Old advice, but probably still true: Either buy from legitimate vendors or pirate it. Buying from shady sites creates extra work and costs for developers.
The steam key is used for verification of the purchase and adding the game to the user’s library. Some games on steam do not have DRM and will continue working after the game gets removed from the user’s library.
With or without DRM, and whether or not the platform/devs spend the time to remove fraudulent purchases from user’s libraries: if the game gets first bought with stolen cc info, then someone will after a few weeks have to deal with the chargeback administration and pay the chargeback fees.
Afaik, least work and least unpredictable costs for the Devs would be to sell only on platforms where the platform pays the chargeback fees and handles removing the game from user libraries (or not). Which would mean that the game is only available through large platforms like steam/epic/gog, which take a large % cut.
Old advice, but probably still true: Either buy from legitimate vendors or pirate it. Buying from shady sites creates extra work and costs for developers.
If you can’t afford or don’t want to buy our games full-price, please pirate them rather than buying them from a key reseller. These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more.
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) June 30, 2019
https://www.techdirt.com/2019/07/09/indie-publishers-tell-gamers-to-pirate-instead-buying-keys-through-reseller-g2a/
Good advice.
Of course, some developers circumvent this by not adding DRM to their game.
Can’t waste dev time fucking with an esoteric key system if they don’t first waste dev time writing an esoteric key system.
The steam key is used for verification of the purchase and adding the game to the user’s library. Some games on steam do not have DRM and will continue working after the game gets removed from the user’s library.
With or without DRM, and whether or not the platform/devs spend the time to remove fraudulent purchases from user’s libraries: if the game gets first bought with stolen cc info, then someone will after a few weeks have to deal with the chargeback administration and pay the chargeback fees.
Afaik, least work and least unpredictable costs for the Devs would be to sell only on platforms where the platform pays the chargeback fees and handles removing the game from user libraries (or not). Which would mean that the game is only available through large platforms like steam/epic/gog, which take a large % cut.