So I actually buy games on G2A well the cd keys sell them to friends etc for a profit. They always activate because I buy from people with thousands of sales and 0 negative feedback 100% review feedback.
Yesterday for myself I even bought Mortal Kombat X for $12.
This game is only a few months old and is $60 on steam. I don’t know how these people are able to do this, some say they buy keys from Russia well ok lets say this is the case, how come they can buy Global keys from Russia? because when I activate it on steam it works like a charm, should it not say only activate in Russian region? how come it activates anywhere in the world?
Valve has reached the point where they are blocking all gray market website links on steam infact they have blocked these words, G2A, G 2 A, G Two A. etc etc
But why are they bothering? gray market sites are being advertised by nearly every streamer. Especially G2A.com
I have noticed that Publishers etc have not taken any steps to do anything about this, well I will tell you something I NEVER buy games on steam for more than $5 or $10. I would wait years for a steam sale before I care about spending money and even its always impulse buy with a big cataloge backlog that I intend to play but never play and this is true for millions of steam users aswell.
So if they tried to stop sites like G2A they won’t make anymore money than they already do for millions of users. It will be about the same profit regardless.
Just think logically–why would a developer sell their game for less than it’s worth? If the game keys are being sold for much less than you would pay normally the keys were probably not acquired through legal means
They usually are acquired legitimately - by buying retail copies of the games in regions with lower prices (Russia), throwing away the disk and box. It’s all a bit silly to be honest.
It is kinda silly. Isn’t it?
I guess away to get rid of it. Is to put in the license is that you cannot sell the license once it is bought. Unless you have written permission.
But you vould still sell the whole box on ebay or something.
It’s more about currency.
60 rubbles is way less than $15.
So, they actually make quite a profit from it.
And, It would be impossible to make all currency the same.
EDIT: Here is some statistics from 2010.
As of 8-17-2010, “1 USD in Rub” is:
Eh? I think you’ve missed the point. Grey market keys exist like this because games are sold for five-to-ten times less in Russia than they are in Europe / Oceania - if we didn’t have such an enormous price discrepency coming from the seller, there’d be no reason to sell grey market keys as they would not be profitable, nor would users be looking for them.
When a game RRPS for ~$100 in one country (e.g. Finland), but ~$5 just over the border in another (Russia), you are creating the problem.
Nobody said you had to necessarily raise the prices in some regions to meet those in the more expensive regions; you could happily meet in the middle somewhere (regional taxes will still have an effect on price, that’s unavoidable). I’m just amused that publishers are complaining about grey market keys, when the problem is of their own creation since prices really are that radically different.
Prices are that low in an attempt to curb piracy. Let’s not forget that games are luxury goods, so whilst $60 may be a significant expense, it’s not a necessary one and game prices do drop dramatically over time (Steam sales, anyone?).
I for one am eternally frustrated with the cost of games in the US being half that of the UK, which surely isn’t fair?
Russia is an enormous market - it’s worth about $1.5billion and growing rapidly.
No they’re not, G2A and Kinguin are full of resellers who get their keys through fraud. Why do you think they offer insurance when you try and buy a key off them?
I used the word usually. Some of the keys (particularly the indie ones, as they do not have retail boxes), may be obtained fraudulently. The majority are obtained legitimately.
Yeah that was my understanding as well … I actually got a fully licensed version of MS Office for my Fiance’s laptop for a very reasonable price. It activated fine and I have had no update issues. As for Indie keys … I prefer to use platforms like Steam or Desura to acquire these.
The thing is that regional pricing sucks, as its something that doesnt really matter with borders, as its digital.
But remember, in russia or some third world country, 60 dollars for a game its the money you get in your work, monthly. Its like if you charge 700 dollars in the usa for the game, literally NO ONE would buy it. And also, they will just pirate it. Its better to just price accordingly to the place, so people can buy it instead of pirating it. Of course, you get the resale problem. But the resale problem its not really THAT big. You are still getting the sale, just with less profit, and for every copy that its sold on g2a.com at a lower price than normal, you have sold thousands of cheap copies in that country wich wouldnt have happened otherwise.
There is a “easy” solution for it, you just lock the game to that region, or only install its lenguage, like russian. That way you dont get resales in other countries.
The price of goods should really reflect the cost of developing / manufacturing them, regardless of the region. What you have here is publishers exploiting regional differences in currency in order to turn a greater profit; there’s no need for games to cost over $100 in some regions (some others like Brazil have high taxes on these goods, so that’s different). Other software, for example even critical things like Windows, doesn’t do this.
This is correct, where I live in Trinidad which is the English Speaking Caribbean. $60 USD is about $400 of our money and the average salary here for someone is around $3000 a month. You could see how expensive $400 is. Especially for a game you cannot resell, this is why piracy here is high on the PC but almost non existent on the consoles even with the ease of modding PS3 and xbox 360 the piracy is minimal due to used games.
What EA has done with their stupidity is forced us onto their Latin American regional language and policy. So while you cannot read anything on the Origin Store, its ok cause I pay half the price of games that Americans do. LOL
I could get Starwars Battlefront for around $35 LOL so technically speaking I don’t necessarily need to use gray market sites I could just buy from EA since they decided to sell me for cheaps. Still I won’t pay $35 I will wait for it to go on sale, I bought Battlefield 4 for $6 on Origin, its lower than what Americans pay.