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Never pirate from indie developers. But for giant companies, pirating is a drop in the bucket for their revenue.
Then why don't illegal obtained keys just become banned? As long as they don't, You can't expect customers to see any problem with them.
It's technically impossible to differentiate a legitimate key from an illegal key. They are usually created in batches to be distributed. So they are legitimate and exist way before the fraud takes place. By the time there's a charge-back on the purchase, whether the key is illegal or not is irrelevant. The damage is done, banning the user does literally nothing. The developer is still on the hook with the processing fees and the user already downloaded and installed the game.
Not only that, but those users thought they were buying legit keys, and expect support from the original publisher. Pirates never expect support.
Factorio devs literally said to pirate their game rather than buy from one of these reseller sites.
For what it is, a top down 2d factory game, Factorio rocks. Just wanted to add that in, it's one of the more recent games that I managed to put hundreds of hours in before even getting to the finished achievement. Though I did use mods to make it worth that time as they make the chains pretty complex. To get to the end of vanilla isn't overly difficult but I had over 150 before launching rocket due to trying mods and restarting but really that's just the tutorial before you understand you want to launch so many rockets per minute to get bigger numbers.
Those devs always had weekly updates on what they were working on, fixed performance issues over the years and made a quality product. No this is not paid advertising but they are devs worth supporting overall.
This is not true, keys are unique therefore it is technically very possible to track their way of payment.
No there isnt. Find interviews from developers on this. They go deep and technical with the detail. They create the keys at a different time. Yes, they are unique. But they're not associated with the payment, only to the user who claims them in a DRM platform. Only the retailer knows the payment details. If it's a reseller with stolen cards, then no detail arrives to the developer, just a transaction then a transaction reversal. The developer doesn't know which client owned the card that reversed the payment, nor which key was given by the retailer to the final customer.
Them not being associated to the payment is the dev's or better the store manager's fault and not a technical limitation. Tbh as a dev, i would try to make the store manager follow his responsibilities to properly keep track of payments.
Good luck with that champ. I'm sure you're a special boy that you and you alone, will achieve what hundreds of small and large companies with whole teams of engineers and lawyers have not done in the past 15 years.
I'm not going to do their work (as they're not going to do mine) but good luck to You for defending the incapabilities of crybabies.
No, no. You said you would do it. Don't abandon us now. You, as a dev, are obviously superior and more capable than any of the hundreds of thousands of people who currently make up the industry. You are unique and special, help us for we are incapable and dysfunctional babies, effectively braindead without your almighty guidance. Your biggest and smoothest of brain is the only solution to this conundrum that trillion dollar companies are incapable of solving. You and only you can save the video games. You ARE the ultimate game dev. Don't forsake us, great one!
Acting pathetic doesn't solve your problems.
See it doesn't matter how keys are generated as they're sold on an individual basis. Thus You can keep track of the exact credit card transaction that was used to buy each key. If You don't save this information linked to each other then it's your fault as the store manager. Don't try to shift a problem of sales management to the customer. It doesn't solve your problem but makes you looking yuck.
They would if they were easily identifiable. IIRC Steam might revoke them if the key is bought with stolen cards and their owners perform a chargeback.
Thing is for copyright law those keys are 100% legal.
EDIT: I explicitly said for copyright law. It's how users justify that "they are not pirating", except it's much worse because game developers need to deal with fees anyway after chargeback.
Obligatory "but does piracy count as lost revenue?"
Piracy probably generates more revenue than it destroys.
Fuck me what an insanely stupid comment.
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Piracy is usually a market problem. If I find something too inconvenient to access I'll pirate it. Put it all in a convenient place and I'll pay.
But also, piracy generates interest in something and makes it more popular overall, leading to sales.