It took me several times to understand what they meant by content.
Those are keys for reviewers and streamers. Companies steal and sell them, without giving anything to the developers. Now that makes sense.What do you mean “companies steal and sell them”. How? Like they are hacking into the email accounts of streamers and stealing and selling the key before the streamer can activate it?
Or they are stealing them from the developer directly somehow?
I don’t see how this would be feasible…
More likely that the streamer or reviewer receiving the free key is selling it on these marketplaces.
That’s one option. Or the sellers scam the keys posing as reviewers or streamers. Or a streamer shares them with friends, and they leak that way. Some combination I imagine.
Well, for a start, a streamer sharing the code with a friend and them selling it is obviously not the marketplace stealing anything.
So do we have any proof that these sellers are scamming developers by posing as streamers or is this something that you are asserting?
I’m speculating. Those are possible ways they could get it. Likely more I haven’t thought of.
I’m not making accusations. I’m putting together things based on what they said in the post. Just trying to make sense of it.
I’m not a researcher, investigator, or reporter.
I’m just a random Steve online. Feel free to ignore me
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers and acted like Karma was watching (as in, I don’t want my credit card stolen, so I won’t benefit from those of others).
Indie game devs are bombarded with free game requests.
I read about one indie dev who woke up to a dozen emails a day asking for a game key to “twitch stream” their game.
It becomes extremely exhausting to verify every single one, and so many just hand it off and hope that one emailer really is who they say they are and they suddenly get a shitton of sales.
Can confirm, I get emails daily.
To add to that, if they are using stolen payment info, then they’d probably have no qualms about stealing yours too
Crazy thing, but my credit card info was recently stolen and after closing it, making compensation claims for my bank and filing a offence report to the police I contacted the three different online store the card was used with.
The only one that responded was a key seller and they even refunded me the money.
Maybe they’re workinh in such a grey area that they want to avoid all possible legal trouble?
Jeez, which country is this that you need to do this much work to deal with credit card fraud?
I was quite surprised as well, when my card was stolen I called discover and they just charged back the transactions, granted they said it would be reinstated if their internal investigation proved to be a fake claim but, they got insurance from the feds for stuff like that, so they don’t need to care too much.
I was really surprised to read a while back that in the UK, for instance, the account holder is responsible if their bank card gets fraudulent charges from hacking, skimming, etc.
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers
I always assumed it was largely money laundering.
Claim to have bought a key for 1$ sell it for 10$. Declare you made a 9$ profit. In reality there was never a key for 1$. You bought a 10$ key with dirty money and are selling it at cost.
Fundamentally no different to the mafia run pizza place.
So how do one of theses sites have not already been taken down by law enforcement?
Why haven’t vinted, ebay or for that matter facebook been taken down by law enforcement?
So, what happend to evaluation keys, valid for 20 days after activation… Would solve a bunch of problems.
No no… It’s fine. Just pirate it. You got a free ticket now.
Some devs feel like it’s a dick move. If the content creator actually did stream or review it, it’s a bit of a slap in the face to then claw back the key.
I’ve seen demos/open betas have become a lot more common in the past year. So I do wonder if that’s changing this paradigm a bit
Freeware used to be a whole thing. A demo version you could play freely, and if you wanted the full version you’d pay for it
It would be a dick move to claw it back like media companies are clawing back “bought” content, but if it’s clear from the start…
What if the key itself had a limited available time to get activated, but after activation you keep the game?
This allows any interested content creator to play the game, while limiting the chances of abusing the developer.
100% possible with current steam key offerings I believe, it’s just a highly manual process.
A very manual process. Unless they can get greenlit from valve to have API access to the steam key system it would mean they would need to go in and manually deactivate keys that are not redeemed per batch.
I’m more surprised steam doesn’t offer the feature built in to be honest.
Yeah I do find it kinda odd it isn’t an option. I suppose there’s a slight risk of effecting normal users but that would be by the dev fucking up.
Tell me about it. Have been given 5 keys so far for steam games, only 1 removed the key from me after a short time
Factorio devs once put out a blog post about game key stores. Essentially, they were running into the issue of people buying factorio keys with stolen credit cards and then reselling them for cheap on G2A or whatever. Then the credit card would get identified as stolen, charge backs would be issued, and bank fraud departments would get involved. As a result, the factorio devs were actually losing money from stolen credit card sales.
Of course, factorio is in a somewhat unique position of never putting the game on sale, so if you’re getting it cheap it’s probably from some dude using a stolen CC.
Use sites like deals.gg or isthereanydeal
There are usually many legit places cheaper than steam with legit paid steam keys
I always assumed people used those sites because they didn’t want to get in trouble for “actually” pirating software.
I assume the main issue is that downloading from somewhere like steam and activating with a code, largely ensures there’s no malware included in what you just downloaded.
If you’re pirating something and certainly if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t be entirely sure the game you just downloaded isn’t a security risk.
so this is where those stores get their keys from
That doesn’t even make sense tho, why are they giving out 1000s of free keys?
If you have no marketing budget, then shipping keys to streamers. Like small streamers, with 10 concurrent viewers, they might actually install it and play the game.
That’s 10 more people exposed to the game. Now send out 10.000 of these keys, even if 1% that’d be 100 streamers, actually play it. That’s expose to 1000 people, if you’re lucky that’s 20 extra buyers - But it’s also buyers way more likely to leave a positive review, given they’ve already seen the gameplay loop before buying it.
The early reviews are incredibly important for Steam to determine whether or not it should boost visibility of the game
Maybe in hopes that youtubers and streamers will play the game on their channels if they got it for free? That’s probably what is meant by ‘to get content on our game’.
Is me paying for a free key meant for a reviewer or streamer so bad, I leave steam reviews lol
as a teenager i did a lot of business with shady key resellers. now i’m missing an unknown number of games from my library as a result of chargebacks and fraud. i’m fine to buy them again, but i’m gutted that i lost all my playstats, achievements, cloud saves, screenshots, etc. i’m not even sure what all is missing :/
Wait, really? You lost your cloud data?
if its steam, none of the stats are lost, if they repurchased the game they would have it again. You just can’t buy a game you don’t know is missing. I don’t think cloud saves are ever deleted, I’ve had cloud saves be restored when I refunded and then humble choice provided me a key to the same game 4 years later.
Yeah, I thought that was the case. But there has to be a way to see what games you have previously played.
You can see your entire steam purchase history which will include them.
Like the other person said, you can check your Steam account to see every key redemption that you’ve ever done. I believe refunds should still appear on that. I’m not sure if Steam initiated refunds will though.
This happened on stores like G2A and Kinguin. Generally stores that one way or another let users sell their keys, not stores that buy games in bulk and specially not stores where publishers and developers sell their keys officially.
It’s pretty easy to find out online which do what.
Depends a lot on the game company though. Sometimes I am willing to pay for the convenience while ensuring that I fuck over the publisher/developer. Sometimes you want to play a game developed by a company you dislike.
My problem with pirating anything isn’t the principle, it is the reliability and risk of viruses.
Should be nearly a non-issue on Linux, unless the DRM busting does some seriously shady shit as well.
True, assuming the crack works in Wine or Proton. However, those emulators aren’t fully sandboxed, so as long as the code can run it could in theory grab data or damage the system. Probably only a matter of time before such things are compromised regularly.
Wine/proton are not emulators, they run the code directly on linux, but using some fancy tricks to rrimplement windows dlls into linux native code. If someone embeds linux code in the windows executable you have the same privileges of your user and at tgat point you can be infected with a linux virus.
It’s not likely today because windows is much more popular, but once linux becomes popular enough to be an attractive target you will need to be as careful as on windows.
As far as I know, gamesplanet.com is okay, they get a deal for buying in bulk from publishers and then resell them at a small markup. You won’t get prices close to the games’ historical lows and they rarely have indies or other smaller games, but it’s a nice, non shady alternative for the bigger ones.
all the ones featured on isthereanydeal.com are legit
Are there any legit, non-shady key sites though? I regularly use loaded.com (formerly CDKeys) but have no idea if they’re legit or not.
Loaded should be fine if they’re operating as they did when their name was CDKeys. 👌
gamesplanet.com should be legit, see my other comment in this thread. As a result they have pretty high prices compared to the shady sites though. My main use case is throwing some money at an independent games journalist I like through his affiliate link (and getting a 10-20% discount in the process)
on gg.deals you can compare multiple ones, then filter the store section for “official”
edit: loaded is a keyshop, not an official one
When it comes to committing piracy, one element is whether or not the money would reach the actual developers of what I bought. I usually don’t give a toss about publishers, unless they have a reputation of actually caring for the studios. If the developers are dead, my money goes to someone who isn’t.
Aside from that, my main use of piracy is to get stuff that isn’t sold anymore, to avoid DRM, and being free of the cloud’s tyranny. Autonomy is more important than money.
