Devolver Digital in an open war with G2A

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

Should i trust you?!?!?!??!

I once had some incidents with the store and i think more people have, but in the end i got everything i basically paid for.

Which makes it all the worse than PayPal has been running that Spring gaming promo in tandem with G2A??

I don't know about other subreddits, but on SGS, you aren't allowed to trade bundle keys.

Also, the key difference is on G2A, you pay in cash, on most trading sites, you are trading for keys/cards, etc.

Selling bundle keys on Ebay is not that common. Digital only sales are not allowed on Ebay (unless under special circumstance, see here) - if you search for Humble Bundle, you'll notice that in most of the auctions, the seller is actually physically shipping a card with the gift link on it to the buyer. Most people don't want to bother doing this, which is why there are so few bundle keys being sold there.

Yeah, but that's so much harder to target and keep track of which keys are resold. It's much easier for just one site.

g2a is probably biggest atm with all their adversting etc. (Paypal promo etc.)
Ebay is more about many smaller resellers & individuals.

I get the feeling that you are just saying this without actually looking for auctions on ebay, in addition to not knowing ebay policies. You know Anomaly Warzone Earth, given out for free recently? There are only 3 auctions for it up. One will send physical mail, the other 2 are email only. If I report the auctions, ebay WILL remove them because they are against ebay auction policy.

Exactly!

About GG & Amazon - that is for sure...bout GMG - not so sure about it to be honest.

That's what they are telling... but G2A has also some "official" partnerships (according to their homepage, we can see Klei and Nordic logos), but they are also selling unauthorized game keys from Devolver... so even if GMG displays a ton of publishers logos on their main page, this doesn't mean anything actually, we will never know if all their keys are officialy bought from the publishers.

They never said they want a cut. They said people weren't getting purchased keys from G2A. You're starting to sound like someone working for G2A, putting words into Devolver's mouth like that.

I would tend to disagree.

A big reason they (and others) bundle their games and as a result offer them as cheap as they have with such promotions is because it's with the specific condition that they are not for resale (this is in the TOS) and should go directly to end users, not resellers. When resellers then exploit that by stockpiling keys and selling them at (probably) huge profit margins, it cuts into their business.

Can you quote where Devolver stated that they want a cut from the resellers?

First of all stop misdirecting all the attention to Ebay and so on. Those are sites for trades and individual resellers, while G2A is an organized and spread out unauthorized reseller. And for once, consider what Jatan said multiple times in this discussion.

Gray economy market has it's risks, what G2A is doing is shady, don't blame your lack of information or risk understanding o n developers :)

Getting stolen merchandise out of customer's hands is the way theft is normally handled. It's up to G2A to refund the purchases so customers can get a legitimate copy from somewhere else.

It's more the fact that G2A sell bad keys... regardless of if the guy got refunded or not, they sell bad products.

read my response above :)

You're equating entering giveaways with supporting illegitimate retailers? What a fool.

that is never going to happen, cause valve only gets their cuts from steam store sales!

This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but take a look at the Enhanced Steam browser addon thing. See a good price in the Steam store, but it's cheaper at GreenMan so buy there instead. Or the RU version is half the price, so look for a trade instead. Or it's in a current bundle, etc. :)

No this is a bad idea. What happens if you buy one legit and it just takes you more then a week to get it into steam.

Or if it takes a store more then a week to sell the games? Just look at Humble, they receive keys and put them into their new system, but it can take them 2 or 3 weeks to sell them off.

Or what about the physical copies that are in stores? Would you have expiry keys for everywhere else but there? How is that fair to legit stores on the net?

Expiry dates on keys would be bad.

That is absolutely horrible. How would they go about CD keys gotten from physical copies? Do they also get deactivated a week after release? What about people who hoard keys from legit sites because they have poor self restraint when it comes to sales. For an example, I have multiple Borderlands (1,2, dlc), Sleeping Dogs, Tomb Raider, Skyrim and so on. Should all of my keys get deactivated because someone somewhere is abusing the sales? No, you take the problem to the reseller and deal with it that way, you don't go around screwing other customers.

The publisher isn't actually directly screwing over the customers. Once keys are revoked, the people that bought from G2A will almost certainly either chargeback or G2A will refund them. It's G2A that has to eat the loss, not the consumer.

So, if you pay a thief in a back alley for a stolen radio you should be able to keep it right? Even though it was never his to sell? I supposed in that case you would blame the store owner who got robbed in the first place if the cops took the stolen stereo away from you.

It's the same thing here. G2A sold keys it was not authorized to and those keys are getting revoked. Blame the shady store for this, not the publisher.

But none of us are making any profit out of this. That's the only reason it's tolerated.

Actually gifting keys is very much ok by their ToS. What's prohibited is their commercial use, aka profiting by selling them. Now please using straw man arguments, they lead nowhere :)

This was originally the case, but rapidly changing. At least Humble Bundle and Groupees now endorse gifting games that you get from bundles.

It's more about streamers getting commission for adversting G2A than customer getting real discount.

Oh right thanks for clearing that up for me, from reading the Twitter post it seemed like all keys from G2A was going to be deactivated, good to hear its only the non activated ones

I also assumed that when people bought the keys it wasn't in thinking that it was illegal or stolen, I would probably go on to assume that if someone wanted to illegally obtain a game, there would be much better ways to do it then G2A. I agree that you should lose when you get caught, but I believe the people here are G2A that should lose.

I wouldn't say those keys are illegal or stolen.

Except you ARE allowed to gift away your purchases. People aren't reselling anything here.

GIFTING of extra copies is allowed. Humble has even function for that. :D

Far from selling thousands copies of each bundle for much higher price.

This is why bundles & devs (eg. compined keys) are taking actions agaist this

"So yeah I understand how they feel...but let's be honest 80% of the bundle games will not even get close to those purchase numbers on Steam."

Because those sites selling bundle keys far cheaper than steam. This means publishers/devs won't get any profit.
Bundles are good way to get exposure, but this kills ability to sell stuff later (after bundle ends).

Because those sites pay few cents per key publisher can't make games cheaper -> resellers always win.

That has no real relevance to what I stated.

"but let's be honest 80% of the bundle games will not even get close to those purchase numbers on Steam."

With the new system that allows devs/pubs to set their own sales whenever they want on steam, odds are if they have a 80-90% sale that they will either sell more copies, or make more money from that sale. But I do agree with your statement, most of those games wont sell a lot on their own.

It would make trading game keys even more difficult. Personally I won't even entertain trade offers that include game keys. I only accept Steam gift versions. That would become even more the norm if they went that route. Unless they put time limits on gifts too, which I doubt.