Friday Facts #303 - Under 100 bugs (but still not stable)

[someone1337]

Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough?

This.

I dont want to start just to have the mapgen/reciepes change an update later forcing me to restart once again.

Once you declare a version stable, i expect these things to not change anymore.

[Azzinoth]

I don't understand how buying from g2a is worse than pirating.

As far as I understand it, some keys (from you or steam) are bought with stolen credit cards and then sold on g2a. When the owner of the credit card cancels the transactions, you lose all the money and you have to pay extra fees.

But thats only a fraction of the total keys sold through g2a. So in total you are still making money from the keys sold on g2a. Of course that means you make less money than if everyone bought their keys from you directly and you have every right to be pissed about that. But how is making less money worse than making no money if people would pirate the game instead?

I'm not trying to defend g2a, I'm just trying to understand it.

[miturion]

Google ads work on a personalised basis. If you search for G2A and factorio in different searches, you get G2A on top.
If I search for "buy factorio" G2A is 7th result. So most people wont get to see the same result.

[Loewchen]

But thats only a fraction of the total keys sold through g2a. So in total you are still making money from the keys sold on g2a.

You can not say that there is still money made without knowing the actual ratio of charge backs vs legitimate keys sold on g2a, you would have to make several actual sales to pay for a single charge back mind you. How do you think a legitimate key would end up on g2a of a game that has never been on sale?

[exi2163]

They are a shady gray area market, so they haven't been shut down. I don't know about how many of the keys are working properly, but
A: only SOME keys there are illegitimate, some are legit. Who knows how many of them are which?
B: they only get detected a while later, so people might not change their rating at that point

But the FFF and the linked article tell us !
According to G2A : potentially 0.02% of the keys they sell are illegitimate.
According to Wube : A whopping 10% of chargebacks. (That would be ~3k website purchases out of ~600k Steam purchases in 2016 then?)

Yes. There might a slight difference in definition. A legit key it was all the time as it was clearly working to activate the game. It just was not paid by an authorized money source. My guess is that those 0.02% are made by keygens or just random keys or already activated keys.

The problem with G2A or other key resellers is that they have no way to verify the legitimacy of the key and its payment. And no primary key manufacturer is going to change that because "globalization should only benefit us, not the customers".
While i like the idea of reducing the price for foreign countrys with a lower price-standard of living you also absolutely have to accept that people who manage to buy a key there can use it at home. Globalization has to work both ways. All this region-lock shit is just to make sure that "the old" ways are preserved. Wake Up, we are in the 21st century!

Disclaimer: I use key resellers to buy keys from sales when i missed them. Bought factorio directly from wube. I think Wube does everything right: No DRM, No Sales, free demo, reasonably priced (to be honest: underpriced), great inclusion of the community, extremely fast major bug fixing, no publisher (i come to really hate EA, Ubisoft and Epic), money goes into the game instead of the E3. I just disagree with Wube about key resellers even though the financial damage is a good argument.

[marzolan]

But how is making less money worse than making no money if people would pirate the game instead?

There's a cost in administrative time to deal with the chargebacks and cancel bad keys.
There's a cost in terms of customer service time spent helping people who think they bought a valid key when it turns out to be stolen.
There's a cost in terms of customer relations when people are upset over actions taken by the publisher to correct for fraudulent keys.

There are tangible and intangible costs associated here that can make any gains associated with an unauthorized reseller not worth it.

[YamiNoSho]

don't be too sad, in Belgium the google result is safe :

[Jonathan88]

In response to why I'm interested in a stable release: I am waiting for the NPE to be in a good enough state so I can introduce the game to someone I know without having to force them through the old tutorial. I don't mind about those remaining 55 bugs - I play on experimental, and I've never had any issues (helped by the fact I avoided the various train related releases).

Just wanted to test the NPE on some genuine NPs

[SWSe]

But the FFF and the linked article tell us !
According to G2A : potentially 0.02% of the keys they sell are illegitimate.
According to Wube : A whopping 10% of chargebacks. (That would be ~3k website purchases out of ~600k Steam purchases in 2016 then?)

Whether this number is accurate is yet another question. Mike Rose begs to differ.
And in his case, it could not have been russian gifts as well, since those are region locked. There were thereby barely any legitimate keys for his game.
So even if the number WAS only 0.02 %, an uneven distribution could easily be very harmful for a small dev.

About your second point, I honestly don't know what that tells us. How do you know there were 3k website sales?
Or do you mean to say "upwards of 10 % of 600,000 equals 3,000"?

If at least G2A wasn't reacting so embarrasingly badly about the criticism, lying that devs had not contacted them before starting the shitstorm, trying to bribe journalists to publish biased pieces about them, maybe then I would believe a single word coming from them. (But wait, they claim it was just a rogue employee. Then of course, there's probably no issue there.)

[mmmPI]

If someone steal a credit card, and is able to use it, it means the bank did not properly protect the transaction, OR the victim was not cautious, from a legal point of view in my country.

The victims is not considered not cautious if the thief can access the money without extra information such as password, confirmation message ect.

In this case the bank is guilty of not protecting the transaction and have to cover the expenses from the victim. ( which they do because it's cheaper )

I had never heard of those chargeback fees, and find them very injust.

[ownlyme]

you gave them 2 days to process an inquiry about 66k $ and complain that they didn't reply yet?
probably this strategy just affects sales after they released that news, but still, this does sound like g2a are the good guys.
Even if you made 6600$ loss (330 games), you probably earned much more from the purchases there, since you seem to be unable to tell where your sales came from.
Suggesting people to pirate stuff is just stupid (for example because of viruses etc), why not sell the game for a fair price to everyone? There are also poor people in rich countries.

[Light]

I was an employee for a company during 2005 which hosted MMOs and a group of Brazilians used a spreadsheet of stolen credit information to buy everything they could. This continued for a couple months until not only the in-game economy was ruined, but the company was deep in the red having to handle these chargebacks.

After the company claimed bankruptcy I was approached by one of the guys on MSN Messenger who shared the sheet of 100,000+ stolen identities and card information to prove there was no hope of stopping them.

Suffice to say, the damage can be severe for small companies who have no way to protect themselves from fraud. Thankfully systems have been invented since the mid 2000's to handle these issues to some extent after having witnessed the effects first hand. It's not pretty.

[Azzinoth]

How do you think a legitimate key would end up on g2a of a game that has never been on sale?

The FFF explains that:

There are still Steam gifts of Factorio being sold on G2A, these are most likely 'legit', in that they were not purchased using stolen credit cards. The question is, where do these gifts come from? Obviously people would not be selling Factorio Steam gifts if it did not generate a profit. We have some ideas:

Regional fraud - Buying the game in 1 country and gifting it to someone in another. This is likely, as we can see that the Europe gift is cheaper than the US/Worldwide.

Speculative buyers from before the price increase - The price of the game was $20 a year ago. So buying 1,000 copies and waiting 1 year, nets you a profit of $5,000 if you sell for $25. Not a bad gain in a year. For Factorio the opportunity only came once, but other games go on sale multiple times each year, which is where the speculative buyers and the grey market cash-in.

[BlueTemplar]

don't be too sad, in Belgium the google result is safe :

That might be because of uBlock though ?
(I don't get any ads with uMatrix either...)

But the FFF and the linked article tell us !
According to G2A : potentially 0.02% of the keys they sell are illegitimate.
According to Wube : A whopping 10% of chargebacks. (That would be ~3k website purchases out of ~600k Steam purchases in 2016 then?)

Yes. There might a slight difference in definition. A legit key it was all the time as it was clearly working to activate the game. It just was not paid by an authorized money source. My guess is that those 0.02% are made by keygens or just random keys or already activated keys.

A fuller quote is :

statistically, only 1% of transactions are problematic in any way, all of which end up as a conversation with our support team or directly with the seller.
In 60% of these cases (0.6% total) the problems concern payment issues (buyer’s card was declined, there wasn’t enough funds, etc.).
In 30% (0.3% total) there’s a problem unrelated to the marketplace itself (someone doesn’t like the game they purchased or bought a key by mistake, etc.).
In 8% (0.08% total) the key didn’t work – it was used or there was a typo in it, but these cases are usually solved promptly by sellers themselves, without G2A’s involvement.
And, finally, in a mere 2% of cases (0.02% total) users come to us because the game they purchased through our platform disappeared from their Steam account, which may happen for many different reasons, one of which is chargeback.

Well, assuming more devs take up on their offer, we might get to the bottom of it...
(This still doesn't change the fact that Wube got hell of a lot more screwed out of their website sales...)

[BlueTemplar]

About your second point, I honestly don't know what that tells us. How do you know there were 3k website sales?
Or do you mean to say "upwards of 10 % of 600,000 equals 3,000"?

300/10%=3000
P.S.: I juxtaposed these % to show that there's more to the story than G2A is willing to tell.

[Mernom]

you gave them 2 days to process an inquiry about 66k $ and complain that they didn't reply yet?
probably this strategy just affects sales after they released that news, but still, this does sound like g2a are the good guys.
Even if you made 6600$ loss (330 games), you probably earned much more from the purchases there, since you seem to be unable to tell where your sales came from.
Suggesting people to pirate stuff is just stupid (for example because of viruses etc), why not sell the game for a fair price to everyone? There are also poor people in rich countries.

G2A have a history of lying and making empty promises. And there are many things they could do to reduce the fraud rate, but what did they say about it?
'if it's not here, it will be done elseware, so it's fine.'

But the FFF and the linked article tell us !
According to G2A : potentially 0.02% of the keys they sell are illegitimate.
According to Wube : A whopping 10% of chargebacks. (That would be ~3k website purchases out of ~600k Steam purchases in 2016 then?)

This probably arises from the data you're using. The persentage G2A provided is probably a global persentage, including many old game that people don't bother to fraud that much anymore. Meanwhile, the Factorio datapoint is from the launch, which means it was a hot new commodity, which has an increase fraud rate.

[AnarCon]

you thought the biters were too cute

i loled so hard

[Gnark]

Are you waiting for stable to play a new playthrough?

Well ... Yes
I spend 1000 hours on my last game don't want to start a new one with some major rules changes while I play it.

And I bought my 2 copies on your shop, this is pretty unusual for me ... want to support your team

[SHADOW13]

btw. G2A is lying again, surprise .....not,
in the latest news posted today they wrote that they:

received multiple messages since then, but none of them were connected to this case (x10 refund of chargebacks)

I hope you get the money lost from them but it's a stretch from such sh*t place

[Klonan]

btw. G2A is lying again, surprise .....not,
in the latest news posted today they wrote that they:

received multiple messages since then, but none of them were connected to this case (x10 refund of chargebacks)

I hope you get the money lost from them but it's a stretch from such sh*t place

Yea, it is funny, especially as my email started with:

Hi G2A,

I was made aware of a recent article on the G2A website,
About G2A offering 10x the cost for any proven chargebacks on the site:
https://www.g2a.com/news/latest/g2a-vow ... argebacks/