https://store.steampowered.com/app/1118310/RetroArch/

Coincidence? ?

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Nope. It doesn't make sense to charge customers the charge backs because they don't have the ability to implement anti theft measures. The payment circuit does so it should absorb those.

I say that the buyer should be charged just and all the regular commissions because the buyer is the only one that is in a position to decide which payment service is better quality vs cost wise. In this case for instance, if service implements an authentication feature that is to clunky a buyer could decide to go with a more expensive payment circuit anyway, one that has for instance less secure payments but offsets the fraud costs with an insurance or something that leads to higher prices.

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Quoting: cprnClearly, you can. Showing ID in a physical world is nothing more but using a 2nd trusted factor. In cards world it's called a 3DSecure gateway - using 3rd party API (in this case the bank or card issuer's API) to 2nd factor the authentication between two endpoints (i.e. buyer's browser and seller's website). But banks dictate the cost of each 3DS request and it's not cheap so small publishers skim on it (as well as other risk management services). This is the reality of what's going on and the true cause of the issue. Cards are flawed. Extra security to mitigate responsibility for those flaws costs money. Publishers don't like to spend money so they don't buy it. They get burned with chargebacks.

I know that ad hoc solutions exists. But they are expensive to implement and not very practical too. My argument is that in the grand scheme of things, the system doesn't work simply because transaction costs are hidden to the card holder and passed to the seller instead. Now ofc nobody like to see the commission charged on them (I don't like them at least). Yet in this situation the card holder is the one with the power to chose one circuit over another, while the seller is the one that is only being damaged by restricting itself to accept only certain circuits or making the payment process more clunky than necessary. So for the natural mechanics of market competition to occur, you need rules that create the conditions for a mindful choice by the actor with the actual decision power: the buyer. But this today doesn't happen, and often the most convenient payment circuits from customer perspective are the less efficient. Which creates a situation where the worse actually thrives over the better.

That's why I say that removing fees from sellers and charging them to buyers is part of the solution to create the conditions for the market quickly fixing the issue. First payment circuits being responsible of absorbing the costs of fraud use would force them to find the best tech solution to limit that or get an insurance to edge the risks. All while keeping the service convenient and the costs as lowest as possible in order to remain competitive with other circuits, given that those costs are charged to the one that can actually chose between one or another, the customer.

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Quoting: cprnIt's so unfixable card associations invented insurance in form of chargebacks. It's as simple as that.

Chargebacks just charge sellers with the responsibility of identifying the buyer. Which makes also sense in the real world. You can ask for an ID card or something to identify the card holder. It's easy, fast, cheap.

But the evil is when lawmakers use real world common sense to regulate the digital one. Clearly you can't ask sellers to do something even large multi nationals have issues to do. Common sense is that the payment circuit identifies who is taking advantage of its credit service.

That and eliminating seller commissions would create the conditions to solve the issue in few years.

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Quoting: NanobangIf I understand how this all works (and that's a mighty big "IF") it seems to me that the core of the problem lies in the keys themselves.

It would seem that the fix for Dev/Pubs would be to either stop issuing keys or expect that they'll need to spend X dollars/euros/etc each year in determining whether a key is fraudulent or not and then rolling that into the asking price of the game.

If the devs want to sell games through their own site to individuals then they could sell actual digital downloads only---wouldn't that remove them from the key market entirely?

The first thing to note is that all this has a cost. With Steam keys Valve absorbs all of it. You go on your own and it's your costs.

The second thing to note is that... it won't solve the issue! It will just force you to handle it directly! Say you run your own site to sell your copies. How do you identify your copies? With a string? Then G2A will sell your key instead of a steam key. You link the copy to username and password. Then Username and password are sold. you link it to an email? Then a bot will create an email address and that will be sold (yeah, you can ban addresses that don't come from trusted providers, but then it's again it's more work for you and you risk to keep out buyers). Facebook accounts? These can be faked too.

The thing is that as long as payment circuits work as they do now, digital goods will always be exploitable for money laundry. So either you sell your copies only on stores that absorbs the costs and hassles of this issue by themselves (and ofc you give them the cut they want) or you save the cut but you have to dedicate resources to handle this. Avoiding humble bundles is for sure a first reasonable step to mitigate the issue (unfortunately for us).


The issue with G2A though is not its business. It's true that if they don't somebody else will. It's hypocritical to say the opposite. The issue is they don't contribute to fight it. The example in the tweet with that user selling like 200 keys in a day you don't need a multi million dollar AI algorithm to catch that. If you don't fight even these obvious abuses, you are partner in crime. You're not contributing to fight the issue, you're making it worse with the intent of profit from it.

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Excuse me... but were these linux games? I think I've stumbled on them a couple of times but I don't remember them having the penguin badge (or maybe they were overpriced and I never got them in the catalog)

Anyway... that stuff is very old and also used to be very popular especially on consoles. At Disney they know that on PC we have emulators right? Because to me that doesn't look like a big idea. It will definitely hurt them more than us.

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Quoting: g000hI was under the impression that a site like G2A is involved with reselling unwanted game keys. You buy a bundle somewhere, you already own one game in that bundle and so the key is useless to you. You put the key on a site like G2A for a small sum back. It doesn't seem "so bad" viewed that way.

Then limiting the number of keys of the same game one account can resell per month should greatly mitigate the issue.

But the real issue is how Credit Card circuits works. If transaction fees were charged to the users instead of the sellers there would never be any problem (also: there would be more transparency on which circuit is the most efficient/convenient).

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Quoting: cprn"Epic is fixing it" while they have money... But they'll have to start making it at some point. And those extra data centres aren't free. Things like power, storage, transfer, backup, people and hardware redundancy cost a little fortune. That debt will sooner or later have to be paid. By us. So lets not fall in love yet. With any side.

I have a theory. Imho people don't understand that it's not loyal consumers Epic is after. The customers they have will just go back to Steam or Gog as soon as they have the freedom to do so. At Epic they are not so stupid to not see it. They can't be. Steam is superior and Epic has no intention to ever compete with them feature wise. Sweeney said that over and over.

Epic just want an install base large enough to convince the remaining big publishers to join their cartel. Including publishers with their own launchers like EA. The 12% thing is there to convince them that it would be much more convenient even for them to just let them handle distribution. Then they will have all the cards in their hand. And with that they will be able to dictate the rules: prices and conditions.

After trying to make a sense from what they are doing, I convinced myself that the real monetization they are after will come from monthly subscription memberships for all the on line features that as of today status quo are included a PC game price tag (the evil 30% steam tax) as opposed to pretty much every other console or stream service out there. Once they have all the large publishers on board, they will be able to force that kind of model on PC. And even Steam would not have the resources to challenge that (their full set of features benefit more small devs compared to big publishers which can invest in their own infrastructure. So in a sense big ones pays for small ones in Steam). The final objective is to make PC market more console like.

Ofc it's just theory of mine. But if I had to be convinced to invest ton of money and assets in this crazy adventure, that is the kind of argument that would convince me.

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Quoting: MunkI will never buy your game on EGS, Origin, and likely not on GoG.

Careful, that exactly the message that Epic is trying to pass. Which is blatant lie.

The day Steam competitors offers the same/equally worth/better features, people will naturally buy games from there too. It's a matter of value proposition. There is people who doesn't like Steam and value more GoG for instance. Other people would likely be happy to buy from present day EGS if they were discounted the value of missing features from the front price. That is way nobody has tried before (ofc they don't, in the end it's all about raping customers, not about fair deals).

In case of Paradox for instance if they put together a service with friends, multiplayer, mods, save cloud, guides/forums, automatic updates and patch management and such I'd say they would already have a compelling case for them going by themselves (though I would still miss streaming in my case and controller profiles for niche games like Magicka2, I absolutely love how they used Steam Controller api in that game it's fantastic). Ofc all that stuff costs and so 12% (which already do not contain transaction fees in Epic implementation, so they do sell at higher prices) becomes a chimera.

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The guy is misinformed. Valve introduced the 30% cut by its own. And at that time it was super convenient because physical distribution cut was around 50%. Ah the golden ages before steam: when nobody cared that the developers were making less money than the distributor and publishers made less money without becoming outraged in the process. Will we ever see them coming again?

Sarcasm aside, I used to believe that someone could actually do better than Valve and challenge them if they tried. But when an intelligent and competent man with an endless amount of money like Tim Sweeney says that it's impossible to do better and the only way for he and his big publishers buddies to get higher margins is to remove all steam features, all steam services while keeping the consumer prices unaltered (or even increased a little because, why not? Monopoly FTW)... well I believe him. I'm now genuinely convinced that 30% is the best price possible for that kind of service.

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