I wonder where sites like GreenManGaming, Fanatical, Humble and IndieGala fit into the mix as I understand it are legit keysellers?
What’s the last one from the top row? The Pirate Bay? :)
What about Instant Gaming ? Is it also a website that only resales keys or do they have some kind of partnership with game devs?
Do we have any intel concerning the percentage that the editors gets in the best and worse case ? I’m wondering if it would be okay to buy AAA on such websites (or more like the company behind a game has enough money) but small editor games on official platforms…
ELI5, Why are resellers bad? Do they acquire the keys in a shady way?
Yes.
They steal a credit card, buy the game with it, and sell the game. Then the owner of the credit card (or the credit card issuer) discovers this and demands a refund from the game seller. Processing this refund requires extra work and additional money from the game seller.
For a longer explanation, with successful results, you can read https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303 .
I sorta blame big media companies for this. They have been trying to kill used movie/game sales for decades, moving to these (should be illegal) licensing models, etc. In doing that, they have failed to allow an infrastructure to form that would keep used or third-party purchases “legit” so you end up with sites that have no choice but to live in the grey area, even cdkeys.com that (allegedly) sources their keys 100% first-party legitimately.
Ultimately, credit card fraud will always be a risk. Someone installed a barcode copier on a local gas station machine a while back, and they bought 5 PS4s on it before the Bank got wise. It’s a little easier in other countries because there’s no physical shipping to deal with, but it’s not really creating the market. As a defrauded individual, you just can’t chargeback a playstation that was sold anonymously on ebay and already shipped.
Here’s a dev explaining it: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2618947
Apparently they do chargebacks, which costs the gamedevs money.
This is something that should have been in the opening post.
It explains why using these sites actually causes harm.
Instead of getting a game at a reduced rate without harming the dev much (just losing a sale) you’re actually harming the dev.
This is something I didn’t know and now I’ll look more at discounted games on official platforms instead of these key sites.
Well, that makes me feel marginally better for never having bought keys in gray market sites like my friend who doesn’t pirate because he’s afraid of viruses, but then does that to get “amazing discounts”.
