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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.
As a mid-tier indie Game Dev, with two titles on Steam, the key system is something I've never quite understood.
It is a hold-over from box copy days. The box industry is still around in the third world, but outside of those few select counties why do keys still exist?
My publisher hands out about five figures worth of keys to about 6 different legit places. After a year, hundreds of "retailers" have my game, all selling them for under Steam price. (Well under discount margin too.)
Leaving out the credit card scamming. 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. Luckily they closed off Russian keys from being used by anyone but Russians.
On top of this, Steam makes no money on keys. Zero. It's just a distro lock for them.
The key system needs to be done away with. Replace it with an API that legit and official stores can use to grant users copies of games. Extend this API into the client for "gifting." If steam wants, charge a tiny fee for each API transaction from a vendor. More money in their pockets and the system doesn't really change. Allow ownership of multiple copies of a title and allow you to transfer these to other users (But you must always keep 1 copy.) This will allow bundles to still function as they did. If they just did that, it would close up the key black market and make everyone more money. (Except the folks buying on these black markets of course.)
But knowing Steam. This won't ever happen. Hell I can't even send out an update without having 50-100 people having corrupt files issues which file verification doesn't fix. I hate telling people to uninstall my product (and reinstalling) to fix their problems.