A good number of these sites sell accounts, not keys. You buy an access to an account that you log in to, with the key enabled on it. Again, best case it’s a region swapped key between 5 people and g2a get paid and the devs get nothing. Worst case it’s a stolen credit card purchasing a single key.
> I would think that the credit card owner would dispute the charge and steam would deactivate the key.
Yes. Chargebacks are painfully expensive for the vendor. One chargeback for a $10 game likely undoes 4/5 sales.
You've twice asserted that "the devs get nothing". Can you please explain that?
Edit: I tried reading that link, but it loads and a few seconds later it is replaced with a "widget failed to load" error that removes all the text. Fun.
Sure - they got that key from _somewhere_. The reality is that if a key is being sold for $5, approx $0 will go to the developer - g2a get a cut, payment provider gets a cut, and either the key was bought for a rounding error of that price, or it was cribbed from a humble bundle or something. Yes you technically get a license for the game but none of that money is going to the people who make or fund the development, it’s going to middle men.
In the worst case, people buy the key from a store operated by the developer using a stolen credit card, flip it on g2a for 30% less and then the card owner files a chargeback on the initial purchase. Vendor bans the key, and the key sites just say “ok” and give you a new key under the guise of customer service but in reality it’s to cover the fact that a high number of their products will have that fate. A single chargeback will cost the dev the purchase price plus another $25 from their merchant, which means not only does that purchase net them 0 it costs them money if it was sold by them in the first place.
You might say you’re supporting games by purchasing them but it’s a bit like streaming music - listening to your favourite band on Spotify will net them approx 0, but buying their album on bandcamp will give them a lot. They’ll see as much from Spotify as they will from you pirating it.
It's likely because I use DNS-level blocking for a lot of junk and their "widget failed to load" was likely caught in that "junk" list. And the "widget" loader is badly (on purpose?) behaved and blanks the page.
I just read that article and while using stolen cards to buy keys is briefly mentioned in the first paragraph, that doesn't even seem to be the focus of the article.
On the surface, if a game developer generates and sells keys directly, they will always have to deal with fraud. It's a fact of life in ecomm. The fact that the keys are being flipped to a key reseller is beside the point, they will have to deal with the fraud. If they are giving away blocks of keys for free or highly discounted and those are making their way to a reseller, that is also something they need to deal with. They should be able to trace the providence of any given key they have issued. If they have commercial agreements in place about the disposition of keys from a batch and they can demonstrate that the batch was misused, that's a commercial contract dispute they need to solve.
I'm going to guess that most of these devs are using Steam to distribute their game and using their ability to generate keys they can sell. This, as far as I understand things, side-steps the Steam cut of a sale. If Steam is the one facilitating the sale, guess who is the merchant of record and deals with the charge-back.
Other than the dev selling a key directly and getting hit with a chargeback, if they are getting $0 in revenue from a key, that's their own fault for providing a key for free. If they didn't provide the key for free, then they would have had revenue. As for direct sales... they are in a better spot than merchants of physical goods. Those merchants not only lose the revenue and other aspects of devs, they physically are out the product. A dev can at least revoke the key.
I'll just close this out with, I don't buy from key resell sites as I find them less than reputable in most cases.
A good number of these sites sell accounts, not keys. You buy an access to an account that you log in to, with the key enabled on it. Again, best case it’s a region swapped key between 5 people and g2a get paid and the devs get nothing. Worst case it’s a stolen credit card purchasing a single key.
> I would think that the credit card owner would dispute the charge and steam would deactivate the key.
Yes. Chargebacks are painfully expensive for the vendor. One chargeback for a $10 game likely undoes 4/5 sales.
https://www.tinybuild.com/single-post/2017/04/28/g2a-sold-45... This story did the rounds a few years ago explaining how much it cost a small publisher