based
image:
screenshot of a Tweet from Running With Scissors reading
“We’ve been told our games are too expensive in some countries but we’ve been using Steam’s recommended pricing for a while. We trust Valve enough to not change this. If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us.”
I have to imagine a comment like this does absolutely nothing to their sales figures. People who were going to download a cracked version of their games anyway remain unaffected now that they have a blessing, and I doubt people who weren’t going to pirate would now feel more inclined to do so.
This seems like good PR and frankly it should probably be the default position for games studios.
If anything, it probably encourages more real sales from would be pirates who like their message.
Yeah, the whole piracy crackdown situation is so stupid.
I pirate a lot of media, if you added it all up it would be a lot of money (if I was to buy everything). The difference is, before I pirated I barely bought any of the media.
- I pirate some games that i’d never buy. I buy all games I want to support.
- I pay TV licence, netflix and amazon. I pirate tons of TV series because they aren’t on those services. I literally can’t buy some of them and if I could i’d need about 10 different streaming services.
- Films, I pirate a lot of films. Before I pirated I never bought any films, i’d either wait for netflix/normal TV or just not watch them. I still go to the cinema for big releases.
- I subscribe on patreon, github and donate to LOADS of projects, many of which i’ve pirated first or obtained a copy of (books are a big one here).
If you were to objectively look at the value of the pirated media, it would seem that i’ve “stolen” or studios have missed out on lots of revenue, but the truth is I pirate a lot of media, just because I can.
It’s the streaming part for me.
Few years ago there was Netflix and Film1 in our country and an ISP with TV that also had a movie service.
That was about it.
Now there’s Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, SkyShowtime, Apple TV+ and ViaPlay added to it.
It’s impossible to have have just 1 and view what you want. Ofcourse you can keep on switching but some of them but it’s all just making it more complicated.
Solution? Pirate it. One source and everything available even stuff that isn’t on any on those services.
Also some movies can’t be bought digital.
IMO all movies and series should be available on any platform and let the streaming service decide if they want to have it in their portfolio. Only the “originals” should be locked to a platform to keep stuff unique.
And make every damn movie and series available for purchase.
IMO all movies and series should be available on any platform and let the streaming service decide if they want to have it in their portfolio. Only the “originals” should be locked to a platform to keep stuff unique.
That’s just cable though. Not sure that’ll be any better. The second a company sees a revenue stream or thinks they’re missing out. They monetise it to the detriment of the customers.
Before this tweet, they also mentioned piracy over grey market keyshops, which seems to be a lot more of a valid reason to endorse it. This seemly links to that tweet.
It won’t have a large effect, but in previous examples of companies doing this, comments would lead me to believe more people who pirated end up buying the game to support the devs after trying it. It makes sense too, but same pirates are unlikely to buy anything that had denuvo and stuff shoved into it.
Some games you dont even need a crack or anything, just access to the files.
For example with KSP, you can just clone the game directory anywhere and run it from there. Doesnt even need steam. Heck i copied it over to an M1 macbook once just to test the Macbooks performance…
Thats also how the mod managers like CKAN work with the game.
I was going to say, all artists should share this position, but I’ll do one better: if you don’t have this position, you’re not an artist. Feels bold to make any absolute claim about what makes an artist, but I feel safe on this one. If making sure you’re fairly compensated is higher priority than sharing your art, then you’re not an artist.
Artists, like all laborers, should be fairly compensated for their work. The idea that love of art should necessarily come into conflict with fair compensation is a primary vehicle for continuing the exploitation of creative labor.
That is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of piracy, though. Some of the most strongly anti-piracy platforms out there are also absolutely terrible in terms of labor rights (hence the current strikes in Hollywood, for instance). It’s notable that in this case, the studio seems to be saying fairly explicitly that piracy is indeed not the main obstacle to fair compensation, such that no conflict between their stance and labor rights needs to exist.
If you think I’m arguing that artists should not be compensated for their work, then I’ve completely misrepresented myself. Is that what you thought I meant?
Their reason is: people is using g2a for “discounted” keys.
Where the “discount” comes? Easy, some asshole buys from their website many keys with a stolen credit card, then they will need to refund it + pay an expensive fee for the chargeback.
I’m not a dev but at that point I would just give up selling keys by myself and I would just rely on steam for fraud detection. The only case where the 30% fee is justified
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 16•10 months ago
So, basically, G2A is a fence for stolen property? Why hasn’t it been shut down by law enforcement?
Because only Factorio has been able to proove that is happening. That and they pretend they don’t know that is happening as they are just the middle men.
Can you give the backstory of what happened with Factorio?
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
They lost $6600 in chargebacks and g2a was running an ad campaign using their name on Google
I had a better link on my old Lemmy instance but that one went the way of the dodo and I can’t find that in-depth explanation.
Basically Factorio never goes on sale. Ever, it only gets more expensive so, if someone is selling a key for a price lower than their starting price point it must have been fraudulent.
In Europe at least if strong authentication was done during the purchase (and it is mandatory since a few years), the merchant is protected and the bank issued the card will take the loss. They don’t need to refund or pay fees for charge back.
Are you sure? My stripe merchant account still mentions the 15 euro chargeback fee and now in my country is easier to ask for a chargeback, can do at the phone while before you needed to send a registered snail mail at a secret address with the right timing using a secret form, while sending a copy of the police report via fax
SCA (strong customer authentication) should indeed move the liability for fraudulent purchases to the issuer. Wording in contracts may still mention other things. We had to, for one specific payment service provider, explicitly tell them to only allow card purchases using SCA since we had problems with stolen cards. With some PSPs we could just refuse certain ECI codes. Been a few years for me and YMMV but if chargebacks are causing headaches it might be worth looking into.
I worked at company like stripe and exactly at the scope of authentication/liability. I am not sure about whatever you pay the charge back fee even though the liability is shifted from you to the issuer bank. Do you have 3DS2 enabled for your payments?
It is normal that Stripe mention the charge back fees as there are exceptions for strong authentication but it is worth asking them for details and whatever you pay the fee even when liability have been shifted. And maybe the issuer bank will just do refund and take the loss if it see the SCA have been done.
Luckily I never had a chargeback, I meant I still saw it in the fees
I’ll take the downvotes but this is hardly true. Most of them come from bundles and purchasing them in other countries where it’s a lot cheaper. You can prove this easily by checking games on g2a that almost never go on sale or are included in bundles and you will notice the price is the same or a few dollars cheaper than steam.
Most == prevent.
The issue with G2A is that any keys at all come from scammed credit cards. In a silly way it’s like of like tor. It doesn’t matter if I am trying to sell my excess Humble Bundle keys in good faith on G2A if other sellers on the market are selling scammed keys. Good users making listings obfuscate all the bad users.
Also, purchasing regional keys cheaper and reselling them is also what causes this shit in the first place. People blame Valve for making the decision, but not the people switching to a region to buy a game for cents on the dollar and then resell it? That is actively hurting the people in those countries who are now being charged closer to USD prices. For Brazillians this is exorbitant.
I don’t disagree with you in that there are G2A keys that come from bundles. But I do disagree with the notion that “it doesn’t matter.” It absolutely matters because it’s affecting people’s ability to buy games and it affects people circumventing legal purchase methods (of which I support their circumventing) who then have to deal with buying scammed credit card keys instead of me selling them and excess Humble Bundle key. The card gets charged back, the developer loses money, the G2A purchaser loses their key, and the scammers get off scott-free.
Basically, G2A should be a good idea but has been co-opted by scammers. These sites have their grey-market reputation for a reason, because it’s run entirely off of the losses of others. Losses of the developers, losses of regional players, and losses of players purchasing games on these grey-market sites.
There’s no winners for G2A except for the owners of the site and scammers. You may win once in a while getting a brand new game for $5-25 less. You may end up losing when it’s pulled from your account, if it does. At that point, you’re effectively gambling. Taking a risk for a discount on something with a high likelihood of it being unethically sourced which may be removed from your account?
In most cases I’d personally rather pay the extra $15 to just have the peace of mind. The chance of the game not being bought on a stolen CC and not supporting regional theft that hurts those players is just a bonus.
I never said it didn’t matter. I said it’s not at prevalent as people are making it out to be. I’ve purchased 100s of steam keys from these sites over the years and never came across an instance where the key was removed or revoked. All of these sites guarantee the key is good or your money back anyways so I find it hard to believe that is what is going on at all. As long as you purchase the key from a reputable seller as they all have ratings just like eBay then there is no issue. I think maybe in the early days of key sellers it’s what was happening, but these sites would have fizzled out a long time ago if they were bastions of credit card fraud.
Anecdotally, I’ve bought 3 keys over the years from g2a and 2 of them immediately didn’t work. Iirc there’s a big button you click during checkout if your key doesn’t work and the seller immediately has to provide you with a working one. That’s not g2a though, that’s just the seller providing you with another cheap key from their collection. G2A is scammy in other ways too (I’ve yet to be able to cancel their $2 “insurance” fee or whatever they call it the first time, it’s been years and I’ll probably have to chargeback since their site just throws me errors when I try to cancel. PayPal won’t even let me cancel it from their end.)
Why defend them?
Because I’ve never had a reason not to? I’ve only used G2A a few times but you can just remove the insurance at checkout. Never had an issue.
Except for, again, how it’s screwing over developers, players in other regions, and supporting credit card scammers.
I’ve seen no concrete evidence of any of that. So agree to disagree.
If they’re charging less in different regions and people were using VPNs to purchase then you’d think that’d be a sign that maybe game prices are too high. They’re selling an identical product at a much cheaper price because the people in some countries are poorer or their currency is garbage compared to USD? Pretty gross to think about.
I wish more companies did this; however, I believe most CEO’s have the biased view that everyone has at least some money to spare which, as you probably know (likely on personal level), isn’t true.
I understand that participating in cultural aspects of society must cost money due to the very nature of economics (if you want the artist to continue to make art, make sure they don’t starve to death) but ‘pirating’ things is there not only as a stop gap to terrible service and personal risk (privacy violations, etc.), but also as an equalizer between those that have, and those that don’t.
If I made enough that I didn’t have to worry about money while working full time, I’d be much more inclined to spend money on arts and entertainment. As it stands, my entertainment budget is almost entirely going to get food I don’t have to make myself.
But until society shifts focus to living wages (and not just enough to live, but enough to thrive)…… welp. Maybe those ceos should think on that, and start paying better.
Definitely. I recall a time in my life where I was working while still living with my parents. Needless to say I had A LOT of money I didn’t know what to do with. I ended up with about 2 storage bins of books and CD’s. I eventually got rid of them when computers became much more capable, but I think I would still buy them if I had extra income. I doubt I will though for at least another 2 decades, considering all the student debt I have. Who would’ve thought that loading people with crippling financial debt would be bad for the economy?
I’ll be pedantic and say that CEOs are paid to think everyone has money to spend. ;)
But I totally agree with you.
I live for pedantry. (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞
This approach makes so much sense from a business perspective.
How many here have this experience: out of my entire friend group that I grew up playing video games with, I can’t think of a single person who kept pirating games after acquiring disposable income, even though we all exclusively played pirated games as teenagers. Without piracy, none of us would have had access to any games, and very likely none of us would still be into gaming today, spending probably thousands of euros every year on games, consoles, PC components, etc.
I miss the era of freeware and demos. Give me a taste with no strings attached and you are far more likely to get my money at some point.
Yeah it’s a shame demos died out. Now studios (or publishers, more likely) just expect everyone to pay for a game they don’t even know they’ll like, and tough shit if you don’t like it.
A lot of indie games on steam still do demos actually but yeah shitty that AAA games don’t do them anymore.
Huh, I haven’t run into an indie with a demo recently, but it’s definitely great to hear that demos are still a thing in the wider indie scene.
The last Steam Next Fest in June had so many demos, I only had time for like 4-5. There were quite a few posts and comments (including mine) on the demos we tried.
During the many steam festivals, there will be indie games with demos.
They want people to buy before they know what is like so they don’t have a chance to reconsider or regret it. This is why they hype preorders.
But so many games still have demos? I feel like it’s probably more that they’re cheap and don’t see a reason to pay whatever it costs to throw a demo together for free
Like people have been pointing out, it’s usually indies which don’t have an establish audience yet that do this. It’s much rarer for triple A games.
I often grab a pirated copy to see if I like it first, and if I do, I’ll buy it. If I play it once or twice and don’t really get much out of it, I’m not out anything but some download time.
Demos have returned, on PC at least.
“Steam Next Fest” are events when devs launch demost for their upcoming projects. it’s like 3 or 4 times per year
I love Next Fest, I usually end up wishlisting like 3-10 games. Lots of good stuff that I’d never know or care about otherwise.
Yup. The only time I pirate a game nowadays is when I can’t get it on steam for the 2 hour refund as a demo.
is two hours enough for you to get into a game tho? it took me 4 hours to get into stardew and no mans sky alike, and once I was into it, I was hooked. however, after two hours, both games were kinda shit to me
I know of a certain former boss of mine who, after becoming a millionaire by side-lining the whole (game!) company and selling it to random yanks who didn’t know WTF to do with it, still continued to pirate games. While moving into the most expensive quarter of the city – by renting a house there.
But sane people without a cocaine habit, sure, yes.
I don’t think this post is allowed on lemmy.world.
This post isn’t on Lemmy.world.
It is funny though since they blocked the piracy community
Oh that’s what everyone was talking about… Well, i’m glad that I’ve got my BeeHaw at least
The wonders of federation
The Darkwood devs did this even though they only have one game out, they even uploaded the torrent
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English21•10 months ago
If you can’t otherwise afford them. Pretty important “if”. And then only until you can afford them.
Now if only there was a way to safely pirate stuff without the possibility of the binaries having keyloggers or cryptominers embedded in them. I seem to recall some studio hosting an official torrent on their website precisely for this reason.
Like having the source code?
Or a zip package signed by the developer.
Now I have to buy their games lol.
I might buy one of their games just to offset someone who can’t. I absolutely appreciate a business with this kind of attitude. Like someone else said, the people who pirate it probably weren’t going to buy it anyway. Might as well get some goodwill out of it.
the people who pirate it probably weren’t going to buy it anyway
Exactly. For example, you can’t expect some middle class kid in some third world country to buy the game they like. Playing games by pirating might make them play their favourite game until they eventually grow to a point where they earn themselves and then they buy the games they like.
P.s) Pirated games all this time but the first game I will actually buy will be Spiderman 2. Really excited to try it out since Spiderman 1 was so fucking good.
I have learned a lot while I was setting up my NAS and all the *arr applications. It taught me a bit about networking and a bit about docker which I know is going to be helpful for me in the future. That kid you were talking about might be able to learn the something similar which might get them interested in the tech world and you have just created a future programmer, or network admin, or any number of other tech job. Those can be very marketable skills in a pool of people who seem to be less tech literate as tech becomes so easy to use.
That kid you were talking about might be able to learn the something similar which might get them interested in the tech world and you have just created a future programmer, or network admin, or any number of other tech job.
One of those kids is me. Pirating has taught me to troubleshoot things and adapt to new things at my tech job and I have met pretty cool people across different pirating communities who taught me various things.
Totally.
I didn’t know games could come with professionally printed labels, when I was a kid with no income. I thought everyone just got them on disks labeled in marker from a good friend of the family.
It’s important to me to support developers, but I can’t say I regret getting to play those games before I could have ever afforded them.
I’ve since gone on to buy those same games from their developers several times over on various platforms.
I mean I don’t think the pirates needed their permission, but it’s a nice gesture at least. Accepting the reality that people will pirate your games makes for much better PR than trying to crack down on it through DRM.
Why not both? “You can pirate our games… But good luck with all the DRM in them!”
Because DRM usually gets cracked within weeks, if not days?
DRM also costs paying customers performance generally
That’s why no one uses it then! Oh, wait…
Why not both?
Because DRM misfires for a small percentage of paying customers.
Those paying customers, ironically, usually get help from the pirate community to get their game working.
Then they go back to paying for everything, because they still trust game studios more than pirates. Wait no, this last bit usually doesn’t happen.
Overall DRM prevents zero percentage of all privacy, while hassling a small percentage of paying customers.
That’s awesome of them! What’s their best game? I’ll buy a copy on Steam.
OG Postal and Postal Brain damaged
I’m pretty sure I was friends with the founder of that studio back in the suprnova.org days when his username was RunsWithScissors and he was a full-blown pirate.
- bauhaus ( @bauhaus@lemmy.ml ) English11•10 months ago
they’ve always tacitly been cool with it. they’ve dropped little hints like this into their games since the 90s.
Why it’s so expensive in Poland, they are not even close to salary in Norway or Swiss.
higher than USD and GBP rofl regional price my ass
