Do websites like CDKeys hurt the gaming industry?

CDKeys is a website that buys keys from other regions and then sells them in other market places for a cheaper prices. As far as I know, the website is legal lol (mods let me know if I'm wrong here). But right now they have Cyperpunk 2077 for $40! They usually have pretty good deals like that. But doesn't that hurt the industry? What say you, SW? Shouldn't we be paying full price to support our beloved games?

No, we shouldn't pay full price for new games.

Once the game is unlocked in your steam library and you got it for 40 when its 60 normally I feel like I got a great deal and achieved something special and it feels legal to me.

Yes, though it affects larger developers and publishers less than indie ones. They've got more scaling and capital to cushion the blow.

Whereas for indies, it can be crippling. Many months back, a bunch of indie devs even came out and stated outright that they'd rather you pirare their games than buy from key resellers.

Not really the gaming industry these days are more greedier than ever. If all next gen games are going to be 70 bucks alot more people will be using these key sites and pirating will most likely go up as well. The gaming industry brought this on themselves play stupid games win stupid prizes.

No, it actually save industry. when yor avg console game cost 60. these people gave you keys in heavy discount. also save piracy too.

This is the same question I answer last year regarding CDkey but hey, I'll gladly answer it here again.

The answer is really a yes/no situation. They are grey market sites not officially endorsed by publishers. Obviously the publishers will get money for the keys somewhere down the line but its not like officially endorsed sites such as Steam where the publisher will get 70% of the money. The keys could be obtained using theft bank details and then sold onto you, which in turn could get revoked leaving you with no game and no money.

But in most cases, you are just buying keys from 3rd world countries, where games are normally cheaper. (Like Brazil, for example) The developers are getting your money, just less. There are some proven cases where you are buying "stolen keys" but this is very rare, so I wouldn't be too worry about it at all. (Like Jim Sterling says it best. "Some money" is better than NO money)

Just so that we are clear, I shop at CDKey site all the time, I been doing business with those people for years and never had any issues with those keys for the games I buy for a fair price. Its one of the reasons why I'm so glad I pay RE3 Remake for much cheaper cause that game wasn't worth paying full price is the reason why I shop at CDKey.

PC: Den of Thieves

I buy games from GMG and CDKEY's.

Imagine caring about the bottom lines of multinationals lol.

Worry about those poor children who have nothing to eat. They matter more than the game industry.

Probably not. Games nowadays implement so many fucked up business strategies milking their customers every chance they get, it probably adds up.

There's so many games I'm mildly interested in that I haven't bought because of crappy business practices. If these games were just full games on release where you had access to all its content when you paid for the game, I probably would've bought way more new games. I hope that's what hurting companies the most, but sadly most gamers are a-ok being scammed.

Like, now I'm considering getting Battlefront 2. That came out in 2017. And if I do, it'll be on a cdkey website for 15 bucks.

Well that key surely must of been paid for originally. What's the problem?

When it comes to the likes of EA, Ubisoft and 2K, should we really care if it hurts them?

I mean, they basically are as bad as criminals themselves. The difference is they have PR to put a happy acceptable face on it.

If someone is nicking their games and hurting them... good?

Love me some cd keys

Fanboys who are more concerned with Sony’s profits may disagree

HaH

#fullpricewankaz

It doesn't hurt the developers, it does hurt the people whose credit cards were stolen to buy those games.

Keys don't exist in a vacuum. Publishers and developers have a lot of control over keys. They can even decide to only generate keys on purchase at specific sites. If there are cdkeys floating around its because the publisher or developer generated keys for alternative distribution.

Not as much as the second hand market for discs.

I mean, the keys are stolen in a lot of cases, so, yeah? I'm not here to preach the ethics of it, but I would count that as even more of a lost sale than piracy, since gamers aren't gonna pay for it twice.

jfc

Funny TC is going after Key resellers but boast about used game sales as a win for consoles. LMAO @ the hypocrisy.

This

It depends on if they keys are legal or not. Illegal keys create financial headaches for developers who have to deal with crediting back money that they thought they earned through a legitimate purchase. Big companies can absorb the blow, but it can be disastrous for small devs who may have already spent the money to keep the lights on and simply don't have it anymore. At least they don't have to deal with that when it comes to piracy.

Cdkeys doesn't steal keys, that's G2A. CDkeys takes advantage of regional pricing.

@BenjaminBanklin: spot on, you can preach all you want about Big companies greed etc etc to try and justify it. But at the end of the day, those sites are at best shady as hell and in a lot of cases they have obtained the keys by illegal means... so yeah if you want to punish the EA etc don’t buy their games..

publisher pays the developers, if you wish to support the publishers then buy digital

And that's another thing. Used games market is by far the worst cases to hurt the developers the most cause they'll never see a dime of the money in return but CDkeys will cause they'll get something back in return but less and lets face it, its better than nothing.

Devs before digital got 15 bucks for a 60 dollar game because off all the extra cost.

They now get 45-60 depends on what they do or where they place there product ( store ).

To get the complete game now u gotta spend mostly a season pass or a few dlc which fast already moves up to 90 bucks if not more. That means they generate 6x the amount of money they once got without any risk attached on oversupplying etc.

Yet they keep the price of a lesser quality product at the end of the day on top of it at 60 bucks at launch.

And they are even trying to come up with excuses to up the price even more.

Digital stores should have reduced the prices drastically that was the original ideology around these solutions and they didn't. Those greedy turds upped it enormously.

Any dev that states they lose money or its even better to pirate there game are lying through there teeth because pirating doesn't give them money even remotely and people buying and selling off keys from different country's still yields them money.

Obviously devs are against keys because they can't charge maximum for there product anymore because of it.

Cdkeys are a middle ground of people that still want the game legally but don't want to pay the full price or wait for discounts because game developers fail themselves at it.

That's a bank issue not a key issue. If people charge back then your payment system is junk.

What prevents me from buying a hardcopy of a game and charge back the moment i leave the store? there you go.

I’m not really sure myself. Do they even sell keys for console games? Personally I mostly try to physical anyway but when I do buy digital I just buy my games directly from whatever the system’s storefront is ie. Xbox Marketplace and Nintendo’s eShop. I’d rather not deal with any potential issues that may arise otherwise no matter how small they may be. It’s not out of any desire to protect a company’s bottom line though, just for my own peace of mind.

@Archangel3371: CDKeys site do sell keys for consoles but they aren't as low price wise as on PC in some cases buts till, you still get a discount however. I never bought a key for consoles, so I cannot comment on it.

I've been using CDKeys for years. Almost all of my game purchases are brand new. If you're talking about purchasing physical copies, I support physical copies. If someone owns a physical copy and want to sell it, it's within their right to do so. That goes with anything else you own. And that is a great benefit to owning console. This topic is about off price retailers like CDkeys. Does it hurt or benefit the industry? Is it any different from buying it from Steam or an official retailer?

Love the option to trade games..pay £45...complete in a few weeks then of to my local game store for back £35-40

NICE!

@davillain-: Oh, ok. Well anyway I still prefer buying my stuff directly from the storefronts just for my own peace of mind.

It depends on the source of the keys.

I try not to support stores that don't do a good job of keeping stolen keys off of their site. I'm not familiar with CDKeys, but I bet they are no better than any other 3rd-party key store. Typically it hurt the devs since they end up giving away free or cheap keys.

Just buy CP2077 on GOG. It's totally worth the DRM-free version. Most of your money will go to the hard-working people who made the game.

The exception being Windows 10, never pay more than $5 for it. MS makes all their money off of your data anyway.

more and more games are coming to PC. that means publishers are making decent money.

which means it fine.

on PC pirating and stuff is uncontrollable. you just have to accept it. its the nature of PC.

Not true. Here's why, explained in the first few minutes:

So you buy digital only games from the stores directly right? Then why did you flip out and say "For the players" when Sony stopped letting 3rd party sites sell there games which were always identically priced and never had deals over Sony's store anyway so buying from Sony was the same thing.

Whats your beef with Sony's shop when you have no beef with buying directly from microsoft and nintendo? Thats so hypocritical dude I really can't stand ya. You could still buy cards for playstation shop so why did you say "For the players"?

@ProtossRushX: Umm, what? I’m not sure what you’re referring to exactly. I have no problem buying games from Sony’s storefront. I’ve purchased their cards from Best Buy and Walmart a number of times.

Edit: You can’t stand me? Aww, now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings. 😢

https://www.gamespot.com/forums/system-wars-314159282/sony-stops-letting-retailers-sell-digital-game-cod-33455137/?page=1

Scroll down. You said "For the players" implying the move was bad for gamers. BRO u buy from the stores directly you should have said this will have no effect on you.

#41Archangel3371

"For the players. ?

Anyway this is just a bit more of a hassle for consumers. Sure you can just buy the monetary cards still but unlike buying just the game code this always leaves you with money just sitting in your virtual wallet."

@ProtossRushX: Ah ok. That’s talking about game specific cards sold at the actual price of the game. Different concept and not the same as this topic really. Nintendo is doing the same thing and I said the same thing about them doing it as well.

You call that a “flip out”? I guess I just need to reel it in sometimes. 😅

Edit: Buying monetary cards and using those cards to buy directly from the storefront isn’t the same as using places like CDkeys to get specific game keys at a discount.

@pyro1245:

Damn. Thanks for posting that. Been a long time since I've used G2A, but I've definitely bought a good few games from them in the past. After watching that, did a bit more digging around and yeah the shade runs deep. I had already stopped a while ago on the word of a couple SW/Discord buds, but I didn't truly realize how damaging it could be.

I support games I like and often times with smaller devs I'll buy and gift multiple copies to others. Costing them a sale to save a few bucks, no thanks.

@ConanTheStoner: Yeah - for a few bucks here or there... Nah. I'll buy it through the normal channels.

I'm a consumer so I just buy wherever it's cheapest. It's not my problem nor is it solvable by me.

This is not a key issue, this is a bank issue. Like i stated before. Your banks are complete and utter outdated and offer zero protection for the sellers of products and victims of credit card fraud.

This is like saying, well hardcopy's of games are bad because i can buy a shop full of games on this stolen creditcard, let it get shipped to a shady adress and resell it to other retailers or outlets or people on the dark web without issue's. Now the devs go bankrupt because the retailer refunds his paid money for those copy's from the devs that sold him those copy's.

It's the dumbest logic i ever saw.

G2A having a protection plan isn't a scam, its what they offer and its what u can get. He going rampant on that shit is just idiotic because he clearly never used key sites to start with. Every single one of them has a protection plan because its free money.

What is the reality when u buy a key however without a protection plan? well here you go:

What happens when u guy sold 50k keys on the website and has good rating that starts to sell keys that don't work? he gets bad ratings and bad comments and gets avoided. They will always replace the key with a working key no matter what to prevent this from happening because otherwise they lose consumers and lose rating which is all they care for. Every single site does this and i had a few keys that didn't work all got replaced perfectly fine without protection plans. It's just a idiot trap.

That G2A holds the money from the illigal reseller is scummy and they should adress that but still G2A isn't CD keys its a shop that sells cdkeys. So saying all resellers are scummy because what G2A does is also false logic.

It's like saying gamestop sold a game that was used so all games must be used that are new from every outlet.

About credit/debitcards.

As somebody that owns a debit card i can tell you this, this is how buying works.

1) U buy the money is gone simple as that, consumer rights protect you if a product u buy isn't good and the company has to pay it back as result. Buying stuff from shady sites or shady company's outside of the boarders that's all yolo and on you.

2) I have a number i have to put in every single time with a device to make a purchase, as extra security check.

3) I cannot go into the red basically -, i can only withdraw 500 a day max, i want 2k in my hands? gotta do it over 4 days period and i can only go up to 2k at max a week. That prevents me if i got scammed to go into the hole.

4) whenever i make a purchase or withdraw and it reaches the max of what i can i get a message on my phone about it.

This means if somebody steals my code + debitcard he cannot do much with it. this also means that retailers that this guy buys stuff with from my debitcard don't have to return the money because its easy covered by either my bank or even myself through extra insurance and savings.

5) Having a separate bank account to go to shady content isn't uncommon with even higher limitations.

Conclusion

Keys aren't the issue and resellers of it, its your bank systems that are easily exploited. If i was a dev i wouldn't even accept creditcards to start with if it means there are charge backs. Or i would support it and up the price massively just for those cards.

Key resellers from anonymous users are bad. CD Key sites generally aren't bad, like GMG, Fanatical and the likes.

G2A and Kinguin are shady af tho, and as grey as it could be.

the thing with CDkeys vs G2A is that cdkeys is a bit grey area because they abuse regional pricing(mind if you people do this on console as well) and they sell the keys themself vs G2A doesnt actually sell anything, anyone can sell their keys on g2a and the platform just grabs a cut from the sales, so its literally russian roulette with what you buy as some are bought with stolen credit cards and so on.

@Gatygun:

Have you ever had a credit card? Not the same thing as a debit card.

There is overhead associated with dealing with charge backs, as the video explains.

You spend a lot of time in your post making several bad analogies. I don't appreciate that.

Regardless of where the exploit occurs, the outcome is the same. If I respect the dev I'll buy their game from a legit source. If not then maybe I don't care.

You do what you want.

I buy games from G2A also. Hope i'm not doing anything illegal by buying cheap stuff sometimes from G2A?

The competition will tell you they're shady but I'm not convinced. You're not breaking the law, I'm pretty sure of that. No moreso than randomly buying stuff off Amazon or any other online marketplace. I'd take most of the supposed legal complaints with a huge pinch of salt.

For me, the pecking order goes: GOG/STEAM, GMG/Humble etc., Kinguin/G2A... the rest (apart from EGS).

Generally I'll go with the first four, because I want devs to get a big cut and because I don't want to be dealing with weird activation routes or blocked STEAM features, but if prices are stupid, I'll look elsewhere. No actual experience with CDKeys, only because their name sounds kind of backwater, but nothing particularly against them over G2A etc. I've bought from most of the larger sites at some point and never had any issues.

Actually, this is the first time I've heard of this site. Sounds interesting, especially considering that some games may cost several thousand dollars.