed, adding: "These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more."

As the discourse escalated into a petition to stop G2A from allowing the sale of indie games, the marketplace responded with its 10x chargeback offer in an attempt to address these concerns.

Lack of response has frequently been an issue for G2A. To date, Factorio remains the only studio to challenge the firm's offer of 10x chargebacks, and when G2A suggested a potential keyblocker tool for developers, only 19 companies registered interest.

Klonan acknowledges Wube's role in how G2A sellers were able to obtain codes for Factorio. These codes were purchased through the game's official website, which was previously less secure than the likes of Steam or Itch.io, although did give Wube detailed records of purchases and chargebacks it could compare with G2A's audit.

The company also offers a free Steam key with website purchases, many of which are "probably flipped on G2A", although as these are obtained legally it becomes harder to challenge these transactions.

Klonan notes that after Wube switched to using Humble's widget on its site and refraining from "giving out tons of keys for giveaways to dodgy, often fake, influencers," the fraudulent purchases "stopped completely."

"In the end, contacting G2A is treating a symptom of people stealing keys," he says. "The best way to combat that is to cut it at the source.

Sounds like G2A has tried to be accommodating and the overall dev response was just refusing to work with them entirely

If it were that easy then G2A wouldn’t exist. Use some common sense.

I hate these guys just tell you to "use common sense" without explaining any shits. Your comment does not contribute to the discussion at all.

If it were so simple to revoke these keys as OP is implying, why would the game publishers be telling people to literally steal their games instead of buying on one of these key resellers?

No that’s not the issue. That’s not why they’re saying pirate the game. The issue is they’re also getting hit by chargeback fees from those fraudulent sales.

See this comment