To get back to the original question of whether purchasing keys from grey market resellers hurts the video gaming industry (PC in this case), the very short and technical question is potentially yes. While to us here gaming is a hobby and a passion, for people involved in making these projects it is a business which like any other is measured through a number of KPIs, main ones being sales numbers and profit generated through those. This is particularly true for individuals and companies involved outside the development teams to whom it is nothing more than a product and a job.
The actual and long answer is a little grey itself (excuse the pun) with not one right or wrong option particularly seeing how we gamers have little information in regards to accurate sales figures, breakdown of costs and profit sharing so must work on a number of assumptions. It's widely accepted that Steam slice of the price normally hovers
around 30%, costs for big titles can push over
$100m+ in development alone and big public companies publish their
annual reports. With Steam itself being a private company and many indie titles out there with smaller overheads it is hard to gauge exactly how much business goes to grey market as opposed to authorised resellers.
To get back to the first point, every project will have its financial performance evaluated in the given market and despite being a clearly flawless master race of gamers (
), we PC folk have been trailing behind those console chums playing in the comfort of their sofas in terms of how much money we generate. At least that has been the old fashioned attitude from many developers despite the
recent trends as demonstrated by the lack of "true" PC powerhouse titles such as the original Crysis that push the boundaries (and systems) of our glorious gaming platform. Speaking of old fashioned attitudes I think this is where we are also seeing a lot of problems with pricing on authorised digital distribution platforms.
Traditionally you have a publisher who sets the RRP of a product and when negotiating with physical retailers, the latter have to abide by those prices. Dropping below those prices normally leads to a breakdown of relations with the aforementioned publisher which isn't great and this becomes a mutual relationship of convenience. Now with the advent of digital distribution we all of a sudden had a new more convenient way of getting the games to a consumer without the need to maintain expensive stores and shelf space. However, we now have a situation whereby you cannot reduce the price of the same product online that a retailer is selling and certainly wouldn't be happy to be undercut on. Publishers do not want to upset their retailers since a significant amount of trade still happens offline, not to mention that a dispute about the game A on PC may lead to a retailer boycotting release of your soon to be launched game B on the consoles.
Places like GMG have been getting around that with healthy discount codes and everyone also likes to have a good sale on with some titles heavily discounted as soon as 3 months after launch. Certain publishers/developers (lines are getting blurred for a lot of companies) like Valve themselves who by being pioneers of the digital distribution don't have to rely as much on the brick and mortar business have had far more reasonable launch prices and have also been adjusting their RRPs accordingly with the age of the game, not to mention frequently putting their catalogue on sale. Problem over recent years has been that of certain publishers going overboard with not just base prices but very unrealistic "complete" editions.
Now personally I don't have a problem with businesses adjusting their prices according to the purchasing power parity of a country. In case of video games it is somewhat less black and white concept seeing how development and distribution is centralised and isn't affected by local factors such as wages, rent and associated costs but alternative of setting a same global price simply isn't a feasible strategy for any profit generating organisation. In terms of legality of buying those keys being as bad as piracy that's a nonsensical notion since you are not breaking any laws that you can be prosecuted for. You can certainly find yourself on the wrong side of agreement that you have with the digital distribution platform of your choice and compromise your account but certainly are not committing a crime.
Morally it becomes an ambiguous minefield particularly for a more conscientious gamer who would like to see more money go towards the developer team but with the secrecy of surrounding price breakdown of most major titles, one can only know that money is going to the source in case of independent studios who self publish on Steam and the like.
.
