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image:
screenshot of a Tweet from Running With Scissors reading
“We’ve been told our games are too expensive in some countries but we’ve been using Steam’s recommended pricing for a while. We trust Valve enough to not change this. If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us.”
Their reason is: people is using g2a for “discounted” keys.
Where the “discount” comes? Easy, some asshole buys from their website many keys with a stolen credit card, then they will need to refund it + pay an expensive fee for the chargeback.
I’m not a dev but at that point I would just give up selling keys by myself and I would just rely on steam for fraud detection. The only case where the 30% fee is justified
I’ll take the downvotes but this is hardly true. Most of them come from bundles and purchasing them in other countries where it’s a lot cheaper. You can prove this easily by checking games on g2a that almost never go on sale or are included in bundles and you will notice the price is the same or a few dollars cheaper than steam.
Most == prevent.
The issue with G2A is that any keys at all come from scammed credit cards. In a silly way it’s like of like tor. It doesn’t matter if I am trying to sell my excess Humble Bundle keys in good faith on G2A if other sellers on the market are selling scammed keys. Good users making listings obfuscate all the bad users.
Also, purchasing regional keys cheaper and reselling them is also what causes this shit in the first place. People blame Valve for making the decision, but not the people switching to a region to buy a game for cents on the dollar and then resell it? That is actively hurting the people in those countries who are now being charged closer to USD prices. For Brazillians this is exorbitant.
I don’t disagree with you in that there are G2A keys that come from bundles. But I do disagree with the notion that “it doesn’t matter.” It absolutely matters because it’s affecting people’s ability to buy games and it affects people circumventing legal purchase methods (of which I support their circumventing) who then have to deal with buying scammed credit card keys instead of me selling them and excess Humble Bundle key. The card gets charged back, the developer loses money, the G2A purchaser loses their key, and the scammers get off scott-free.
Basically, G2A should be a good idea but has been co-opted by scammers. These sites have their grey-market reputation for a reason, because it’s run entirely off of the losses of others. Losses of the developers, losses of regional players, and losses of players purchasing games on these grey-market sites.
There’s no winners for G2A except for the owners of the site and scammers. You may win once in a while getting a brand new game for $5-25 less. You may end up losing when it’s pulled from your account, if it does. At that point, you’re effectively gambling. Taking a risk for a discount on something with a high likelihood of it being unethically sourced which may be removed from your account?
In most cases I’d personally rather pay the extra $15 to just have the peace of mind. The chance of the game not being bought on a stolen CC and not supporting regional theft that hurts those players is just a bonus.
If they’re charging less in different regions and people were using VPNs to purchase then you’d think that’d be a sign that maybe game prices are too high. They’re selling an identical product at a much cheaper price because the people in some countries are poorer or their currency is garbage compared to USD? Pretty gross to think about.
I never said it didn’t matter. I said it’s not at prevalent as people are making it out to be. I’ve purchased 100s of steam keys from these sites over the years and never came across an instance where the key was removed or revoked. All of these sites guarantee the key is good or your money back anyways so I find it hard to believe that is what is going on at all. As long as you purchase the key from a reputable seller as they all have ratings just like eBay then there is no issue. I think maybe in the early days of key sellers it’s what was happening, but these sites would have fizzled out a long time ago if they were bastions of credit card fraud.
So, basically, G2A is a fence for stolen property? Why hasn’t it been shut down by law enforcement?
Because only Factorio has been able to proove that is happening. That and they pretend they don’t know that is happening as they are just the middle men.
In Europe at least if strong authentication was done during the purchase (and it is mandatory since a few years), the merchant is protected and the bank issued the card will take the loss. They don’t need to refund or pay fees for charge back.
Are you sure? My stripe merchant account still mentions the 15 euro chargeback fee and now in my country is easier to ask for a chargeback, can do at the phone while before you needed to send a registered snail mail at a secret address with the right timing using a secret form, while sending a copy of the police report via fax
SCA (strong customer authentication) should indeed move the liability for fraudulent purchases to the issuer. Wording in contracts may still mention other things. We had to, for one specific payment service provider, explicitly tell them to only allow card purchases using SCA since we had problems with stolen cards. With some PSPs we could just refuse certain ECI codes. Been a few years for me and YMMV but if chargebacks are causing headaches it might be worth looking into.
I worked at company like stripe and exactly at the scope of authentication/liability. I am not sure about whatever you pay the charge back fee even though the liability is shifted from you to the issuer bank. Do you have 3DS2 enabled for your payments?
It is normal that Stripe mention the charge back fees as there are exceptions for strong authentication but it is worth asking them for details and whatever you pay the fee even when liability have been shifted. And maybe the issuer bank will just do refund and take the loss if it see the SCA have been done.
