I bought my own game from a reseller - Here's what happened. 

Perma blacklisting consumers who paid for a copy of your game from a store instead of pirating it? What a shitty, scumbag thing to do.

@@JohnSmith-fq3rg Note the wording: Emails you _back._ A person who bought the invalidated code from a third-party source wouldn't be emailing the developer back, as there would have been no contact between them prior to that point. Furthermore, the issue that consumer has- an invalid code- is the fault of the site that sold them an invalid code, not the developer. It's not the developer's problem.

@@JohnSmith-fq3rg What "consumers" are you on? Those review keys are for reviewers, NOT for fcking retail. Also, if you think those sites are real "stores" with 100% legitimacy... good luck out there. Buy from Steam, hell, even those Rstar bs.

@@JohnSmith-fq3rg Yeah no. That's literally the traditional, for-profit software piracy of selling "copies" of a game that the seller paid little to nothing to obtain. Just because the pirate has a storefront and charges money from their customers doesn't make it not piracy.

Yeah review keys should really just be temporary. If this stuff is a big issue, steam should really have review keys for this purpose that expire automatically if it hasn't already and/or some way for the dev to gift/lend the game to an account directly.

fck 'em up!

Bro. I got a warm feeling from reading that.

There's just something about making scammers angry that makes me feel extremly happy

That's one way to get a response. Perhaps the only way.

What game?

Taht's a good idea

Can't this already be done if the reviewer gives you their steam account name and you gift the game to them directly in Steam?

People are selling Steam accounts with the games on them, so this wouldn't solve all that much.

@@oneblacksun I don't think that It'll be that easy to create an account with more than 6k reviews just to sell the whole thing, I believe that the current issue is that it's a very easy scam to do

@@Malthan it works for normal account, not sure how the dev account works on Steam

Better, make review keys single used.

whenever you have a product on steam it has a key even if youre using it, the key should be made one use

@@zenovak5177There are no separate review keys in the current system, review keys are just generated like any other CD key for your game. They are all single use, as per the emails those review groups were requesting 3-5 keys at a time and so he would send them 5 keys and they resold them. I don't think Steam allows you to generate infinite use keys.

Just send it as a gift?

Valve already has that. You can send curation copies directly to curators via the steam curation page

That would be a good solution for curators and devs.

If you're a curator, surely Steam can set up a system where you directly give an entitlement to that curator group specifically?

Kinguin also sells steam accounts. So I don't think that will work.

@@Korato01 then they would need to sell their curater profiles right? I don't think that is worth the

@@Korato01 people are far less willing to buy whole steam accounts that they need to know the login for and for multiplayer games, re-add all the friends they want to play with, so while not completely fool proof, this would be a great system and most likely dry out the gray/black market resellers over time.

That's sad, as there can definitely be some legit people asking for them to help and review a game. Maybe setting a one week deadline for the key and invalidate it then would be an option?

Possibly, but invalidating managing a bunch of keys would be a big hassle, and it's honestly not worth the potential return of a reviewer reviewing your game. Besides that, most reviewers won't review your game unless it's already popular anyway.@@Korne127

best way to go is probably either offering discounts/ giving them to established youtubers/streamers that would be interested in it. ( i'm not a dev , i got no idea what's happening on the dev side )

​@@Korne127there really isn't. If they're not a well known youtuber or twitch streamer their review isn't worth giving them a free copy. Any reviewer with a decent following will have enough income that begging for a review copy isn't necessary, especially of an indie game.

@@MrFlarespeed Eh, some of the more niche parts of gaming aren't popular enough to make the content creators so rich they can just buy a 100 games a year. So I do think there's reason in giving out review codes, but only to established creators.

Having seen how bad the remasters were, you're probably a hero to some people out there. lol

That's understandable.

only keys i've ever bought are windows keys lol. i'm not paying $100 for an operating system everytime i swap motherboards.

Hey just so you know you can just pirate them and then shitty people don't get your money and it's free.

@@Zedgnar so modern times windows keys *pro keys atleast i think* are bound to the account, so you can reactivate the same key more then once going via your account, so im useing the same key i got for free like 8 years ago as my key got upgraded all the way to 10

If someone PAID your game and decided to resell it instead of claiming it by himself then that person has every right to do so as that person became the owner of that particular key.

@Quessen no it doesn't, keys can be given out freely, that doesn't give you the right to sell them to other vendors. You cant resell music you didn't make, can you, genius?

@@Quessen This is not how licensing works lmao

@@TegridyMadeGames "You can resell music you didn't make, can you, genius?" You can genius. How do you think iTunes and other services local stores work? They buy it from creator and resell it. Thats how trading goes. You buy and then you resell...

@@LZeugirdor yah this guys never sold anything online other than the facebook market place or craigslist and he thinks hes a e-commerce expert.

This is the best advice that one could possibly have put out here.

Based on how he described himself as socially inept (8:25) his interaction (8:30) with the crazy old man who sends tons of emojis and suspicious clip art, I doubt he will be that mindful or involved with the community. He is just angry with the fact that someone sold his key for money when those keys were provided to get more traction and money for him. Look at his face (13:49) you can tell that he's really angry about is people who buy on reseller sites, and he actually encourages people to commit a crime. Who is the one ruining the fun here, everyone has their answer.

Might also be worth offering a single key, and offering more keys upon proof of redemption of previous key, and/or for giveaway only on release of the review. Giving keys otherwise is just inviting the dark trade of it.

@@sooo0kie well, he encourages them to commit a lesser evil basically, both are crimes.

This is indeed, the only answer to this kind of thing. And don't just call them scammers, this is pure theft.

This is 99% why Kinguin was helping. They don't want a dev to cancel all their keys and the resellers not know and make Kinguin look like shit with "fake" keys. They'd rather help the dev figure it out for a game like this and save face by actively cancelling the listings on the site.

@@MrWhiskey1 The problem is that he didn't specifically set any terms on the keys, so when he gave those keys to the curators, they were legitimate keys that could be resold regardless if the developer later amended the terms & conditions.

Damn. I've been spending money and writing reviews for years and you're telling me people give it away to scammers?

At least in this scam the Dev doesn't lose any money as they were keys already given away for free.

@@bazahaza yeah but what would you feel if you give somone a gift and you found out they sell it later for profit

I don't know how common it is for bigger companies / publications that do reviews to let a whole team do it. Like, let a few people in the office play the game and talk it out while writing the review. In the days of now sharing a pc would be seen as hugely archaic, so even for a singleplayer game, asking for multiple keys might have a valid reason behind it.

If possible you should send over curator connect so they can’t resell the key (if they were the ones who reached out to you)

​@@CidVeldoril Tbh, that can be easily solved (assuming they don't play the singleplayer game at the same time) with Steam's library share function.

Use curator connect, I'm a curator and the system doesn't even display a key for the games given through the interface.

We send multiple keys to influencers if 1) as payment for their work, 2) they do a giveaway at their place.

Gaming Grandmather

Gaming Gramma is actually Kinguin in disguise. So is Cute Shop and Crazy Old Manner.

Gaming Grandma IS the same group of people (maybe Kingun): Wrecker/Abstract/Antoine/gt4/Lilly

i mean in this case its public information but "ppl who might have committed crimes shouldnt have rights actually" is a hell of a tak man

@@DimT670 The only 'hell of a take" here is you reading "Scammers should be exposed" as "criminals shouldn't have rights".

@@ShaCaro "Thieves shouldn't have the privilege of privacy " Thieves (aka someone who might have committed a crime) shouldn't have the (right) of privacy So yes, there is written that you should lose your right as soon you are suspected of a crime.

@@MrKolaros The difference between "right" and "rights" is huge though. If a criminal gets caught he gets put and jail and therefore loses his right for freedom. Do you think that is immoral? We are not talking about stripping them of every right, but certain crimes justify taking away certain rights. We would all be majorly screwed if we never did that.

as far as REASONING goes only PROVEN guilty persons should have their personal data become publicly known. If SUSPECTED person is proved to be innocent then his info shouldn't be publiced. Innocent people should've NEVER experience any backlash just for being suspected of something.

Yeah, if I ever end up releasing something, I'm not giving keys to any rando who asks, only those who I *know* without a doubt can be trusted.

RU-vidrs are the only people worth giving keys to, because 1 hour of gameplay footage showing off your mechanics does A LOT more than any amount of text wall reviews on steam ever could. With that said, your steam page has to interest people to seek out said footage. Don't bother with steam curators to boost you, because they are literal nobodies (anyone can become 1 in minutes). You as an indie dev have more effective reach than a 10k steam curator. Even if curator reaches those 10k followers (generally doesn't) odds are most of those people will never play the genre you're offering (unless it's a specialized curator). Finally, If you want a quality feedback/reviews seek out people who gave good feedback to similar games in the past (accurate, detailed and not necessarily positive). Don't expect genuine reviewers to fall into your lap, care about you (a stranger), your projects or have your interests in mind. Find them yourself and ask for feedback/review.

When is the vampire masquerade bloodlines video

I was just thinking this feels like an hbomberguy video.

Came to say the same. Love sonata

holy shit its h bomber guy

arent you the extremely racist dude from the metokur forums?

well digital goods are handled differently then physical goods, the digital license is to a sol person and if you sell the account with them odds are you broke that platforms TOS, and if the account is banned or locked you can sue the person/platform that sold you the account the keys were not meant for sale as a digital good, depending on how hard someone might want to try, they can probably claim the steam keys are stolen since they were review copies

In Europe, in european law, digital goods have to be able to be handled exactly like physical goods. It means the access keys, or the licence to play a game, can be sold exactly like a videogame on a cd of past times It may break the TOS, but TOS cannot be above the law, meaning, if the TOS forbids you to do something perfectly legal and tries to enforce penalties, those can be fought under LOCAL law, and not some US ones, as the competent jurisdiction is the one you reside in, or, an european one.

@@peulleieoyukino6369 im not talking about a tos lawsuit, its sueing the person/site that game you a key that was unusable due to it not being permited by the actual license holder (in this case it would be steam and the game devs)

@@peulleieoyukino6369 Well, the examle you're giving (which would also mean a lot of game practices regarding games-as-a-service would be illegal) has never been tried in court properly for video games.

@@GGG_gaming First sale doctrine (and equivalent EU/UK law) applies to keys. If a key is sold legally, and that person doesn't redeem it but sells it on later, that's legal. If it's bought with stolen cards, or scammed from the dev (pls give keys emails), etc then that doesn't apply. I had this with Ubisoft a few years ago over a Watch Dogs key that I had chain of sale for... they ended up readding it to my account as they had no evidence of any wrong doing on my part and could not prove anything.

Yeah good luck finding decent cracks lately. Most of the Scene is a joke as the better crackers gets hired to work for Denuvo. For example, the latest two sonic games still haven't been cracked. I get it that getting key resellers for indies is bad, but it's never when it's about AAA games. Considering how creatively bankrupt they are these days. And the people here acting all high and mighty, they clearly have never had financial issues in their lives.

Worst case: The key was bought with a stolen credit card or similar, then the bank was infromed and they do a chargeback, resulting in chargeback fees for the developer.

@@XSamsaX I am honestly baffled that the merchant is getting the fees for the charge back like it would be the merchant's fault.

it's amazing how my comment disappeared. either stick in with the status quo or disappear, huh? anyways, this video is as disingenuous as it can get. I cannot go too much into details because RU-vid will delete my comment again, but "do your research"

Pirating is less harmful than supporting grey market. It's sad, but I think it's more ethical way to go about it.

Hustlers all the way down

Dont waste ur money bro His game does not look good lol

@@devilvocano420Are you the sort of person who thinks 'graphics are everything'? Game can be good while looking quite bad at first glance.

Some of us want to play delisted games and don't want to deal with shady executables uploaded anonymously. So, I used Kinguin to get Origin keys for some Need For Speed titles I had missed.

@@user-yg4kj2mf1p I'd accept the extremely low risk of dealing with "shady executable" getting the game from well known pirates than support scammers with money. I mean, you don't just pirate from anywhere. Places like fitgirl repacks, empress or so on are well known and they actually care a fair bit about their reputation. Unless its a small time game you can't find there, I don't see the risk.

Agreed. Even though it doesn't look *great* in terms of artstyle, it doesn't necessarily HAVE to look good. If your gameplay is good enough, which based of the trailers, looks like it is, then it's a fun looking game. Look at Undertale, the graphics can looks simple or goofy at times, but then you get to the battle system which is a mixture of turn based AND dodging attacks. Not to mention the rare occasions where the fights work differently, whether through small changes like "soul has gravity" or "soul have shield" or through big changes like "HERE'S 500 BOMBS, FLIES, AND PELLETS, HAVE FUN!" or "i'ma attack you in the menu now, okay?" Edit : Heck, even Undertale Yellow shakes things up a bit, without changing your soul's color to reflect how it operates in battle. You can have a lasso pulling you towards the center, or be playing a rhythm game (Hey look!), or doing what the yellow soul is known for, "Soul is gun"

Yeah, in the best case scenario the keys in reseller sites come from those kinds of packs or more commonly limited time bundles that were bought legitimately. If you buy in those sites, do your research and find out where they could've gotten their keys and if it makes sense

But you can't really buy steam keys on steam. Only the developer can do that directly and I REALLY doubt anyone willingly sells keys to kinguin or g2a or any other shit like that.

@@ErnieZee the 4 packs was some kind of buying keys tho, that's why they're no longer a thing

​@@ErnieZeeDepends tbh. While I personally prefer to give duplicate keys away to friends and acquaintances, I've ended up with quite the number of duplicate keys over the years from buying humble bundles and other similar bundle deals from legitimate retailers. Even if I don't wish to sell them on and just give them our, others might decide to recoup some of their spending money by putting their dupes up for sale.

TBF that can also be a reason. The 4 most common cited reasons for how these private sellers obtain keys to resell on sites like Kinguin are: 1. What was stated in the video, review keys 2. Unwanted bundle games from like Humble 3. Packs like 4 Packs, "Share with a friend", etc. 4. Currency differences, many devs adjust their currency to better fit region standards (so like a $60 USD game one place might be a $30 USD equivalent elsewhere since nobody in that region buys $60 games usually). They take advantage of this buy buying in a lower currency but there's such a big gap that they can offer a discount and still be able to sell it for a profit

dude, pirates just upload that shit again, changing a little part of the md5 checksum in the .rar or .zip archives so the automated system can go f*ck itself when trying to find files with the md5 checksum that are marked as illegal, lol.

@@PaSP_YT_DE Very true, but for smaller indie titles, they usually don't bother

im sure it will work on an upload site that literally links to another pirated download for internet download manager to download faster :)

99% of curators are just bots like in the video. it's just an old system valve has never done anything about. there's no point anymore since this isn't 2004 and i can watch tons of real people actually review a game

Steam has system that allows devs to add games directly on account. And i have really no idea why this feature is so underutilized. Last time when i saw it work was Endless Legend giveaway by Sega half a month ago, you register on their site then connect your steam account and game appear in your library. And other cases of this feature being used were so long ago that i don't even remember them.

this was a poor researched comment cause it does

@@FunkeymonkeyTTR Then it's bad that people are sending out keys instead of using it.

@@olnnn Exactly, I don't wanna say its entirely the devs fault but there is a system in place to avoid this

most of the keys work though lol - ive never had issues with G2A at least and I bought maybe 16 copies of CS:GO ($1.49 each but it was $15 or $20 at that time) as for why i needed 16 keys i was a dev for cheats

i do live in the US though im guessing we have more game keys available

@@mem7806 as a gamedev who makes multiplayer games and had to waste time on anti-cheat that I could've spent actually making the game better: you are the scum of the earth. You do realize you not only make the game worse because you bring cheaters, but you also waste the time of the devs, making the games worse for everybody, not only the one experimenting cheaters. Get a life, be of any use to society.

@@mem7806 Doing shady work like that I guess you didn't care if a key stopped working after a while. Friend of mine got 1 month of progress deleted in BF3 because of a too good to be true cheap key.

​@@mem7806no shot the keys for CSGO are being obtained this way though. I don't think the success rate of keys for games that are already huge could possibly be relevant in exploring the nuance of small, niche, indie games that are looking for coverage.

Algorithm coming in clutch

le llevo diciendo ya en los dos videos que voy a seguir comprando claves estafadas de todas las compañías de mierda que metan denuvo en sus juegos, y por extension todos aquellos que tengan microtransacciones de mierda y mierda totalmente anticonsumidor, las dos cosas suelen ir de la mano, y eso si alguna vez siento la necesidad imperiosa de jugar a sus juegos... comprarse un indie de 5€ para ahorrarse 2€ en una pagina de estas, hay que estar borracho, pero antes le financio dos yates de 2 millones de euros a gaminggrandma y a oldmangaming que darle 30€ a ubisoft en rebaja ni mucho menos 60€ en lanzamiento (que hay que ser suicida para comprarse un "AAA" en lanzamiento estos dias)

le llevo diciendo ya en los dos videos que voy a seguir comprando claves estafadas de todas las compañías de mierda que metan denuvo en sus juegos, y por extension todos aquellos que tengan microtransacciones de mierda y mierda totalmente anticonsumidor, las dos cosas suelen ir de la mano, y eso si alguna vez siento la necesidad imperiosa de jugar a sus juegos... comprarse un indie de 5€ para ahorrarse 2€ en una pagina de estas, hay que estar borracho, pero antes le financio dos yates de 2 millones de euros a gaminggrandma y a oldmangaming que darle 30€ a ubisoft en rebaja ni mucho menos 60€ en lanzamiento (que hay que estar loco para comprarse un "AAA" en lanzamiento estos dias) Reposteado por takedown de youtube

You're really telling him his story is "worth" being on some other guy's youtube channel? It's already on youtube, you know. Right here. On his own channel.

@@ShaCaro if it is on a bigger channel, that has worked with game publishers in the past while reporting this issue, adding witnesses and victims to give shape to the story and have the authorities take action, it would be worth the shot.

Smart!

Isn't this is what Curator Connect system is already doing? And curator pages didn't like them bc they cant resell. Also as a dev, you wont' get many review either, so still a lose-lose business...

@@paponwappen7165 uh. wait what? whats curator connect? (never heard of it..)

This is what steam already do lol, these people are asking in email on purpose to bypass that

I don't get it; does one key grant multiple activations? Or do they simply sell the keys once?

so it's just a copy paste of someone elses text

Skr is the abbreviation, SEK the ISO-code

Yes, you can label keys so they can expire at the push of one button at release. But most of the mails we got (basically the same than in the video) were after release so it wouldn't change much.

Tell them that the key its on the text scrambled everywhere but actually dont put it in.

sounds like a fun dev. o hey a cool indie dev. can i get a key? dev: lick my balls fuckwad. uhm okay? sheesh.

Send them instructions that say "Click here for your code" but have a lengthy email with a lot of links, and the real link for the code is called "Developer's Story, from rags to riches" and you have to read carefully to know you have to click it.

You DO realize they don’t actually read the emails right… The only people you’d be offending are the ones who actually are legitimate.

@@jakemartinez6894 did you even watch the video?

depends on the dev. to do that you need to make a separate version of the game on steam (like how there are demo versions or alpha version that appear on your library as a separate game). the timer however i think you can just disable the key yourself and just have to keep track of time

But the credit card argument makes sense if you get to know that selling keys is a way to wash money

bro wasting his money lol

@@devilvocano420 Money you enjoyed giving aint wasting.

Assuming they bought the key from one of those sites, it doesn't really help the developer unless they specifically reach out and tell the developer to try and help them

@@justpassingby298 I bought it from steam. Felt appropriate. It’s a small price, but it feels like a good deed.

@@justpassingby298 Assuming they bought the game on steam, as their comment is implying it.

This may have been CJSCDKEYS. before steam Introduced stricter geo restrictions around games you could effectively get physical copies of games in somewhere like Russia at a fraction of the cost of the rest of Europe and they would resell them at discounted prices. Not sure if they are into selling the scammed review copies now or not, but they were legit back in the day.

That's how it's supposed to be done legitimately, the seller buys a game from a retail shop with an overstock of used copies of a particular title, then sells it for a higher price than they bought it (but less than Steam price). But that requires luck, time, and effort, so it's not true for the vast majority of keys on "reseller" sites. And such bargains don't exist for new titles anyway.

I've bought dozens of games off sites like this and never had an issue and afaik nothing been taken off my account before.😊

@@ZawaOnRU-vidsame! I can understand the frustration that these devs are talking about. But I and a lot of other people are not rich. I’m looking into dragons dogma 2 right now. The game is 65. But you can get a key for 40 Euros. If people start pricing games properly there won’t be a need for key sites.

Skr was an abbreviation used before 1978 when it was officially replaced with SEK. So there's nothing official about it today and it has no place in being used for anything except when reviewing historical documents.

Wrong. SKR has never been used as an abbreviation for the Swedish Krona. I'm Swedish and if you google "SKR", even on the Swedish internet there is absolutely no single mention of Swedish crowns. There is no mention of "SKR" on the official wikipedia page in English, and the only mention of it in the Swedish wikipedia page states that it was used sporidacally before 1978, but since 1978, the formal shortening of Swedish crown is SEK. In Swedish absolutely nobody will understand what you're talking about if you say "SKR".

@@tsoii "Abbreviation" was a bit misleading (I'm not a native speaker); it's actually called the currency sign or currency symbol. Other code / symbol examples would be EUR / € and USD / $. In domestic applications, the sign is used as it is. In international applications however (like an online shop) this could lead to ambiguities when more than one currency is using the same sign. The Danish Krone (DKK), Swedish Krona (SEK), Norwegian Krone (NOK), and Islandic Króna (ISK) all use the currency sign "kr". To distinguish them, a letter (usually the first letter of the ISO code) is added in front of the sign, resulting in "dkr", "skr", "nkr", and "ikr". The same is done with other currency symbols also. The sign of the Australian Dollar is $, but to distinguish it from US-Dollar, A$ or AU$ is used. I know that because part of my job is literally to use currency libraries for various programming languages to format monetary amounts for display on websites and other media.

@@NeovanGoth If it's not explicitly specified in an ISO (or in the case of sweden, an SIS standard), it's not official.

A hero to dumbasses

Bought

Same, the audio was really quiet.

Wish youtube had some sort of standardized volume levels to help creators balance their audio.

@@1un4cyI think they used to normalise, but that's even worse as it ruins the audio for anyone who carefully mastered it.

I'm pretty sure that they can actually. But i'd suspect that it takes some work in getting to talk with someone on steam.

If they could say, invalidate any keys not used before xxx date. Then when those clowns try and sell the key, its invalid, and they get dinged for it. It's really shi--y that you give someone a key and immediately they attempt to flip it online for cash. @@RRKS

Through the dev portal you can ban keys, which makes them not be able to be used and or removes access to the user if already redeemed

If it was me, I would invalidate the keys, and no longer deal with those people.@@Ragdoll00

I'd say it's both, either from sales or currency differences for global keys, plus the review keys

it all depends on the website, some of the time it is shady people stealing keys or review keys to sell them or purchasing during a massive sale. other times however, on websites such as humble bundle its developers that are selling the keys (steam lets devs generate as many keys as they want to sell off site with only the condition that the price can not be lower then steams price)

Because people want the full game, because demos are restricted

Yes, steam curators has always been used for this shit, I'm shocked more people aren't aware of this, because it's been known for years.

Total biscuit was a left wing sjw gamergate supporter feminist. And an all round disgusting person. Were all better off without voices like that ruining the industry.