Quoting: LungDragoOkay, I suppose the question then is why do proprietors of the store feel the need to exclude or pressure customers with busy lives? What makes me less worthy of doing business and what I can reallistically do about it?

Store owners do sales because it gets you to look at the store and it makes them money. It's that simple. You just happen to be one of the people that didn't get to take advantage of a particular sale, just like I don't get to take advantage of a random sale that might be happening in some store in Siberia.

Quoting: LungDragoIndeed, it does suck to miss out on opportunities. Imagine the feeling of a service allowing you to figuratively travel in time and erase past regrets. Magical, really.

False equivalence. No time travel, even figuratively, takes place. The nature of the whole transaction changed. This is just a weak justification for continuing to buy from G2A while ignoring the negative effects of doing so.

Quoting: LungDragoI didn't come up with the discounted price, either. The lower price was offered and it matched my demand. Yet no sale happened. You don't want my money anymore, and I believe I am not the only losing party here. What again makes me more entitled than the guy who bought the game a week ago? There's no entitlement, just a missed opportunity as you said. Missed business opportunity and the cause for it was bad timing.

What makes you more entitled is that you feel entitled to a price that is not available. The person who bought it happened to be paying attention and was able to take advantage of an opportunity when it presented itself. You do know that you are not the only person in the world that is busy and cannot keep track of all the sales, right? You just happen to be among the few that think this entitles them to an offer that is no longer available.

Quoting: LungDragoWhat are you trying to say, really? If I didn't play games, I wouldn't have a problem? Or that games don't really have to sell?

What I am saying that your solution doesn't actually fix what you claim it fixes. You will miss out on games regardless of your ability to buy them from G2A.

Quoting: LungDragoHere's a thought. How about instead of whining over G2A, we stop and think about how we could improve our business so that G2A doesn't provide such an incentive to use? The thing is, I went LOOKING specifically for a G2A-like service because of that "missed opportunity" feeling and I DIDN'T want to pirate the game. I would really prefer it the stores made up their damn mind if they want my money or not and we could stop playing such games.
In other words, if G2A can meet my demand, why can't the original store? Since the issue is timing?

Sure, there are aspects of key reselling that are desirable and there are ways we could do key reselling in ways that don't cause active harm to developers. Keeping track of key age and sale legitimacy, disallowing bulk sale of keys, etc. There are ways behaviour as described in this very article and the comments could be mitigated.

However, when it comes to the actual topic of the article, G2A, these things are not there. G2A can meet your demand specifically because they benefit from keys sold at an effective loss because those keys are fraudulent. That's why the original stores cannot meet your demand: they don't sell stolen shit. If you get something for free, any price you put on it later on is profit.

Also, whining about G2A's policies is kind of the point of an article on the harm caused by G2A's policies.

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Quoting: LungDragoOkay, explain to me what makes anyone entitled to purchase a game at a time-limited discounted price? There are no limited supplies, no manufacturing costs, no shipping costs. No entry fees, club memberships or raffles. I am just as entitled as everybody else, no?

People are entitled to a time-limited discount because the proprietors of the store set a time-limited discount. We can argue whether games are appropriately priced but that is an entirely different issue.

Quoting: LungDragoIt's just that real life does not bend over backwards over a dev's sale. Sometimes I find myself excluded from this entitlement due to third party circumstances that have nothing to do with me as the buyer or the devs as the seller. Buying the product at now full-price feels bad, I believe understandably so.

Yeah, it sucks to miss out on opportunities. But that's life and opportunities are passing you by constantly. Getting stuck on what-ifs isn't productive here or anywhere else.

Quoting: LungDragoYes, none of this would be a thing if time-limited offers weren't around. But they are. They even come en masse seasonally as you mentioned. Even though there is NO guarantee that the game you want will be on sale, a large enough quantity does go on sale, enough so customers can ask questions such as 'Am I willing to buy this at full price or am I willing to buy this only on sale price?'. Reviews today have a "buy at sale" rating. You're calling me entitled, but it seems to me that everyone is entitled. It's the reality of things when you show you're willing to lower the price - it just might become apparent that your product was never worth the original price in the first place. In other words, if there was no discount, there would be no purchase.

This goes back to whether games are appropriately priced or not. In our economic system prices are set by sellers and it's up to the buyers to determine if that price matches their demand for a product. In some cases that means waiting for the product to be on sale for the price to match demand. This is not relevant to the discussion though and you feel you are entitled for that price to match your demand even if that means working around the economic system.

Quoting: LungDragoI want to reiterate the fact of oversaturation of discounted games on those large big sales you mentioned. I don't know about you but I don't sit around all day on the Steam page filtering the games. Real life is a thing. Filtering is needed though, as the primary sales-keeping feature I'm aware of, wishlists, have one major problem: you have to know a game exists for you to add it to a wishlist. Second problem is that wishlists really stop working once you add too many games to them, so you can't use them as a "maybe buy at sale" list either. This is why I find myself discovering games after a sale and end up retroactively buying them on G2A so to speak.

So, on one hand you are complaining that you cannot know for certain that the one game you want will be on sale but the next moment you complain that it's hard to keep track of multiple games. So I'm not really sure which of the two is the issue here. It's a fact that you cannot keep tabs on every discount ever, so you need to prioritize and keep tabs on the discounts you consider important. This may require, for example, pruning your wishlists. In either case, I don't believe that because keeping tabs on everything that might be on sale is inconvenient, you now get to use illegitimate means to acquire a product for that price.

Quoting: LungDragoAlso let me point out that I did ask for better options. It is not my intention or wish to rip of the devs, if it was, I would indeed pirate the game, but I am not using that option. I am arguing though that G2A does provide a convienience service that is not available anywhere else. There are use cases for it and if it weren't around, games would go unpurchased and unplayed - after all, when I missed it once, what's there to stop me from missing it again?

Games go unpurchased and unplayed anyway. Either because you miss a sale and have to wait for another one or because a game didn't receive enough publicity and fades into obscurity. Not everyone gets to play all the games. If this was an argument for something, it would probably be another argument for piracy, since one's economic status is a limiting factor on their ability to play all the games they want to.

And regarding convenience, there are lots of convenient things people can do. For example, it might be extremely convenient for me to throw my trash on the street so that I don't need to inconvenience myself with a trip to the trash bin. However, we typically don't tolerate people taking advantage of such conveniences because it makes other people miserable. Something being convenient doesn't justify it, which is a thing I'm trying to focus on here. We know that grey market key trading causes harm to devs, we know that G2A has repeatedly lied and acted scummy about this. Just because they happen to be a convenience for you doesn't override these things.

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Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: tuubiAnd you're saying we should all be entitled to sale prices after a sale has ended, even if that means purchasing from a random dude on a shady key reselling site like G2A?

I wishlist games I actually do want to buy, and if I miss a sale, I wait a few weeks or months for another one. There's always something else to buy or play anyway.

That's the problem, isn't it? There are tons of games, games go on sale en masse and it's very easy to miss one amidst everything else. Or maybe the sale's timing sucker punches you in a different way - it comes right before your payday, it comes right when you were on a vacation with no internet access or maybe you just plainly haven't used your computer for a while. Then when you do miss one, you can't be sure it will go on sale anytime soon or even ever again. So yeah, if I've just missed one, I went to G2A to get it. I guess my point is that time-limited offers such as these have proven inconvienient numerous times and G2A is the service that provides that convienience (for a while, after a certain point the prices there are the same as everywhere else anyhow). I always figured some purchase is better for both parties than no purchase or a maybe-down-the-line-if-the-stars-align-later purchase. It would be better if there was a more direct way that pays the devs better, but that's the can of worms you open with time-limited offers. Either you ax those completely or find a way to improve your service/store so that I don't feel the need to go G2A to make my purchases.

This has a number of problems. Firstly, this is based on an assumption that game sales are random. They are not, the biggest sales are seasonal and if a game is going to go on sale, that's most likely when it happens. You have at most a few month window when you cannot know if a game is going to be on sale. You are also still clinging to an entitlement to a temporarily lowered price but haven't made arguments why that entitlement is justified. Hell, you even mentioned that stores could stop doing sales entire, so why aren't you willing to buy the game at full price? That's what you'd be doing if stores didn't do discounts at all.

Secondly, "some purchase is better than no purchase" isn't really valid when there's a bunch of devs who would rather that you pirate their game than buy on G2A. With many of these purchases no benefit goes to the developer. At best they profit nothing, at worst they take an actual financial hit from it.

Basically, nothing you've mentioned is an insurmountable problem and thus a justification for going to G2A. Sales aren't random, they can be reasonably tracked and games aren't such a vital commodity that you can't wait for the next sale if you happen to miss one. Just because you can get a small amount of convenience from going to a grey market doesn't justify it.

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Quoting: K3rcus

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: aokamiI wonder how can they even flourish a business out of stolen keys...

Are there any rogue agents trying to generate collisions ?
Or do they actually stole them from phishing, unauthorized access or from the inside ?

That's the kind of questions I'd love G2A to answer as they might know better.

Beginner's guide to laundering money using G2A

1. Steal credit card details using phishing techniques.
2. Buy loads of game keys on Humble or game developer's own websites.
3. Sell keys on G2A to cash out.
4. Leave game devs to deal with chargeback fees while G2A gets rich off of the cut they get from stolen keys.

Why don't they just revoke the keys?

If so many stolen keys are actually sold in G2A, the user will know, everyone will say on the Internet that their key bought in G2A has been revoked, even though not many buyers denounce G2A, it would be a problem for them, and they would worry about doing something.

They could revoke the keys but since that key now belongs to somebody that thinks they bought a legitimate key, they risk pissing off people playing their game. The devs already have to deal with the chargeback but on top of that they risk PR damage if they actually try to do something about it. So, not exactly a perfect solution.

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Quoting: aokamiI wonder how can they even flourish a business out of stolen keys...

Are there any rogue agents trying to generate collisions ?
Or do they actually stole them from phishing, unauthorized access or from the inside ?

That's the kind of questions I'd love G2A to answer as they might know better.

Beginner's guide to laundering money using G2A

1. Steal credit card details using phishing techniques.
2. Buy loads of game keys on Humble or game developers' own websites.
3. Sell keys on G2A to cash out.
4. Leave game devs to deal with chargeback fees while G2A gets rich off of the cut they get from stolen keys.

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Quoting: SilverCode

Quoting: SamsaiWe know for a fact that the anti-cheat itself won't support Proton. There's no way they will bother to create a kernel module to replace their rootkit, not to mention even if they did the kernel module would become incompatible in no time. The best they can do is either fall back to a higher trust mode or just disable multiplayer while allowing games to start. Or it's just words to get over this particular PR blunder.

In one of the Denuvo PR blurbs defending their actions, they said the software was only done at a kernel level so they can get access to security features offered by the physical CPU. I don't know what features they were referring to, but it could be possible that these same hardware features are accessible to user space on Linux, so it only requires changes to Proton to function. That is a bit of a leap though.

Sounds like diversion and distraction. I bet they just wanted to peek at arbitrary memory or intercept data. Also, even with how crappy Windows is as an operating system I honestly don't think Linux provides access to any security features in user-space that Windows doesn't. Basically, don't listen to a Denuvo rep because they are going to lie either intentionally or accidentally because they don't actually know how their software works.

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We know for a fact that the anti-cheat itself won't support Proton. There's no way they will bother to create a kernel module to replace their rootkit, not to mention even if they did the kernel module would become incompatible in no time. The best they can do is either fall back to a higher trust mode or just disable multiplayer while allowing games to start. Or it's just words to get over this particular PR blunder.

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Quoting: DorritAnd you think that putting people in house arrest is "doing something about it" ?
Open borders and, in the case of Italy, 300.000 Chinese immigrants is recipe for catastrophe.
What brought us here was too much government; only the fall of these so-called social democracies and the return to healthy individualism will return Europe to its former glory.

Are you proposing 300k Chinese just happened to immigrate to Italy carrying COVID-19? Because I'm quite sure that is not the case. If you really want to restrict any disease from hopping from one country to another you need to totally isolate that country, meaning absolutely no travel, immigrant or otherwise. Immigration was not the issue here.

Also, yeah, putting people into "house arrest" is "doing something about it", since people won't flood the hospital capacity and leave tons of people to die in the streets.

Quoting: Dorrit

Quoting: tuubiCan you be more specific? At what point in history exactly was Europe a better place to live? Just curious.

1914 was a watershed.
After that governments never stopped absorbing more and more power, never let a crisis go to waste. We were finally left with crumbs of our former liberties, in exchange for sclerotic leviathans we call States, EU on top as a rotten cherry.
Now they're taking away even the crumbs, in the name of health security.
I pray for all to crumble back to that August, when Governments were small and people free to decide for themselves.

This I find extremely funny. It's not like in 1914 extremely powerful, centrally lead global superpowers existed. Even better, those superpowers usually had some kind of a king in control to whom your average individual was but an ant. And these kings had a nasty tendency to send these average individuals to fight each other in pointless wars. But I suppose since they never were encouraged to stay home for a few months in order to stop hospitals from overflowing, they must have had it so much better than us.

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Quoting: Solitary

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: Solitary...but it always boils down to one weak point and that is people itself.

... unless you believe that democracy doesn't work, which I very much don't agree with.

I am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

Ah, in that case we are in agreement. Overly concentrated power creates conditions ripe for abuse. I would like to propose, however, that social causes can be furthered without concentrating power among the few. There are even people that believe socialism can be done in that way, see anarcho-communists for example.

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Quoting: SolitaryThis is already reality in most of the EU, capitalism mixed in with (more or less) democratic socialism... "free" healthcare and decent quality public education with certain assurances that you wont end up homeless after one mistake. I would say it is working pretty well.

This is true in the sense that us Europeans tend to have it better than others in some ways. However, it's still a constant fight to protect these public systems from privatization attempts, not to mention having to fight the capitalist aspects when they do shitty things like threaten to sue people 3D printing ventilator valves in the middle of a pandemic because the company cannot manufacture or transport them in adequate amounts.

Quoting: SolitaryWe have seen what marxist socialism can do, all through out 20th century and it is always only good on paper. Fighting for the little man, the workers, peasants, or in current day it is minorities...

People hungry for power often justify their attempt to grab power with beautiful words and promises. I mean, the US only goes to war to bring democracy to undemocratic countries. That, however, does not make democracy itself a negative thing...

Quoting: Solitary...but it always boils down to one weak point and that is people itself.

... unless you believe that democracy doesn't work, which I very much don't agree with.

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