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G2A pays Factorio developer $40k over illegally obtained game keys
- Nextgrid 6y agoJust curious, how do these illegitimate keys get obtained to begin with? Is it some kind of payment fraud where keys are obtained through fraud and the payments then get reversed? If so why don't the keys get invalidated when the associated payment is disputed?
- londons_explore 6y agoPerhaps this is a game dev stealing keys from their employer and reselling?
- londons_explore 6y agoI could imagine: 1. Mr evil uses stolen credit cards to buy game licenses. 2. Mr Evil sells those game licenses on this marketplace to Alice. 3. Alice has paid her own money for this game, starts playing it, maybe buys a few in-game items. 4. The original card owner disputes the charges. 5. Now, if the game manufacturer disables the game remotely, they will take a PR hit from Alices vocal complaints on twitter. Yet if they don't disable the game remotely, they continue to loose revenue.
- WillKirkby 6y agoExactly this. Typically the keys come from legitimate promotions such as the Humble Bundle, but purchased (as you said) with stolen card details.
- Mirioron 6y agoAlso, don't forget that the stolen credit card charge back incurs fees to the developer. So not only do they lose (potential) revenue, they actively lose money.
- Manfred 6y agoYes, lots of stolen credit cards and automated account creation in Steam. I understand that the publishers had to ban the accounts by hand to invalidate the keys.
- dx87 6y agoA couple of ways I've seen are: Pretending to be an "influencer" so you get free press keys Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region Buying a bunch of keys during a sale, then reselling them a couple of months after the game is no longer on sale
- crankylinuxuser 6y ago> Buying keys in a region with low regional pricing then reselling them in a higher region Notice that companies can do that with labor and buildings and tax evasion, and it's 'situation normal'... But when real humans try to, its bad and illegal and horrible. Hmm.
- Tyr42 6y agoThough note that Factorio never goes on sale.
- mywittyname 6y agoIs it the same price everywhere in the world though?
- _jgdh 6y agoIt is not. Steam has lower prices in some countries. Factorio sells for the equivalent of $12 in India while it sells for $30 elsewhere. Most games are similarly discounted. That said, someone who buys it from Steam can't gift the game (or presumably extract a key) to someone in a different country. If you bought the game in India, only an Indian account can play it.
- 0-_-0 6y agoYou can see the prices per region here: https://steamdb.info/app/427520/ https://steamdb.info/app/427520/
- lagadu 6y agoAll of those are completely above water, legally speaking. There's even a term for that: arbitrage.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoAs well as credit card fraud, I believe some shady key resellers buy keys in poorer countries where the game's price is low, and make a profit reselling the keys in richer countries, for a price somewhere between what they paid for the key, and the legitimate price in that country. If the game is on sale in the poorer country, all the better for the reseller. With the Internet, I imagine this is all very easily done.
- fiblye 6y agoOne common route is game bundles. They’ll ask for 20000 keys “just to start” and pay you 10% of total bundle revenue. Surprise surprise, the bundle sells 150 units, you make $5, and suddenly you have 50 copies of your game being activated everyday for the next year. Just a note to indie devs out there: unless it’s a colossal site like Humble Bundle, all game bundles are scams. Ask them if they can return unused keys to you after the bundle finishes and they’ll suddenly stop replying. Legitimate sites have no problem doing this if sales really ended after the bundle did.
- driverdan 6y agoThere's nothing wrong with this. Someone who legitimately buys keys from a bundle should be able to resell them.
- joshstrange 6y agoI'm pretty sure the comment you are replying to is talking about the group/company/person that runs the bundle. They ask for 20,000 keys, sell 150 legitimately, and then sell the rest of the 20,000 on the gray/black market. Reselling a key you bought legitimately isn't the issue here AFAICT.
- cshokie 6y agoI think the point is that the people -running- the bundle are reselling all of the keys that didn’t sell as part of a bundle. Not the end customer who purchased a bundle.
- conistonwater 6y ago> G2A told Polygon at the time that it intended to use either PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, KMPG or Deloitte to perform the audit. Unfortunately, according to a blog post issued on Wednesday, G2A couldn’t come to terms with those large firms and just did the audit themselves. I wonder what the story is there, and I doubt those are the only companies capable of auditing.
- londons_explore 6y agoAudits normally cost a lot more than $40k. If the auditor is going to take legal liability for the audit being wrong, they will also typically want rock solid evidence, which it's likely hasn't been kept. I'd bet that the sticking point in the negotiations was the cost of the audit.
- curiousllama 6y agoA single fresh-grad analyst for a week costs more than the total value of the keys stolen at those firms... I've seen single, generic ppts sold for more than 40 grand. Yes, definitely cost on that one.
- a_humean 6y agoWelcome to the world of audit. There are only 4 firms left after decades of consolidation and an Enron scandal. They are the only people they actually check the books of firms, and they all have profitable consultancy services that totally don't create conflicts of interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms
- dmurray 6y agoWell, no. There are thousands of small accountancy firms that will audit your small business' accounts. For large companies, you may as well go with one of the big 4 partly because of economies of scale - you want your auditor to have experience with similar companies, and almost by definition a smaller audit firm won't have lots of large clients.
- tgb 6y agoI just stared playing Mindustry [1] after someone on HN recommended it a few days ago and I'm hooked. My understanding is that it's roughly a Factorio clone, which I haven't played. Should I go play the original? Glad the developer got what they were owed here. [1] https://mindustrygame.github.io https://mindustrygame.github.io
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoMindindustry looks a lot like The Space Game... thanks for turning me unto it.
- dependenttypes 6y agoThey are very different. Mindustry focuses more on the waves of enemies and tower defence aspect while in Factorio the enemies are kind of a secondary thing.
- db48x 6y agoYes, I think you would probably like Factorio. It even has a demo, which makes it easy.
- Lazare 6y agoI've played both, and while Mindustry is good, it's...hmmm. Mindustry is a tower defense game with surprisingly deep supply chain, research, and crafting system bolted on to it. They're still very much secondary. Factorio is a stupidly complex supply chain optimization problem, that also has an actual game bolted on to it, and some of the gameplay is tower defence related, sure (depending on your game settings). They look similar, and both let you mine ore to turn into ammo for turrets, but the similarities end there. If you really enjoy the tower defence part of Mindustry, Factorio will probably seem like an overly complicated version of Mindustry that's not even as fun. If you're fine with the tower defense parts of Mindustry but you just really want to spend 6 hours redesigning your secondary copper smelter to iron out a throughput kink which is causing bottlenecks in your northwest electronic fabs, with flow on effects to your entire atomic energy program, then you'll love Factorio. (Disclosure: I much prefer Factorio.) Also, Factorio is quite moddable, and there are some interesting mods that make it even more insane, so there's that to look forward to as well. If you're curious, I'd recommend giving it a try. If you're still cautious, there are a ton of really good streamers and lets plays on Youtube; they should give an EXCELLENT view of what the game is like and if it's "for you". Finally, if you do like Factorio, I'd also recommend modded minecraft. Some packs focus heavily on massive, enormous research trees and automation.
- nelaboras 6y agoThe thing is the developer already knew they were stolen and resold. So this is likely just a tiny sample of what might be much higher numbers that go undetected. The burden of proof in their model is basically on the developers.
- dmurray 6y agoThe developer knows which keys have been stolen from the developer, i.e. ones it has allowed to be used, but hasn't received revenue for, possibly because of a credit card chargeback. It doesn't account for, e.g. having your laptop stolen with the games installed on it, or charged-back keys that were never used. But the developer knows about much more than "a tiny sample" of the thefts that actually affect it.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoall the "factorio friday facts" (blog title) leading up to the offer to audit and the 10x settlement https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-145 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-145 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303 https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
- noname120 6y agoSee the second part of this blog post[1] from 2019 for more context. In a nutshell, fraudsters buy keys from the official Factorio store with stolen credit cards. They then sell these keys on G2A and Factorio gets charged back (+fees) when the real owners of the credit cards report the transactions as fraudulent. [1] https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303
- mavhc 6y agoSo as usual the actual problem is how terrible banks are
- arkitaip 6y agoG2A knows very well that they are used as a money laundering device for criminals, they just don't care. What I don't understand is why banks and other financial organizations keep retaining G2A as a customer. Surely they must have hundreds if not thousands of cases involving G2A by now.
- kungato 6y agoDont they charge 20 dollars per chargeback as someone said? In a normal country the national bank would regulate this
- microcolonel 6y agoFar as I'm aware, there is no law restricting chargeback fees in Canada, which countries are normal? Merchant services providers do need some fees to accurately process chargebacks, and in the normal case it also functions as an incentive to make sure you perform transactions that you reasonably believe won't be reversed.
- user5994461 6y agoThe developer of factorio was charged 20 dollars for charge back. I imagine G2A is using a more fraud-friendly payment processor.
- css 6y agoG2A is, and has always been, a black market for software. They list Windows 10 for $27 [0], McAfee for $4 [1], among many other things [2]. They sponsor professional esports teams to add legitimacy to their brand [3]. [0]: https://www.g2a.com/microsoft-windows-10-pro-microsoft-key-global-i10000083916004 https://www.g2a.com/microsoft-windows-10-pro-microsoft-key-g... [1]: https://www.g2a.com/mcafee-antivirus-pc-1-device-1-year-mcafee-key-global-i10000178790001 https://www.g2a.com/mcafee-antivirus-pc-1-device-1-year-mcaf... [2]: https://www.g2a.com/category/software-c5 https://www.g2a.com/category/software-c5 [3]: https://navi.gg/en/read/text/232-navi-prolongs-the-partnership-with-cs-go-players https://navi.gg/en/read/text/232-navi-prolongs-the-partnersh... (Note the logos on the uniforms)
- qqj 6y agodunno about the others but 27$ Win10 is OEM license that is locked to a single machine. Seems legit.
- css 6y agoThe link I attached is to a normal license, not an OEM one, which goes for even cheaper: https://www.g2a.com/microsoft-windows-10-oem-home-microsoft-pc-key-global-i10000179338002 https://www.g2a.com/microsoft-windows-10-oem-home-microsoft-...
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoThat's actually way too high a price for a windows 10 OEM licence. You can get entirely legitimate ones on eBay for <7€. The reason they are so cheap is that EU laws protect the consumer right to resell things they purchase, and EU feels very strongly that this extends to software licenses. Most pre-built computers come with a bundled OEM Windows, which any EU resident can legally sell. Since a lot of computers bought by businesses, schools, hospitals, etc also contain Win 10 Home licenses, which are promptly replaced by whatever OS the site actually uses, and then immediately sold to someone reselling them, there is a healthy marketplace that has pushed license prices very low.
- sammycdubs 6y ago"G2A couldn’t come to terms with those large firms and just did the audit themselves" That's not an audit, it's just deep introspection
- curiousllama 6y agoDeep introspection is free... audits cost $100k+
- dreen 6y agoPlease can someone explain to me this: Why cant game developers just make a key retroactively invalid if it was found to be stolen?
- Jonnax 6y agoBecause the game developer had to pay the credit card company a chargeback fee so they're out of money.
- dreen 6y agoThats not what Im asking though. Lets assume the thefts go on as they do with no changes, if devs made the keys invalid it would starve g2a's business.
- CivBase 6y agoThey could, but it wont hurt the person who purchases the codes with a stolen credit card or the reseller who already offloaded the stolen goods. It just hurts the people who unwittingly bought the stolen keys.
- dreen 6y agoPerhaps but they wont make that same mistake again right? At least they would never buy anything from g2a again
- NoodleIncident 6y agoUsually they blame the developer and then go buy someone else's games on G2A
- csharptwdec19 6y agoLikely that the cost/benefit isn't there for such a system if you're a smaller pub. An MVP Implementation would require Something to determine if a key was stolen. Let's just imagine it's something that keeps a Key tied to a given Order number, and can mark a key as invalid if there's a chargeback on the order. You probably need another subsystem to periodically re-check the key if you weren't already doing that. You'll also need additional CS / PR staff to deal with the eventual case of people who bought keys complaining and blowing your company up on Social media. Pulling numbers out of the air, I'd guess that this would add 50-100k to the overall budget of the game. Possibly a high number but I'm assuming at least one additional staff member would be required to deal with the potential fallout of such a move. But even then the catch rate would be limited; within the first 1-3 months it will likely be cracked anyway and your protection mechanism will be meaningless to the people who really want to steal your software. Assuming your thieves buy the keys day 1, it would likely take a good 2-3 months for the chargeback to happen...
- tmwed 6y agoexciting! i wonder if this will set a precedent going forward for any other software impacted by G2A’s very grey area tactics .i do believe there could be a marketplace which facilitates swapping keys for other keys, setting aside any monetary value and basing it on a persons perceived value of the game they would like to play.
- SlackingOff123 6y agoBlack/gray market aside, the G2A "shield" cancellation process is the epitome of dark patterns. https://imgur.com/a/ql0iC https://imgur.com/a/ql0iC Terrible company.