I didn’t understand that analogy at all.
Good.
There’s two transactions here. One is the bad guy buying the key from the developer using a stolen credit card. The other one is the real consumer buying the key from the bad guy via G2A. The first transaction is what gets a chargeback, when the actual owner of the CC finds out.
Ok, so the thought is that in a world without G2A the first transaction would never take place because the guy with the stolen credit card would not be able to resell the key? If so, that would indeed suck.
If I was on the developer side, I would definitely revoke the key if possible. It’s basically stolen goods at that point.
Right, but that’s the problem. Yanking the key pisses off the customer, who ends up blaming you because all they know is they gave someone money and have nothing to show for it after the key gets revoked.
They won’t, though.
Pisses off the “customer” ? He’s not a customer though, he’s someone who basically bought stolen goods. Fuck that guy.
They won’t think of themselves that way, they won’t look that way to the general public, and they’ll be very vocal about being upset.
It’s like how people hit copy protection in their pirate copies of stuff and complain about the game being buggy. They may be pirates, but the public perception will be that the game is buggy.
I don’t understand this. They bought a stolen key off G2A, why would they complain to the original developers instead of G2A? And why would the general public care? I mean, what perception would the developers be worried about?
It won’t be “oh, I bought a stolen key off G2A”, it’ll be “these rotten devs took away the game I purchased”. And you had better believe people care about the idea that their games can be (seemingly) arbitrarily taken away.
Obviously, they would have to be told why the game was taken away. And then they would know to contact the actual merchant they bought it from instead of the developers. And, yes, G2A should provide refunds in these cases.
You have way too much faith in humanity, is all I can say.
This story always comes to mind. The pirate copy would always end with the gamer losing money to pirated copies. And the pirates just moaned about it without any type of self reflection.
People can be horrible. And when they are, they are usually vocal about it.
Why would the purchaser on G2A know they are buying a stolen key? I’d wager most people think they are buying legitimate keys on G2A, so when a key gets revoked and you lose access to a game on your steam account you are left wondering what’s going on, and the lag time may mean you may not even associate G2A in the process.
That being said I do have to say that G2A’s blog post is pretty persuasive and I do wonder how often that does occur now, especially for the devs being real vocal about it.
Why not just deactivate all Youtube keys after a short while? They should be preview copies for review, not free stuff.
Why can’t the devs validate who the real reviewers/influencers are in the first place? Maybe YouTube and the other Social Media types can get involved (not saying they will). A lot of them have verification of identity for some of them and can offer a service to make sure solicitations are legit in the first place.
No idea what to do about the grey market.
This.
I feel this “fake reviewers” is such a hollow problem to focus on.
Which indie developer the fuck cares if a percentage of the couple of hundred review copies they give out just scammed them for a free game? Is it annoying as a matter of principle? Sure.
Is it worth obsessing over or spending any amount of time trying to minimize it? Absolutely not.
You could research each and every person to make sure they have a youtube channel/blog whatever. But even a single minute doing that is just absolutely wasted effort. Sending 20 more keys to 19 scammers and one guy who does a youtube vid that generates a couple of sales is a net positive of exactly a couple of sales and nothing else.
You want coverage and playtime turning into sales. A buckshot of review copies helps with that. Focusing any effort, time or energy on the guaranteed non-sales among that buckshot is stupid.
What happens if those sales come from the g2a keys the other 19 YouTubers put up? :)
So, as it turned out, roughly 70% of the keys we had given out were taken under false pretenses, or to use a more direct term, stolen. It left us asking ourselves: Were we really so blind and naive?
As it turned out, the answer was “Yes”, but we’re not alone.
Holy shit, they were SUPER naive. So they just gave keys to whoever contacted them by email saying ‘I AM FAMOUS YOUTUBEr PLS SEND KEY THANKS’ ?
BRB, sending a few emails
joking