Key resellers & grey markets

Cordell

Yes, because going into a price war with thieves is a battle that they can win. Those who do sell stolen games at half price can half the price again, it wouldn't cost them anything, right?

Shiminay

dunworth1 wrote: »

I'll go wherever is cheapest to buy.

Same as if I was buying anything else.

If the devs were really worried they would reduce the cost to match simple as. They are greedy asking for 70+ for a game

Once again, for everyone who keeps ignoring this. Developers do not set prices for AAA games. Publishers do. They are 2 very, very different companies doing 2 very, very different jobs. One makes games, the other markets and sells games.

In the case of the indie dev, who is typically a team of less than 10 and who does not have the support of a multi-billion dollar publisher behind them, they have to wear both hats and they are the ones that are really suffering in this climate of stolen/fraudulent keys.

It's the same in music, gigantic bands on big labels make their money on record sales, the label makes its commission and it also pays for and receives the profits from big tours (and in their defence, they front an absurd amount of money and take on a big risk in doing so). Small bands who aren't on a label make their money by going out and gigging and selling Merch and CDs to people on the night. Sure, I could just stream or download their album, but given the choice between making a very real "can afford to eat next week" difference to a small band (or indie developer) who's art I am enjoying versus giving as little as possible back which only means they find it harder to stay in the game, then that's a no brainer - I'm always gonna try help a struggling artist because if people don't support the arts, they don't get arts.

dunworth1

Shiminay wrote:

Once again, for everyone who keeps ignoring this. Developers do not set prices for AAA games. Publishers do. They are 2 very, very different companies doing 2 very, very different jobs. One makes games, the other markets and sells games.

Surely the devs have already been paid when the game releases no?
I assume that the publisher fronts the money and hope to make a profit from the sales?

If a local shop was selling an item for 70 euro and an online retailer is selling the very same item for 40 euro. Who are you going to buy from?

I don't believe that the stolen keys are as common as people are saying as they normally deactivate the keys anyway

gizmo

dunworth1 wrote: »

I don't believe that the stolen keys are as common as people are saying as they normally deactivate the keys anyway

In the context of this discussion, it doesn't matter if the key has been deactivated because the retailer in question, whether it's the developer selling directly or an online store, will have already suffered the chargeback fee for the fraudulent transaction. This fee has been said to be up to $45 per instance, depending on the payment provider and case in question.

The scale of the problem is unknown but numerous developers, publishers and storefronts of various sizes have been hit with it over the last number of years as outlined in the links posted in the OP and since.

FAILSAFE 00

gizmo wrote: »

In the context of this discussion, it doesn't matter if the key has been deactivated because the retailer in question, whether it's the developer selling directly or an online store, will have already suffered the chargeback fee for the fraudulent transaction. This fee has been said to be up to $45 per instance, depending on the payment provider and case in question.

The scale of the problem is unknown but numerous developers, publishers and storefronts of various sizes have been hit with it over the last number of years as outlined in the links posted in the OP and since.

Well, we haven't heard of many deactivated keys incidents in the last couple of years. Only a few incidents reported so it can't be that bad and we know how gamers like to complain when it comes to deactivated keys.

I think the vast majority of reseller keys on the market are genuine and its a very small percentage that are fraudulent. Otherwise we'd be hearing about deactivated keys all day, every day.

dunworth1

FAILSAFE 00 wrote:

I think the vast majority of reseller keys on the market are genuine and its a very small percentage that are fraudulent. Otherwise we'd be hearing about deactivated keys all day, every day.

That's the thing if there was lots of keys being deactivated on g2a people would have stopped using it.

Once in a blue moon is fine but if every couple of games were being deactivated I wouldn't be buying from them anymore.

I've only ever had one game deactivated and that was eso

So 1 out of about a hundred odd

EoinHef

Every online retailer of digital good is vulnerable to this. Not just small indie stores.

They seem to want to try appeal to the emotions of the consumer to try and stop it. Im sorry but imo emotion has nothing to do with business,as a company there job is to try get the most possible from a sale,as a consumer my job is to try and get the best value i can. Lets not try and pretend business cares about the consumer.

If the key market sellers did not exist would prices/profit margins be higher at these sites? Would an appeal by consumers to reduce inflated prices be heard by any of these companies in that enviroment?

gizmo

FAILSAFE 00 wrote: »

Well, we haven't heard of many deactivated keys incidents in the last couple of years. Only a few incidents reported so it can't be that bad and we know how gamers like to complain when it comes to deactivated keys.

Quite true, there haven't been many publicised incidents but there are a number of reasons why this is the case, namely:

• There may not be that many incidents in general.
• Companies don't want the negative publicity of deactivating large swaths of keys. Case in point, the blowback over Ubisoft and Rebellion revoking keys for Far Cry 4 and Sniper Elite 3 in the past.
• It's not exactly easy to track which keys were fraudulently obtained. As the second IGS article says, tools to do this aren't exactly prevalent so it's difficult to do it accurately without harming legitimate buyers. The tinyBuild blog post has also been updated since, addressing this fact.

FAILSAFE 00 wrote: »

I think the vast majority of reseller keys on the market are genuine and its a very small percentage that are fraudulent. Otherwise we'd be hearing about deactivated keys all day, every day.

Putting aside the idea of outright fraud, however, there is a fairly decent argument from developers that the key reselling market is being bolstered by people purchasing keys in bulk from bundles and then reselling them for a profit on these marketplaces. Obviously, EULA issues aside, this is more of a moral issue but one which I'm clearly very much against. Is it the free market in action? Sure. Doesn't mean it doesn't suck for those depending on a much smaller number of sales to survive though.

To reiterate what I said earlier...

gizmo wrote: »

In general though, I find the more interesting question in this debate isn't really "is the key I bought working fine", it's "who is getting shafted in order for me to get this cheap key" and the obvious follow up, "do I care?".

EoinHef wrote: »

Every online retailer of digital good is vulnerable to this. Not just small indie stores.

They seem to want to try appeal to the emotions of the consumer to try and stop it. Im sorry but imo emotion has nothing to do with business,as a company there job is to try get the most possible from a sale,as a consumer my job is to try and get the best value i can. Lets not try and pretend business cares about the consumer.

If the key market sellers did not exist would prices/profit margins be higher at these sites? Would an appeal by consumers to reduce inflated prices be heard by any of these companies in that enviroment?

All totally true however I'd argue that the emotive aspect plays a larger role in these cases because we're dealing with smaller companies who simply can't afford to survive with these losses. In the case of tinyBuild, whose blog post kicked this thread off again, this is an interesting read on how they got their first game out the door, how they moved into publishing and what they've done since. They may be a business but they're also just a small bunch of folk trying to get some neat games out there and who I don't particularly like to see getting hit in the manner which they've described.

dunworth1

gizmo wrote:

Putting aside the idea of outright fraud, however, there is a fairly decent argument from developers that the key reselling market is being bolstered by people purchasing keys in bulk from bundles and then reselling them for a profit on these marketplaces. Obviously, EULA issues aside, this is more of a moral issue but one which I'm clearly very much against. Is it the free market in action? Sure. Doesn't mean it doesn't suck for those depending on a much smaller number of sales to survive though.

Thankfully my moral compass is aligned with my wallet.

I'd also look at it while they are getting less large sums of cash i would bet that people are buying more games.

I'm more likely to buy a few games rather than just one purely down to the cost

Stingerbar

Affiliate for two cd key resellers here

The vast majority of resold keys are simply bought on cheaper markets and sold to more expensive ones. The developers in these cases get the revenue, less per unit, but more volume sold.

There's the option to use a Russian VPN and have lots of cheap games, but nobody really wants to do this, so the market exists. Capitalism.

Naturally not all cd resellers are to be trusted, some are shady, some are new, and certain keys (like Blizzard keys) I would be cautious of.

The two resellers I am an affiliate for have good trustpilot scores, feature regularly on large international deal sites, respond quickly on twitter, have tens of thousands of followers/likes/shares, have been around for several years, are pretty well established.. personally I can see the sales, return rates, etc so it all reconciles.. yet they get lumped in with bad sellers (e.g. fly by night resellers who seem to disappear into thin air or rename their company) or get associated with old and recent stories about deactivated keys and so on


TLDR: the whole market itself is grey, but certain resellers are dependable. Likewise I don't trust every single computer hardware site I come across, I check them out. Zero risk, stick with Steam/Uplay/Origin

Robert ninja

I wouldn't have bought a ton of the games I have if they weren't as cheap as they were on key resellers. Mostly older games from big publishers. Like Max Payne 1/2 deal I got for something like 3 quid. Those titles are pretty old and awesome but R* are not a company I respect and have pushed even stricter DRM so I've no interest in directly supporting them but I'll still buy their older games albeit at a cheaper price.

Simarly if there's a developer or publisher who has been catering to my niches and values then I'll buy directly from their site if possible or from steam/gog. A lot of AAA publishers seem to think adding more DRM and regional restrictions will curve this problem... but for me that just makes me think less of them and even more likely to buy from a reseller or outright dismiss their game.

Just stick to your guns with these kinds of issues. You can't take on the weight of the whole market. Do you little part in supporting things you like but I won't be losing any sleep over Rockstar not getting an extra €13.01 from me. (and I refuse to buy any RSC games).

Shiminay

TotalBiscuit went on a full on shouty crackers rant about this yesterday on the Co-Optional Podcast (which had Sky Williams as a guest and he's a man who up until very recently was sponsored by G2A). Like him or not, he's a great orator and he made the point that you're actually doing LESS harm to small time developers by pirating their games instead of buying stolen keys. The Developers in these instances have to foot the bill of a chargeback/refund and often times that's a flat fee, not a percentage of the transaction, so it can be for MORE than the game would normally sell for.

Some interesting points I took away from the discussion/rant: G2A and Kinguin offer you (the consumer) insurance to protect against fraud - they are straight up admitting that they know their platforms are being abused for these purposes and they're cashing in on it - it may be rare to be sold a stolen key, but it's a nice little money spinner for the platform.

G2A told developers who wanted a fix that if they signed up exclusively to their sales platform, they'd be able to fix, but otherwise no - that is a fking shake down of Mafia proportions. You cannot suggest these are the actions of a company that has any ethics or interest in addressing a serious legal issue that's ongoing with their platform. Fine - argue that Ethics and Maximising Profit are mutually exclusive and that ethics has no place in this conversation, but that makes you a part of the problem.

G2A, knowing their reputation has been taking a hammering on these issues for a few years has decided to throw money at things and people to buy good-will. TB said of a recent tournament he casted that was sponsored by them that he didn't want to do it when he heard they were the headline sponsor, but the event organisers said that they gave them so much money, they couldn't afford not to take it.

Links234

Take a good look at this if you think G2A aren't a shady business.

gizmo

Shiminay wrote: »

G2A, knowing their reputation has been taking a hammering on these issues for a few years has decided to throw money at things and people to buy good-will. TB said of a recent tournament he casted that was sponsored by them that he didn't want to do it when he heard they were the headline sponsor, but the event organisers said that they gave them so much money, they couldn't afford not to take it.

Six million dollars I heard. Repeatedly.

Robert ninja

I'm not defending G2A. I've bought from them before with no issues but I know full well they're grey market but no more 'evil' in terms of corporations than the 'legit' guys.

What I find rich is that the same people who shouted about them (resellers in general) being illigetimate are now surprised that they're taking any kinds of steps to try and gain their customer's confidence back.

I never liked their 'shield' and insurance policy crap either. I always unticked it. Consumer rights garuantee I get a working key not a charge. And if I ever recieved a non-working key or later flagged as stolen I'd reverse the charges with my bank and never do business with the seller again. They're making the whole inusrance thing a part of their business model now which i think is a bad idea. But I can do what I've always done, ignore it, no matter how tacky it gets. Certainly can't be any worse than payed mods steam tried to push or the desolation of certain mod scenes' integrity from the steam workshop overall.

gizmo

I'm not really sure I'd consider throwing money at sponsorship deals for LoL teams and events while simultaneously promoting account selling and ELO Boosting services for the very same game as attempts at gaining customer's confidence back, Robert. I'd liken the former aspect to more straight up self promotion and increasing brand awareness than anything else.

Hell, I'd happily take the point that what they do in general isn't anti-consumer. I would, however, consider it damaging to the developers and publishers whose games they resell for the reasons already stated. They may, to quote Stingerbar above, "get the revenue, less per unit, but more volume sold" but that doesn't really do them any good if their total revenue is diminished because of their business. It's also important to note that most of the complaints about the resellers have come from the smaller outfits who are less likely to be able to absorb the losses stemming from both those falling revenues and large fees stemming from chargebacks.

Robert ninja

@gizo

We've heard all this before about piracy and it's not true or exagerated. I'd say a large amount of people who buy resold keys don't have a lot of money for video games and/or aren't exactly the core audience or fans of that particular game. Either they're going to buy it at the reduced price or they're not going to buy it. It's similar to the pirating situation: They're either going to pirate it or not play it if there's no crack yet. Do you really see people suddenly just paying full price for things they're not mad into? They'll skip it.

Again it's all about priorities. People buy multiple games more than ever on PC. Most people couldn't possibly have a library of 100s of games if they didn't use bundles, sales and resellers. Look at console players' libraries. A lot smaller. There's very little variation in price.

gizmo wrote: »

Hell, I'd happily take the point that what they do in general isn't anti-consumer.

Or at all anti-consumer. Do people even know what anti-consumer means? Saving a consumer money or giving them more choice is under no circumstance anti-consumer. Adding DRM, regional restrictions definitely is anti-consumer though and are done by the industry its self to combat reselling/piracy. Look how well that's turned out.

I'll always support my favourite games as directly as possible if they're catering to my values. Most people who have disposable income really don't use key resellers and they're not as popular as people make them out to be. My friend gifted me Crysis ME (2007) recently because he wanted me to stream it. He got it full retail price for €20 on steam. I told him he could've gotten it way cheaper if he got it from a key reseller but he said it doesn't matter because it was easy to gift over steam. I had to practically crack the game anyway because of an issue with that game running @ 32bit. It doesn't show up as me playing it on steam now because of this (which I don't mind too much). The official servers are also no longer supported so there's no multiplayer. And the game continously prompts me to install anti-cheating software on top of its DRM... every time I boot it up. To me, this is exactly the kind of game I buy from resellers. Support dropped, ancient issues unsolved, development studio and publisher doing absolutely nothing interesing anymore and not catering to their original audience.

FAILSAFE 00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBakPg6x63Q

gizmo

Robert ninja wrote: »

@gizo

We've heard all this before about piracy and it's not true or exagerated. I'd say a large amount of people who buy resold keys don't have a lot of money for video games and/or aren't exactly the core audience or fans of that particular game. Either they're going to buy it at the reduced price or they're not going to buy it. It's similar to the pirating situation: They're either going to pirate it or not play it if there's no crack yet. Do you really see people suddenly just paying full price for things they're not mad into? They'll skip it.

Again it's all about priorities. People buy multiple games more than ever on PC. Most people couldn't possibly have a library of 100s of games if they didn't use bundles, sales and resellers. Look at console players' libraries. A lot smaller. There's very little variation in price.

Funny that you mention piracy actually, given some of the fees which certain companies have been hit with over the last while and the general distaste towards G2A and their ilk expressed by others, I'd wager RageSquid aren't the only ones wishing some people had just pirated their game.

You're certainly right with the above though, the pirated game being equal to the lost sale has always been a nonsensical argument. At the same time, however, so too is the point that people would suddenly just stop buying or playing games if they couldn't download or acquire them cheaply. Yes, they'd probably buy less in terms of volume but, as I said above, using the higher volume of sales argument that some of the resellers use doesn't do studios much good if they're not able to survive on the reduced revenue it leads to.

This isn't a retailers good, resellers bad argument though. There are resellers who use basic economies of scale to offer discounts to customers with which I'd wager no one has any real problem with. In these instances practically everyone gets what they want and no one is being screwed in the process.

What would be even better is, of course, if we saw the larger price variation you mention. Personally though I'd prefer if this came from pricing that was perhaps more reflective of the costs involved in the production of the title combined with a more organic price drop of older games over time. Again, the objective would be to ensure that content producers are adequately rewarded for their work while customers get access to a wide range of varied content at prices which everyone can afford at some point.

Robert ninja wrote: »

Or at all anti-consumer. Do people even know what anti-consumer means? Saving a consumer money or giving them more choice is under no circumstance anti-consumer. Adding DRM, regional restrictions definitely is anti-consumer though and are done by the industry its self to combat reselling/piracy. Look how well that's turned out.

I italicised the "in general" part to draw a distinction between their actual business model and the Shield nonsense they've been peddling for the last while. It's the latter I'd lump into the "anti-consumer" bracket there.

That being said, if the reselling market grew to the point that it started to actively harm larger publishers and they in turn normalised prices across all geographical regions in order offset the damage done to it, would that be classed as anti-consumer? I mean, everyone is now paying the same price for the product, that's fair, no?

dunworth1

FAILSAFE 00 wrote: »

-levelcapgaming youtube-

from that i gather that the problem is some games on g2a are stolen keys but not all are so really the issue is with credit card companies not deactivating card fast enough/people reporting them stolen

he even mentions about how to convince people to pay double the price
and doesn't really have any solution.

the clear solution is for devs/publishers to reduce the game prices.
if they are loosing out as much as they are making out well then

reducing the price to the same or close to g2a prices would get people buying from them instead of g2a.

its hard to justify 70 euro these days for a game when often enough you have to buy dlc and the game ends up costing 100+

id much rather pay 30 odd for the game and then probably another 20 or so on dlc.

with the lower price i get to buy more games and play more so to me personally its a good deal that i will continue to do until such a time when devs/publishers reduce the prices.

similar thing happen in the movies/music industry it was rampant with piracy but Netflix/spotify came along and stopped a huge chunk of it (yes i know it still happens)

the point i'm trying to get across is offer the product at a reasonable price and people will pay

Robert ninja

gizmo wrote: »

That being said, if the reselling market grew to the point that it started to actively harm larger publishers and they in turn normalised prices across all geographical regions in order offset the damage done to it, would that be classed as anti-consumer? I mean, everyone is now paying the same price for the product, that's fair, no?

You mean regional pricing dissapeared and everyone payed the same price?

No, that wouldn't be fair. But they do that anyway. The game will be 59.99 USD and 59.99 EUR despite them not having the same currency value. GOG is the only digital retailer I know of that gives store credit to offset the regional pricing and I'm pretty sure that's at their own discretion.


Large publishers for the big titles like CoD, Assassin's Creed etc will never be hurt financially more by key resellers than they are physical reselling/trading, anti-consumer DRM and the overall quality (or lack thereof) of their games. Pretty sure gamestop's trade-in racket was and still is a bigger issue financially for many publishers. But they can't make them into boogeymen like they can re-sellers and pirates. The ghosts they can always blame over their own incompetence.

Make no mistake, I think resellers are a much bigger problem than pirates ever were, but we'll see the same drivel coming from the industry about em' and frankly I don't have the ears for it anymore. I'll support my favourite games, always have and always will. Anything beyond that is their problem. And if they make their problems my problem (hello 2-layer DRM) then I'll stop supporting them as I have with many so far.

Shiminay

dunworth1 wrote: »

reducing the price to the same or close to g2a prices would get people buying from them instead of g2a.

I rather suspect it'll just make them cheaper again on G2A. Besides, how much cheaper can they make it? The cost of developing games is about ten times what it was ten years ago and yet we've had no real price hike - instead we've had back-door additional charges like season passes and dlc content etc. There is no way for this industry to sustain itself if you're telling devs and publishers who're already suffering from falling revenues as more choice presents itself that they have to sell at a loss.

dunworth1 wrote: »

similar thing happen in the movies/music industry it was rampant with piracy but Netflix/spotify came along and stopped a huge chunk of it (yes i know it still happens)

the point i'm trying to get across is offer the product at a reasonable price and people will pay

There's a very important distinction to be made between these comparisons though, one is buying a product, the other is buying membership of a service. 2 very different sorts of transactions and one that suits passively consumed media like films and music but which has been shown to have only limited appeal to actively consumed products like games. People want to own a game, they don't want to just be allowed to play it.

dunworth1

Shiminay wrote: »

I rather suspect it'll just make them cheaper again on G2A. Besides, how much cheaper can they make it? The cost of developing games is about ten times what it was ten years ago and yet we've had no real price hike - instead we've had back-door additional charges like season passes and dlc content etc. There is no way for this industry to sustain itself if you're telling devs and publishers who're already suffering from falling revenues as more choice presents itself that they have to sell at a loss.

EA made $875 million net income last year and ubisoft made €561.8 million that's hardly struggling

the small guys will always find it hard its the nature of being small same as any business.

in the company i work we sometimes end up footing the bill for certain things i assume same as any company


anyone who buys a game through steam or similar don't own the game
there noting stopping steam closing tomorrow and then all the games are gone.

Robert ninja

Shiminay wrote: »

There's a very important distinction to be made between these comparisons though, one is buying a product, the other is buying membership of a service. 2 very different sorts of transactions and one that suits passively consumed media like films and music but which has been shown to have only limited appeal to actively consumed products like games. People want to own a game, they don't want to just be allowed to play it.

Actually for consoles (where key-selling isn't nearly big of a deal) playstation and xbox are becoming more of a service. I've said it before but I think that's the future for those companies' gaming departments. You subscribe to PS+ and XBL to get 'free' games as it is. People seem to like it.

You're right in that games are cheap, though. I think video games are the cheapest non-physical hobby around with the best money:hour ratio. I also don't think reducing the overall price of games is not going to solve the issue and like you said it would just make the resellers reduce the prices even more.

But there is the issue of content. Many games are trying to monetise content that used to be standard in the base product. Things like costumes are no longer unlocked but bought. It's also hard to justify some AAA publishers pricing when a game like Terraria releases for 10 quid with sales often dropping it to less than half that, with more content, quality, playtime and platform support than a handful of the latest AAA games combined.

It comes down to proper financing. The big publishers spend a lot of money on marketing as well as trying to fit everything including the kitchen sink into their games, while making them as 'safe' as possible so they appeal to as many people as possible (ultimately hitting no niche). They have no sense of scaling things back and focusing on specific features, budgeting for a niche.

Even the smarter publishers like the people behind The Witcher 3 spent more on marketing than they did the actual game. Then went and said to their core audience that they just had to focus a lot of the design on PS4/XBO because without those platforms they just couldn't turn a profit.

dunworth1 wrote: »

anyone who buys a game through steam or similar don't own the game
there noting stopping steam closing tomorrow and then all the games are gone.

While this is true, the games are simply gone from being downloaded from their service. You still own a license to the game. That's what you purchase. Entertaining the idea of Valve's steam closing, if they didn't also release a DRM removal patch before closing their doors everyone would need to crack their games to play them (the ones with DRM anyway, some steam games are actually DRM free).

Similarly, Sony and Microsoft could push a 1MB update to all their respective consoles that prevents it from ever playing games again. Turning those physical copies into worthless plastic. Only off-the-grid machines would be safe, which has always been the case for PCs and consoles that have network features.

johnny_ultimate

dunworth1 wrote: »

similar thing happen in the movies/music industry it was rampant with piracy but Netflix/spotify came along and stopped a huge chunk of it (yes i know it still happens)

the point i'm trying to get across is offer the product at a reasonable price and people will pay

This is part of the problem though: as prices race to the bottom, other problems rack up. Take Spotify: there is no reasonable argument that small artists - and, frankly, even bigger ones - aren't getting ****ed over there. Pittance per play. Don't get me wrong - I'm a Spotify subscriber, because it is great value. But I know that great value isn't a great deal for everyone, so I feel obliged to go out and support the artists in other ways. At the same time, I don't think artists should have to rely on endless touring for revenue, as is often put forward as a counterpoint - some sort of middle ground between 'sweet FA' and 'overpriced' could surely be reached for their recorded music. But again, Spotify has lowered the bar so radically it remains to be seen if that can be achieved now, outside the pool of people who actually are willing to still buy music.

Same with Netflix, although distributors get a better deal there. It has its own problems, though. It is an incredibly unfriendly place for foreign, classic and independent cinema,leading to an IMO troublesome drift towards a sort of cultural status quo. It undoubtedly has its place - increasingly so, especially its original content - but it alone cannot maintain a healthy and varied cinematic landscape. There are companies out there putting incredible efforts into producing high quality Blu-Ray releases, or releasing all manner of obscure and wonderful gems. Yet they're reliant on an increasingly small niche, because many people now consider anything beyond a low monthly subscription too high.

Yes, it is in many ways a great time to be a consumer - of music, films or games. But one cannot pretend that the rush towards low prices doesn't have negative consequences. It's hard to feel a whole lot of sympathy for the corporate executives whose profit margins are diminishing. But whether it's key resellers or subscription services, what's 'consumer friendly' is only a portion of the story - and I think a lot off people would be better of if some of these 'consumer friendly' practices were more 'fair trade' then they are now.

dunworth1

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

...

if those artists dont like spotifys model they can pull their song ala taylor swift
spotifiy is probably making them more money now then they would have with the amount of piracy in my age group early 20s before spotify nobody i knew bought cds we all downloaded or listened on youtube

i don't get this race to the bottom thing your on about artists/publishers/actors all make serious cash maybe not as much as they used to (which is the problem) but its still serious cash and will continue to do so and all on the back of us normal folk.
they don't seem to realize that the world is changing to a digital model and that means they need to move along with it or eventually get dragged.


small artists actually make more money these days (if they are good) as they dont need to somehow get a label behind them all it that's is a mic and webcam.
same with indies where would they even be without the internet.. nowhere
fraud has always been there and always will any good business should have a plan in place to deal with those kind of things before they release

i read above about some dev spending 6 months implementing security features to protect themselves that's a no brainier.

you wouldn't paint a beautiful picture and place in it inside your front door but leave the door wide open its obvious whats going to happen that's the world we live in.

i work for my money so I'm going to make the most of it by shopping around
i will buy my products at the cheapest place i can so i can buy more stuff.

if i got robbed down the street how many knights in shining armor would come to save me? probably none

because this world favors the rich and they have managed to brainwash the poor into helping them to get richer and richer at our expensive.

so g2a is shady but why dont they all get together and create something which would compete with g2a? greed that's why

gizmo

dunworth1 wrote: »

EA made $875 million net income last year and ubisoft made €561.8 million that's hardly struggling

In that same period EA made over $1.3b in "additional content", over half of which was from the Ultimate Team platform in FIFA, Madden and NHL. This is a massively important piece of information you need to consider in this argument.

Your figure for Ubisoft, however, is incorrect. In FY2016 they had a net operating profit of €169m. Again though, what's important to factor in here is that said figure was made from sales of nearly €1.4b. Game development, as is often said, is expensive.

Robert ninja wrote: »

But there is the issue of content. Many games are trying to monetise content that used to be standard in the base product. Things like costumes are no longer unlocked but bought. It's also hard to justify some AAA publishers pricing when a game like Terraria releases for 10 quid with sales often dropping it to less than half that, with more content, quality, playtime and platform support than a handful of the latest AAA games combined.

This is simply because the cost involved in the creation of this content has risen so dramatically over the years. You've played both the old and new Doom games recently, right? Putting aside the fact that you preferred the older version, look at respective team sizes involved in the production of those two games. Hell, look at each creature and examine the work that would be required to concept, model, texture, rig and animate each one. As Shiminay said above, the reason we've seen such growth in additional paid content is that they needed to find ways to make up for the fact that despite ballooning development budgets, the amount they can charge for the base product hasn't changed since the early 90s.

Robert ninja wrote: »

It comes down to proper financing. The big publishers spend a lot of money on marketing as well as trying to fit everything including the kitchen sink into their games, while making them as 'safe' as possible so they appeal to as many people as possible (ultimately hitting no niche). They have no sense of scaling things back and focusing on specific features, budgeting for a niche.

And the reason marketing budgets have increased is precisely the same, with the price of each unit locked at the same level, they simply need to sell more of them to make a profit. As you rightly point out though, this can also have the rather negative effect of the watering down of titles to appeal to everyone rather than being able to focus on more niche games.

Robert ninja wrote: »

Even the smarter publishers like the people behind The Witcher 3 spent more on marketing than they did the actual game. Then went and said to their core audience that they just had to focus a lot of the design on PS4/XBO because without those platforms they just couldn't turn a profit.

I don't doubt for a second that given the investment required to build the game they did, they needed to push hard for consoles. It is, quite simply, where the real money is. Look at the figures which resulted from their approach though; 1.5m pre-orders, a #1 debut in the UK sales charts with revenue at a level 600% above that for the previous entry in the series and, most importantly, over 6m copies sold worldwide within the vital six week window post-launch.

Net result? An overall project budget of approximately $81m led to a $62.5m profit for the studio, money which can now be used to fund the likes of Gwent and Cyberpunk 2077.

K.O.Kiki

dunworth1 wrote:

[...]

I have no idea what you're ranting about now, mate.

And there are services which are competing with G2A.

The problem is that G2A is a middleman facilitating dishonest transactions (unusable/stolen keys, protection money against said) and I'm just waiting for the day someone takes them to court.
And as those trying to honestly compete with them are forced to continually lower their prices (race to the bottom), G2A can just take their prices and match them.

dunworth1

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

I have no idea what you're ranting about now, mate.

And there are services which are competing with G2A.

The problem is that G2A is a middleman facilitating dishonest transactions (unusable/stolen keys, protection money against said) and I'm just waiting for the day someone takes them to court.
And as those trying to honestly compete with them are forced to continually lower their prices (race to the bottom), G2A can just take their prices and match them.

that's called economics businesses always compete against each other
i still don't get this race to the bottom your on about mate.

gizmo wrote: »

Your figure for Ubisoft, however, is incorrect.

Google has failed me

Robert ninja

gizmo wrote: »

This is simply because the cost involved in the creation of this content has risen so dramatically over the years. You've played both the old and new Doom games recently, right? Putting aside the fact that you preferred the older version, look at respective team sizes involved in the production of those two games. Hell, look at each creature and examine the work that would be required to concept, model, texture, rig and animate each one. As Shiminay said above, the reason we've seen such growth in additional paid content is that they needed to find ways to make up for the fact that despite ballooning development budgets, the amount they can charge for the base product hasn't changed since the early 90s.

Let me just paste this snippet from an interview with John Romero

GamesBeat: Does Doom have something to teach the younger generation here about game development?

Romero: I think so. The team was really small. I think that when people look at Doom, they don’t know the technology that was behind it, because if they were brought up with what’s taught today, they think, “Well, I’ll just use OpenGL and generate the polygons and textures. It’s no problem.” It’s all about levels and design, instead of understanding that this technology didn’t exist. There were no APIs. There were no video cards that did polygons. You did a 320 by 200 bitmap with 256 colors and you had to try to make it go fast on slow machines. It was very hard to make this game.

Even with the technology situation solved today, though, just getting this feel out of a game — the solidity of that feel — is pretty difficult.

You think Bethesda and NuID team have the talent, the ambition or creativity... or even the money to hire the talent to do the equivalent of what was done on the original doom but for today? I think my point stands. Those guys couldn't match the new level Romero made for the original over a weekend if you gave them the whole budget for the game again. They added a lot. A lot of stuff that drove the budget up. And in the end the game isn't as good as the original. That's an absolute failure of budgeting (among other things) if I've ever heard.

gizmo wrote: »

And the reason marketing budgets have increased is precisely the same, with the price of each unit locked at the same level, they simply need to sell more of them to make a profit. As you rightly point out though, this can also have the rather negative effect of the watering down of titles to appeal to everyone rather than being able to focus on more niche games.

Indeed. Going back to TW3 again... that recent youtube ad campaign was a fecking waste. Anybody who was going to buy that expansion had already bought it or had it in their gog/steam wishlist or just knew they were going to buy it eventually. I don't even want to know how much advertising across YT like that cost, but I'm betting the money would've been better spent on other things.

gizmo wrote: »

don't doubt for a second that given the investment required to build the game they did, they needed to push hard for consoles. It is, quite simply, where the real money is. Look at the figures which resulted from their approach though; 1.5m pre-orders, a #1 debut in the UK sales charts with revenue at a level 600% above that for the previous entry in the series and, most importantly, over 6m copies sold worldwide within the vital six week window post-launch.

Net result? An overall project budget of approximately $81m led to a $62.5m profit for the studio, money which can now be used to fund the likes of Gwent and Cyberpunk 2077.

That's exactly my point. They had to push hard for consoles because they budgeted so high and in turn spent an incredible amount of advertising. Again, no sense of making a focused game for core audience. You have to please everyone now.

Thankfully TW3 turned out to be an incredible game anyway so we got lucky. Literally best case scenario with the only downsides being its consolitus: gamepad design, downgrade of graphics (which I wouldn't have minded if they didn't lie about it half a dozen times before admitting it) but it wasn't Crysis2/3-tier consolitus. That series got it fatally for its gameplay.

As for their new projects, I wish them the best. Hopefully they can make the DOOM of this generation in terms of ambition in design and technology.

johnny_ultimate

dunworth1 wrote: »

if those artists dont like spotifys model they can pull their song ala taylor swift

No, they can't, because they're not Taylor Swift Most people not named Taylor Swift, Kanye West etc... do not have the luxury of picking and choosing how their music is sold.

The vast majority, as you say, have to suck it up and move with the times because that's how music is listened to these days. Shame how screwed over they get in the process.

i work for my money so I'm going to make the most of it by shopping around
i will buy my products at the cheapest place i can so i can buy more stuff

I work for my money too, but I also think as consumers we need to be aware of the ethical implications of how we spend our money and not just be focused on 'more stuff' all the time - an attitude which is the ultimate victory of the very system you reference. Sadly, in this capitalist society of ours it's incredibly difficult to be an ethical consumer, given how deeply ingrained inequality and horrible practices are in everything we buy, from food to clothes. A lot of these practices are 'consumer friendly' but **** over untold millions of people and animals in the process. It takes a serious amount of effort - and quite a bit of money - to divorce yourself from these practices.

Luckily, with a completely luxury item such as a video game, we actually have some sort of freedom and capacity to make an informed decision about where we buy from, and what we buy - and personally that's why I stay away from key resellers If others have no issue with it, that's fine, we all have the right to make our own decisions. But ultimately I for one am reluctant to enable shady practices just to save a few euro or stick it to some corporate publisher.

gizmo

Robert ninja wrote: »

You think Bethesda and NuID team have the talent, the ambition or creativity... or even the money to hire the talent to do the equivalent of what was done on the original doom but for today? I think my point stands. Those guys couldn't match the new level Romero made for the original over a weekend if you gave them the whole budget for the game again. They added a lot. A lot of stuff that drove the budget up. And in the end the game isn't as good as the original. That's an absolute failure of budgeting (among other things) if I've ever heard.

None of this is particularly relevant to the point I made though. I'm talking about the time and the sheer number of people, each with their own skillset, required to create the content that goes into a modern game. I simply used the Doom games as an example since I read you had played both recently but it applies to any other modern title of a similar scale.

Robert ninja wrote: »

Indeed. Going back to TW3 again... that recent youtube ad campaign was a fecking waste. Anybody who was going to buy that expansion had already bought it or had it in their gog/steam wishlist or just knew they were going to buy it eventually. I don't even want to know how much advertising across YT like that cost, but I'm betting the money would've been better spent on other things.

It's difficult to say though, maybe that ad was targeted at the kind of person who would pre-order such DLC. While you would probably fall into the categories of customer you've described, I gather you wouldn't necessarily pre-order such a product?

Robert ninja wrote: »

That's exactly my point. They had to push hard for consoles because they budgeted so high and in turn spent an incredible amount of advertising. Again, no sense of making a focused game for core audience. You have to please everyone now.

Thankfully TW3 turned out to be an incredible game anyway so we got lucky. Literally best case scenario with the only downsides being its consolitus: gamepad design, downgrade of graphics (which I wouldn't have minded if they didn't lie about it half a dozen times before admitting it) but it wasn't Crysis2/3-tier consolitus. That series got it fatally for its gameplay.

As for their new projects, I wish them the best. Hopefully they can make the DOOM of this generation in terms of ambition in design and technology.

I feel you're coming at this from the wrong angle. While the marketing budget was undoubtedly higher for TW3, the game would have also required a far larger development budget due to the actual scale of the game, the direction taken with regards its open world design, the general improvements to the assets within, the engine upgrades required to drive all of this and of course, the larger team required to do all of this work. As a result, consoles and a beefier marketing campaign were always going to be a necessary evil in order to sell enough copies to cover the costs involved.

riclad

indie games dont cost as much as a aaa game .
IF you buy a game on steam it should not cost the same as a game disc sold in a retail store.
You are downloading a digital file and a code .
IF you wait a few months game prices go down ,
theres even sales on the ps4, xbox one store .
The problem is pc keys are sold at different prices in different countrys ,
the average income in russia is lower than the uk or france .
some people are using fake credit cards to buy pc game keys and then selling
em for cash at low prices .
Maybe the devs could make special codes ,designed only for use in a certain country .eg you cant use a uk code in spain or russia .
Then they,d need some complex drm system to check your ip
and what country you are in.

FAILSAFE 00

I keep it simple and just go where the value is. I am not on a crusade, just looking for the best price.

kunst nugget

dunworth1 wrote: »

small artists actually make more money these days (if they are good) as they dont need to somehow get a label behind them all it that's is a mic and webcam.

Jesus, if that's what people should aspire to when making music, then the future of music is going to be pretty bleak…

johnny_ultimate

kunst nugget wrote: »

Jesus, if that's what people should aspire to when making music, then the future of music is going to be pretty bleak…

Who needs to spend the time and money properly writing and recording deep, complex compositions with dozens of layers, instruments and post production flourishes when you can just plug in a web cam?

I'd say 'the vast majority of great musicians', but horses for courses and all that.

dunworth1

johnny_ultimate wrote:

I'd say 'the vast majority of great musicians', but horses for courses and all that.

you don't millions behind you to become a great musician. All you really need is time and dedication.

Anyway that has nothing to do with key sites.

Mr E

Interesting article from PC Gamer that shows the revenue split between storefront and developer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/pc-game-storefronts-compared-what-you-need-to-know-about-retailers-and-resellers/

May make you think twice if you want developers to be rewarded for their work.

Covers Steam, GOG, Itch.io, Humble, GMG, G2A, Kinguin and CDKeys.

kunst nugget

Mr E wrote: »

Interesting article from PC Gamer that shows the revenue split between storefront and developer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/pc-game-storefronts-compared-what-you-need-to-know-about-retailers-and-resellers/

May make you think twice if you want developers to be rewarded for their work.

Covers Steam, GOG, Itch.io, Humble, GMG, G2A, Kinguin and CDKeys.

I'd love to know what the breakdown is like for console stores and B&M shops.

Robert ninja

@kunst nugget

Or more interestingly how Sony/MC profit from making people subscribe to PS+/XBL play non Sony/MC games online. Do they foot the server bills of the respective games' in order to drag people into that eco?

Retr0gamer

A lot of games are P2P these days so there's way less server costs. When servers are needed the publisher usually foots the bill and probably licenses server software from MS and Sony to integrate them into their eco systems.

With MS and Sony really just providing a platform to sell you stuff for the most part and with a lot of servers being P2P it's pretty insane to think they are charging for the service considering PC platforms and Nintendo offer the same for free.

gizmo

When Vlambeer first launched Nuclear Throne they actually did something similar on their website where they broke down the various places the game was on sale and what each service offered both parties. It was a rather pleasant change from the usual secrecy surrounding game distribution.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

A lot of games are P2P these days so there's way less server costs. When servers are needed the publisher usually foots the bill and probably licenses server software from MS and Sony to integrate them into their eco systems.

With MS and Sony really just providing a platform to sell you stuff for the most part and with a lot of servers being P2P it's pretty insane to think they are charging for the service considering PC platforms and Nintendo offer the same for free.

On the platform holder side they still run the presence servers for tracking player activity in-game as well as some other basic functionality such as leaderboards. On top of this, while the games themselves are P2P, the session management is still done via the platform holder backend. The reduced server costs in this setup come from the fact that there are no actual game servers running on the platform holder end. In terms of charging, this would be covered from their cut of each sale which I don't believe is public.

When it comes to more customised services, the likes of those offered by EA and Ubisoft with some of their games, which link into their backend, there'll be APIs available for the respective online services.

Sales via their stores have a similar breakdown to other online storefronts I believe, somewhere around the 70/30 mark.

EoinHef

Assuming a reseller does not obtain the key fraudulently there has to be a payment to the publisher somewhere along the line,so that article is a little misleading. The publisher does not get a cut of the resale but why should they?

If i sell something second hand i dont pay the original manufacturer any money. They set the price,i bought the product,i can now resell at whatever i like. Again this is assumimg the key is legit. And lets get this straight,more keys than not are not revoked by a large percentage.

If seller bulk buys or buy in cheaper reigons that money goes to publishers devs,or whatever split they get with the retailer.

Im certainly not saying this is perfect but without the competition we would be paying console prices for games on PC or waiting for a long time for deep discounts in sales.

K.O.Kiki

Necro because this kinda came up again:
Darkwood developer releases its own game on Pirate Bay

"If you don't have the money and want to play the game, we have a safe torrent on the Pirate Bay of the latest version of Darkwood (1.0 hotfix 3), completely DRM-free," the studio stated.
"There's no catch, no added pirate hats for characters or anything like that. We have just one request: if you like Darkwood and want us to continue making games, consider buying it in the future, maybe on a sale, through Steam, GOG or Humble Store."

"But please, please, don't buy it through any key reselling site," Acid Wizard pleaded. "By doing that, you're just feeding the cancer that is leeching off this industry."

Potential-Monke

Interesting approach!

Retr0gamer

They kind of only have their self to blame here?

These dodgy keys come from people claiming to be youtubers or bloggers.... so why not properly vet these people before giving them keys. I mean that kind of **** is your own responsibility.

Potential-Monke

Hang on, do they not have a record of who they sold what keys to? And if a key comes back as cloned/used, then there is a follow up...

K.O.Kiki

Retr0gamer wrote: »

They kind of only have their self to blame here?

These dodgy keys come from people claiming to be youtubers or bloggers.... so why not properly vet these people before giving them keys. I mean that kind of **** is your own responsibility.

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Hang on, do they not have a record of who they sold what keys to? And if a key comes back as cloned/used, then there is a follow up...

Seems to me that they know how shady these charlatans are, and just stopped giving out keys.
Interesting comment too:

What's odd is that steam used to have a key authentication system (humble bundle used it) that they got rid of

gizmo

Retr0gamer wrote: »

They kind of only have their self to blame here?

These dodgy keys come from people claiming to be youtubers or bloggers.... so why not properly vet these people before giving them keys. I mean that kind of **** is your own responsibility.

Blame is completely the wrong word to use here. Let's look at the full quote...

We've also been flooded by emails! There's more of them than we are able to reply to, actually. The sad thing is, that a lot of those are scam emails. You know, when people claim to be a youtuber or blogger and ask for a Steam key. That key then gets sold through a shady platform. To be honest, we're fed up with it. This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don't have the money to play Darkwood.

So, is it their responsibility to handle this? Well yes, of course it is. However, they're just a team of three guys trying to develop a game and market it effectively while on a shoe-string budget*. Rather than wasting their time trying to sift through these requests in order to pick out legitimate ones so as to help promote the game and, possibly, give out free copies to people they want to, they've taken the torrent approach. Fair play to them imo, it's not something I think I'd consider doing but after working on the project for as long as they have it definitely takes some balls to do.


*For reference, they raised a little over $53k back in May '13.

EoinHef

They could always have a look on youtube/twitch etc and send keys to content creators via their official channels. No sifting through tons of emails then and you know your talking to the legit people then. Like first place as a small independent game maker id be sending keys is to totalbiscuit/angry joe/jim sterling. Not a huge fan of any of them but at least they give smaller games a chance. Id work down from there.

Its really not that hard to come up with better ways of getting a game out there rather than handing out keys to random emails.