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Indie Dev TinyBuild Lost $450K To Fraudulent Sales Facilitated By G2A (pastemagazine.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Paste Magazine: Indie developer TinyBuild, the studio behind Punch Club, Party Hard and SpeedRunners, had thousands of their game codes stolen through fraudulent credit card purchases, which then wound up on G2A.com, a site that allows people to resell game codes. The basic idea behind G2A is straightforward and pretty harmless: with the amount of game codes sold through Steam, the Humble Store/Bundle, and more, the site gives consumers a place to sell unwanted game codes. However, in doing so, G2A has created a huge black market for game codes sales. As TinyBuild described in their blog post on the matter, the common practice for scammers is to "get ahold of a database of stolen credit cards on the dark web. Go to a bundle/3rd party key reseller and buy a ton of game keys. Put them up onto G2A and sell them at half the retail price." This allows scammers to make thousands of dollars while preventing any profit from reaching the game developers because, once the stolen credit cards are processed, the payments will be denied. G2A states that TinyBuild's retail partners are the ones selling the codes on G2A, not scammers, despite the thousands of codes they lost through their online store to fraudulent credit card purchases. In 2011, TinyBuild was in the news for uploading their own game, a platformer called No Time To Explain, to the Pirate Bay.
"Someone can just purchase keys in Yuan or Bhat's or Rupiahs for 40-50% (Or more if the game is discounted) and resell them for 25% less than the steam price."
Oh noes! Someone bought the game for a price you were willing to sell it for, and then sold it on.
Why is it when companies/corporation take advantage of globalisation it's good. But when consumers take advantage via parallel imports, it's bad?
Besides, steam has a region system (it's not just Russia) for preventing this if you really wanted to.