Running With Scissors:
Key reselling websites hurt indie developers like us. There are many ways to obtain our games and we STILL prefer piracy over people buying from those websites.
Illegaly obtained keys are a source of money for scammers and it could even affect you as the customer in some cases.
NiX:
I love you guys and postal series, but I’m not made of money, if I can get a game for cheaper I’d rather pay less than more.
Running With Scissors:
Which is why we’re telling you to pirate our games instead of paying a scammer who will cost us money and probably even get your key revoked
Our games are cheap right now through official sites. Is saving a few cents worth lowering the chances for releasing another POSTAL game?
NiX:
Isn’t pirating illegal? You want your fans get fines and shit? Now they are on sale so I might pick up some but normally i still rather get the game of g2a for cheaper
Running With Scissors:
You can’t get fines if the owners of the IP give you permission to download.
Just know that by getting on G2A, we not only get no money, we also have to pay for the chargeback, that’s the core of the problem and it means no new games in the future and no more RWS
It’d be nice if software license ownership/reselling could be secure and decentralized. Here’s an idea on using distributed ledger (blockchain) for that: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/is-there-potential-for-blockchain-in-copyright-and-licensing-applications/?guccounter=1 Monkey NFTs are stupid, but there are other assets, like software or other copyright licenses that could be bought and sold as smart contracts.
The problem is rather the opposite. The keys are secure and their sale is decentralized, which gives limited control over them. People generate the keys with stolen credit cards, and then resell them. The Postal devs are basically admitting they are giving up trying to actually go after the thieves, but it is genuinely hard to figure out which keys are legit and which are stolen, especially when it’s someone else selling them. All you’re proposing is to make it impossible to revoke a key even if you know it’s illegal.
The actual way to prevent this theft would be to forbid merchants from generating keys at all, and go to a fully centralized model like Steam and Epic generally use.
What? Steam generates keys, does it not?
Also, what if usage of keys was required to be publicly declared on the chain? That would instantly stop all of this.
As of 8½ years ago, you can’t buy keys from Steam, although they still allow developers to generate keys for use on other sites that still use them.
How would requiring keys to be declared help? The people using the keys are all innocent (or at least largely ignorant) buyers. Steam can already see who those are, but that doesn’t stop the sale or say who sold them.