It took me several times to understand what they meant by content.
Those are keys for reviewers and streamers. Companies steal and sell them, without giving anything to the developers. Now that makes sense.What do you mean “companies steal and sell them”. How? Like they are hacking into the email accounts of streamers and stealing and selling the key before the streamer can activate it?
Or they are stealing them from the developer directly somehow?
I don’t see how this would be feasible…
More likely that the streamer or reviewer receiving the free key is selling it on these marketplaces.
That’s one option. Or the sellers scam the keys posing as reviewers or streamers. Or a streamer shares them with friends, and they leak that way. Some combination I imagine.
Well, for a start, a streamer sharing the code with a friend and them selling it is obviously not the marketplace stealing anything.
So do we have any proof that these sellers are scamming developers by posing as streamers or is this something that you are asserting?
I’m speculating. Those are possible ways they could get it. Likely more I haven’t thought of.
I’m not making accusations. I’m putting together things based on what they said in the post. Just trying to make sense of it.
I’m not a researcher, investigator, or reporter.
I’m just a random Steve online. Feel free to ignore me
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers and acted like Karma was watching (as in, I don’t want my credit card stolen, so I won’t benefit from those of others).
Indie game devs are bombarded with free game requests.
I read about one indie dev who woke up to a dozen emails a day asking for a game key to “twitch stream” their game.
It becomes extremely exhausting to verify every single one, and so many just hand it off and hope that one emailer really is who they say they are and they suddenly get a shitton of sales.
Can confirm, I get emails daily.
To add to that, if they are using stolen payment info, then they’d probably have no qualms about stealing yours too
Crazy thing, but my credit card info was recently stolen and after closing it, making compensation claims for my bank and filing a offence report to the police I contacted the three different online store the card was used with.
The only one that responded was a key seller and they even refunded me the money.
Maybe they’re workinh in such a grey area that they want to avoid all possible legal trouble?
Jeez, which country is this that you need to do this much work to deal with credit card fraud?
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers
I always assumed it was largely money laundering.
Claim to have bought a key for 1$ sell it for 10$. Declare you made a 9$ profit. In reality there was never a key for 1$. You bought a 10$ key with dirty money and are selling it at cost.
Fundamentally no different to the mafia run pizza place.
So how do one of theses sites have not already been taken down by law enforcement?
Why haven’t vinted, ebay or for that matter facebook been taken down by law enforcement?
So, what happend to evaluation keys, valid for 20 days after activation… Would solve a bunch of problems.
No no… It’s fine. Just pirate it. You got a free ticket now.
Some devs feel like it’s a dick move. If the content creator actually did stream or review it, it’s a bit of a slap in the face to then claw back the key.
I’ve seen demos/open betas have become a lot more common in the past year. So I do wonder if that’s changing this paradigm a bit
Freeware used to be a whole thing. A demo version you could play freely, and if you wanted the full version you’d pay for it
It would be a dick move to claw it back like media companies are clawing back “bought” content, but if it’s clear from the start…
What if the key itself had a limited available time to get activated, but after activation you keep the game?
This allows any interested content creator to play the game, while limiting the chances of abusing the developer.
100% possible with current steam key offerings I believe, it’s just a highly manual process.
Tell me about it. Have been given 5 keys so far for steam games, only 1 removed the key from me after a short time
I always assumed people used those sites because they didn’t want to get in trouble for “actually” pirating software.
I assume the main issue is that downloading from somewhere like steam and activating with a code, largely ensures there’s no malware included in what you just downloaded.
If you’re pirating something and certainly if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t be entirely sure the game you just downloaded isn’t a security risk.
Use sites like deals.gg or isthereanydeal
There are usually many legit places cheaper than steam with legit paid steam keys
Factorio devs once put out a blog post about game key stores. Essentially, they were running into the issue of people buying factorio keys with stolen credit cards and then reselling them for cheap on G2A or whatever. Then the credit card would get identified as stolen, charge backs would be issued, and bank fraud departments would get involved. As a result, the factorio devs were actually losing money from stolen credit card sales.
Of course, factorio is in a somewhat unique position of never putting the game on sale, so if you’re getting it cheap it’s probably from some dude using a stolen CC.
so this is where those stores get their keys from
That doesn’t even make sense tho, why are they giving out 1000s of free keys?
If you have no marketing budget, then shipping keys to streamers. Like small streamers, with 10 concurrent viewers, they might actually install it and play the game.
That’s 10 more people exposed to the game. Now send out 10.000 of these keys, even if 1% that’d be 100 streamers, actually play it. That’s expose to 1000 people, if you’re lucky that’s 20 extra buyers - But it’s also buyers way more likely to leave a positive review, given they’ve already seen the gameplay loop before buying it.
The early reviews are incredibly important for Steam to determine whether or not it should boost visibility of the game
Maybe in hopes that youtubers and streamers will play the game on their channels if they got it for free? That’s probably what is meant by ‘to get content on our game’.
Is me paying for a free key meant for a reviewer or streamer so bad, I leave steam reviews lol
Yeah, I’ve never bought this. “oh no, someone redeemed a code we gave away/already sold”
So if a person who received a key sells it to someone who might have bought it from the official channels then the devs do not receive that money but the so called “content creator” gets it. The content creator was supposed to make a video or whatever of the game in exchange for the key. It’s also a breach of trust. Basically “content creator” begs for a key and says it’s for video or a stream, but then sells it is just a dick move.
It was a gift, no?
Who are you to tell me what to do with a gift. Its mine after you give it.
Software industry understands neither property nor consent.
I think that’s stretching the definition of “gift” a bit far, no? A gift doesn’t come with strings attached (even if unenforceable).
If these streamers aren’t being contracted, then it is basically the same as a gift. Selling the key is still perhaps morally dubious if there was an expectation of promotion, but that’s as far as it goes.
These streamers are a business expense to drive their marketing department. They could time-limit the keys or limit them to a beta just for the streamers, but they just blindly issue fat tranches of keys and get upset when people use the copies of the game they minted.
The CD key is conceptually the same as a game cartridge. Why would I -not- give away my review copies of a Nintendo 64 title?
Ya’ll cooked if you can’t see it. You’re all jumping infront of the bullet for companies who’s purpose is to make money, like Apu.
If your justification is “it’s not a crime” you’re well aware it should be.
My justification for what exactly? I wasn’t justifying anything.
And what do you believe should be a crime? Giving out free keys, or selling keys that you got for free?
If theres no formal agreement and no contract between the dev and the recipient of the key, where/what is the crime??
Why should it be a crime? Spell it out for us.
The property becomes mine, I resell it. Nothing here is illegal.
Then I don’t think you’ve ever received or given a gift? A Faustian bargain is not a gift.
Okay but then you are still a liar if you pretend to be a content creator so you can source free keys to flip. Why is a dev not allowed to be upset when they got duped by a liar?
Also, like, lol… that’s entirely on the marketing people to do their job and vet.
I do not care, even in the slightest about a marketing departments “losses” from issuing CD keys.
Not even in the slightest. Its the cost of doing business.
No other industry, not even the software industry, gets to do this.
Unilever sends me some shit to review? They’re not allowed to be upset about the eventual fate of those things.
CD keys are property, and property is tradable.
Just because the original intent is X or Y, doesn’t mean dick for shit.
If they didn’t like it, maybe they shouldn’t issue so many free copies.
At some point they have to take responsibility for the keys they’re minting. They can always issue time-limited keys.
There’s so many technical solutions to it and so much crying over the resale that I just do not buy the story.
Because they should be angry at their incompetent marketing people who didn’t vet the keys they sent.
Each key they send has a cost, and this is part of it. There are technical solutions to their problems, in the form of running a beta for the streamers, and releasing beta-only keys
This is a fabricated story because the keys they’re complaining about have no reason to exist. Its pure incompetence on the manufacturers marketing teams part.
The devs can easily revoke the keys and burn the content creator, they’re choosing to be victims here.
as a teenager i did a lot of business with shady key resellers. now i’m missing an unknown number of games from my library as a result of chargebacks and fraud. i’m fine to buy them again, but i’m gutted that i lost all my playstats, achievements, cloud saves, screenshots, etc. i’m not even sure what all is missing :/
Wait, really? You lost your cloud data?
Depends a lot on the game company though. Sometimes I am willing to pay for the convenience while ensuring that I fuck over the publisher/developer. Sometimes you want to play a game developed by a company you dislike.
My problem with pirating anything isn’t the principle, it is the reliability and risk of viruses.
Should be nearly a non-issue on Linux, unless the DRM busting does some seriously shady shit as well.
True, assuming the crack works in Wine or Proton. However, those emulators aren’t fully sandboxed, so as long as the code can run it could in theory grab data or damage the system. Probably only a matter of time before such things are compromised regularly.
Wine/proton are not emulators, they run the code directly on linux, but using some fancy tricks to rrimplement windows dlls into linux native code. If someone embeds linux code in the windows executable you have the same privileges of your user and at tgat point you can be infected with a linux virus.
It’s not likely today because windows is much more popular, but once linux becomes popular enough to be an attractive target you will need to be as careful as on windows.
As far as I know, gamesplanet.com is okay, they get a deal for buying in bulk from publishers and then resell them at a small markup. You won’t get prices close to the games’ historical lows and they rarely have indies or other smaller games, but it’s a nice, non shady alternative for the bigger ones.
all the ones featured on isthereanydeal.com are legit
This happened on stores like G2A and Kinguin. Generally stores that one way or another let users sell their keys, not stores that buy games in bulk and specially not stores where publishers and developers sell their keys officially.
It’s pretty easy to find out online which do what.
Are there any legit, non-shady key sites though? I regularly use loaded.com (formerly CDKeys) but have no idea if they’re legit or not.
Loaded should be fine if they’re operating as they did when their name was CDKeys. 👌
gamesplanet.com should be legit, see my other comment in this thread. As a result they have pretty high prices compared to the shady sites though. My main use case is throwing some money at an independent games journalist I like through his affiliate link (and getting a 10-20% discount in the process)
on gg.deals you can compare multiple ones, then filter the store section for “official”
edit: loaded is a keyshop, not an official one
When it comes to committing piracy, one element is whether or not the money would reach the actual developers of what I bought. I usually don’t give a toss about publishers, unless they have a reputation of actually caring for the studios. If the developers are dead, my money goes to someone who isn’t.
Aside from that, my main use of piracy is to get stuff that isn’t sold anymore, to avoid DRM, and being free of the cloud’s tyranny. Autonomy is more important than money.
