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Waaaay back in the day, when I was running my game development company [1], I put that on the website - an unconditional, no questions asked money back guarante
by ggambetta 8y ago
Waaaay back in the day, when I was running my game development company [1], I put that on the website - an unconditional, no questions asked money back guarantee. As you said, nothing stopped customers from keeping the game. However, in 10 years or so selling games, only a handful of people ever asked; and I complied, of course.
Focus on the customers who _are_ willing to pay. Invest the time and energy you'd spend fighting pirates, fraudulent requests for returns (as defined in this post), etc, in making a better product.
I do have some really fun stories about antagonising the pirates - but do it as a hobby, not as part of your business strategy.
[1] http://mysterystudio.com http://mysterystudio.com
- sametmax 8y agoBesides, you can ban credit card number of abusers. It's easy to create an email, it's harder to get a new credit card.
- chrismeller 8y agoIt’s not hard at all to get a new credit card. Report it lost and get a new one. In the US I’ve never seen a bank charge for it, and several times have simply gotten a new one sent to me unprompted because the bank had been informed the card was compromised. Sure it’s not the same as creating a new gmail account, but it’s still incredibly easy. Also, banning credit card numbers is going to be problematic... most smaller operations are not (and should not) be handling their own payment processing and should never have access to card info. Even if you do and you hash it to match against that’s iffy from a security perspective and would likely run afoul of any decent PCI auditor.
- flyingpenguin 8y agoYou can actually get new credit card numbers generated super easy. There are services that will give you a unique credit card number to use at every online retailer to limit your risk of theft.
- chrismeller 8y agoI used to use Paypal’s digital card service before they discontinued it. I’m surprised this isn’t more popular in the US, it’s in the bank’s interest to help you limit everyone’s risk.
- softawre 8y agoA lot of credit cards offer it still. My favorite card, my Citi Double Cash, does. https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-Numbers https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...
- jedberg 8y agoI don't think most people realize that those services limit you to one number per vendor in most cases, so they don't get banned for enabling fraud.
- vertex-four 8y agoStripe will give you a “fingerprint” of a card that you’re allowed to do whatever you want with, and recommend that you use that to block cards.
- patio11 8y agoYep. You can either write code for it or use Radar to block the charge by fingerprint (write a rule once in your Stripe dashboard to block cards on a blocklist, add a fingerprint to the list when you identify an abusive customer, done). This lets you block a card without ever contaminating yourself with knowledge of its number (we expose the fingerprint in a variety of places to you, like API responses or on the charge detail page in the Dashboard). https://stripe.com/docs/radar/lists https://stripe.com/docs/radar/lists
- sametmax 8y agoAppart from the obvious benefit of not storing the credit card yourself, I imagine if a user switch cards, the number change and we are back to the same.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y agoPrivacy cards allow you to generate new cards whenever you want, even pause or 'destroy' them whenever you need. A merchant can block the cards that come from that service though. Merchants such as Supreme NY, but Privacy has claimed they have found a way around that.
- sovnade 8y agoI need to use this for trials that I will probably forget about. Bookmarking now.
- astura 8y agoIf the trial takes PayPal you can also reject authorization for automatic payments in PayPal. Just be aware that blocking the payment doesn't necessarily cancel the service so you can end up in collections if you don't cancel in rare cases (like if you signed a term contract)
- sametmax 8y agoWanted to try it, but it's US only unfortunatly.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago>It’s not hard at all to get a new credit card. It's not really hard but it certainly is an inconvenience, especially if you're going to rip off a video game dev. It would take a lot of dedication and resources to exploit OP's policy, and pretty much no one would do it is the point.
- chrismeller 8y agoI would also think that in cases like this you’re dealing with an indie dev who you’re never going to purchase something from again anyway. Steam would never have a refund policy like this, so the issue becomes moot.
- astura 8y agoI have over 20 credit cards, its hardly difficult to get a new one. Combine that with services like privacy.com and Bank of America ShopSafe and credit card numbers can be infinitely generated.
- clubm8 8y ago> Besides, you can ban credit card number of abusers. It's easy to create an email, it's harder to get a new credit card. Several CC issuers offer virtual card numbers for online purchases you can generate many #s with one card easily
- slig 8y ago> I do have some really fun stories about antagonising the pirates - but do it as a hobby, not as part of your business strategy Did you publish them anywhere? Thanks
- Buttons840 8y ago> I do have some really fun stories about antagonising the pirates Please tell us. :)
- ggambetta 8y agoMy favourite one is that at some point there was a lot of piracy happening in a forum. Someone would post "Hey, I'm looking for <Game X>, thanks", and someone would reply "Here's a link to the zip: <link>". Sometimes people would reply "the link is broken", or "thanks", or "the zip has a virus". After fuming for a couple of days, I discovered that you could post to this forum without needing to register, and that you could post via a simple HTTP form post (this was before REST APIs). I figured that if the website couldn't be taken down (guess which country hosted it...), at least I could make it less useful! So I wrote a bot that would periodically scan for posts asking for zips, and post replies with bit.ly urls that went nowhere. It also scanned for replies to posts that contained links, and randomly replied "the link is broken", or "thanks", or "the zip has a virus", all using a simple text generator with phrase templates, an username generator, and a game name generator. What I didn't anticipate, but was obvious in retrospect, was that the bot started posting fake replies to its own fake posts. So for a few days, my bot was essentially running the forum by itself! I eventually fixed this, as hilarious as it was. To get around IP blocking and rate limits (which I'm unsure I ever actually found), I distributed this bot to a handful of fellow indies whose games were being pirated in the same place as well. I don't remember how or why I stopped using this, or whether it ever made any difference to our bottom line, but it was a silly source of entertainment for a few weeks :)
- Buttons840 8y ago"The game has a virus" is a great threat, makes people avoid the game and is something that most pirates aren't able to verify or discredit.