Buying keys cheap from a reseller

And humans never were on the moon and the world is a flat disc.

If you claim that all those who explained it in the past are part of a big conspiracy to keep prices high, including big publishers as well as indie developers, then yeah…there will be nobody who can prove it to you because you excluded them all.

Originally Posted by Kordanor
And humans never were on the moon and the world is a flat disc.

If you claim that all those who explained it in the past are part of a big conspiracy to keep prices high, including big publishers as well as indie developers, then yeah…there will be nobody who can prove it to you because you excluded them all.

More BS. Credit card fraud is provable. You are the one making claims that are not and cannot be proven, Fraud; pure and simple.

Price fixing is a criminal offense. Fraud is a criminal offense. Careful what you claim. LEO may be coming after you next.

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Originally Posted by Kordanor
Steam tries to fight it, but their possibilities are limited as well. They limited gifting a couple of times in the past, and most recently they also limited the amount of free codes a developer can request (which also had other reasons, considering exploits of the system by exploitative developers)

Yep, that more recent one was the one I was thinking about. They still limit to something massive, though, so companies can easily get a boatload of keys and sell them to re-sellers that give them a bigger cut than Steam does - leaving Steam to do all their support and whatnot for free.

Knock that boatload number down to a few hundred and a big hunk of this problem goes away. Taking advantage of regions selling to other regions wouldn't be touched but at least they aren't forced to take care of customers who haven't given them a dime.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
As you know there has been a lot of back and forth on this but you've never said anything till now (that I remember).

So your answer (policy?) then is CDKeys is questionable but acceptable..for now?

No that is not what I intended to say. There is a policy in place on stuff that is illegal. I don't know if this is illegal.
Besides that not every comment I make in this forum is a site policy. Most of the time it is just my opinion on something

Originally Posted by henriquejr
When I go there, I am asked to enter a phone number verification, which I couldn't complete because their site said my phone number was invalid when it was not. I typed and re-typed the phone number, sometimes using the international code for Brazil (+55) sometimes not. I got no success entering my phone number and I opened a cdkey support ticket. I made myself pretty clear telling them I nver saw such "safet measure" before and that all purchases I made on Steam, GOG, GMG, whatever, don't come with such burden.

I had a similar situation once. I'm not sure if it was cdkeys or someone else, but I bought something and paid for it, then they emailed a day or so later asking me for photo identification (such as passport or driver's license) in case I was attempting fraud.

I emailed back and asked if there was another way I could prove I was legitimate as I wasn't confident in the security of giving them my photo I.D. and they just sent another email saying they reversed the payment.

The only problem with that was that it was an international transaction, so I was hit with credit card transfer fees twice, costing me about $5 for nothing.

All ignoring the fact that how the hell does photo I.D. help identify me if they can't see what I look like through an email?

That experience did teach me a lesson. Don't just go for the cheapest price you find for the item you want.

Sounds like a scam to me. What was the site so we know to avoid it?

@RPGFool said it better than me but as long as developers and publishers are fine with price discrimination then I have no issues with legal key sellers. In fact, re sellers are necessary under this price discrimination.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Sounds like a scam to me. What was the site so we know to avoid it?

I wish I remembered. I did a quick search of my email before posting but couldn't find it - mainly due to having forgotten both the shop name AND the name of the game I attempted to buy - which I ended up buying from some other place at the time. It was quite a few years ago.

Originally Posted by Zloth
(…)SO ANYWAY…

Big sale on Focus games on Steam(…)

Can anyone recommend "Of Orcs and Men" ?

Originally Posted by lostforever
@RPGFool said it better than me but as long as developers and publishers are fine with price discrimination then I have no issues with legal key sellers. In fact, re sellers are necessary under this price discrimination.

That makes no sense on two levels:
1. While price discrimination exists, the majority of price differences between countries is tied to income and currency differences. In a country with an average income of 500$ you cannot sell a product for the same price as in a country with 1500$ average income. One could argue that it would be discrimination if the price was the same as it would exclude a big percentage of players from ever playing the game.
2. Just because some companies might use bad practices that doesn't mean that you should blame and harm all companies, especially in an industry like the game industry and especially in a niche as RPGs as lots of the developers whose games we play, make their games as a passion and should rather leave games behind if they wanted to earn "real" money.

I tend to agree with Kordanor. Regional pricing is pretty contentious, but there is a sound reason behind it. Value, as someone mentioned, is really what people are prepared to pay for a thing, and that's going to vary drastically in different regions. If they didn't vary the prices, it would place them in a very difficult position. There is certainly a free-market argument against it, but with digital goods, things get complicated.

Generally, the reason I pay for games is to reward the creators. If they say that buying from unauthorised resellers is hurting them, I'm inclined to believe them, and to cooperate. I don't see this as a dodgy practice, personally, and I'm not usually slow to call out what I see as shady behaviour!

Originally Posted by Kordanor
That makes no sense on two levels:
1. While price discrimination exists, the majority of price differences between countries is tied to income and currency differences. In a country with an average income of 500$ you cannot sell a product for the same price as in a country with 1500$ average income. One could argue that it would be discrimination if the price was the same as it would exclude a big percentage of players from ever playing the game.
2. Just because some companies might use bad practices that doesn't mean that you should blame and harm all companies, especially in an industry like the game industry and especially in a niche as RPGs as lots of the developers whose games we play, make their games as a passion and should rather leave games behind if they wanted to earn "real" money.

1. Irrelevant. Even in UK, there are people who cannot afford a game at £30 - £50.

2. I agree with you on this one. There are developer I choose to support and buy directly from their website so they don't even have to pay 30% cut to steam. But there are also developer and publishers I don't care about…

I don't feel bad at all buying e.g. Ubi games from CDKeys and taking advantage of regional price differences that way. Ubi has a lot of studios all over the world including places such as Bucharest, Romania.
Among other factors such as e.g. EU sponsorships or tax incentives etc. they are blatantly taking full advantage of lower wages in certain regions of the world to create their games.
But I'm "worse than a pirate" if I buy an Eastern European, i.e. maybe even a Romanian key? Yeah.. no .

Price discrimination or price gouging? People that have more money need to be charged a higher price so the publishers can make more profits.

And we all know that those profits will be passed to the developers, artists and programmers who actually created the game. We also know that all claims by the publishers as to rewarding the game creators by charging higher prices to the wealthy are also true.

Game publishers speak only truths.

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Originally Posted by Moriendor
But I'm "worse than a pirate" if I buy an Eastern European, i.e. maybe even a Romanian key? Yeah.. no .

Yes. As you buy "some" key. There is only a chance that it's a key which is "just for the wrong region". You buy a wrapped package and you actually don't know where the key is from. Actually supporting the demand for keys on such pages.
And where there is demand, there will be supply by fraudulent suppliers.

It's basically the same as if you buy gold in an mmorpg from these pages. The problem is not (only) itself that you buy the gold. The issue is mainly that there is a demand to "produce gold" the cheapest way possibile to maximize profit. And this is done by either botting or hacking players accounts. So buying gold from these sources actively supports these methods.

That's why some developers/publishers actually say that you should rather pirate a game than buy it at resellers. Ofc it's mostly indie developers. But that is because they are more open in general and also revealing more numbers:

RageSquid Link
No Goblin Link
Acid Wizard Studio Link
Level Up Labs Link
They also made this nice pic:


That said: People buying from these pages are also hurting other gamers.
Because the solution to the problem of having key reseller pages is to further ignore retail products and focus on "games as a service". Forcing the players to create an account, using an "always on service" and selling DLCs and ingame content, which can be exclusively bought from their store.
That way exploiting the system becomes much, much harder / the fraudulent part would be needed to be done by the individual player instead of a professional who sells their service. Of course this solution can only be taken by big publishers who can actually afford the infrastructure. And well, "games as a service" is booming for a reason for a few years now.

Start a separate thread if you want to keep fueling that discussion.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Start a separate thread if you want to keep fueling that discussion.

My point is: That if linking unauthorized resellers is ok in here, then we will hardly see anything else anymore as these pages undercut all kinds of sales.
And linking to pirating sites and torrents should then be fine as well.

Originally Posted by Kordanor
My point is: That if linking unauthorized resellers is ok in here, then we will hardly see anything else anymore as these pages undercut all kinds of sales.
And linking to pirating sites and torrents should then be fine as well.

Except that no one linked to an unauthorized reseller, and your comparison is just plain silly.

Definitely an interesting discussion, but I agree with JDR, move it to a different thread please

Regional pricing ))) when I hear this excuse …
I am Romanian, the medium salary is 500 euros the price of a game is 60 euros like in Germany

Sorry about the off-topic.