Steam prices! Grey key sites! and the I love/hate developers thread - Enter if you dare!
- Thread starter Musty Pie
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Am I not allowed to defend my position?
Somebody said earlier that because it was legal there was no case against it. Then we went down this line of reasoning.
Now you're telling me that this line of reasoning is invalid.
So basically, I shouldn't bother with any line of reasoning, because I shouldn't be arguing against the majority.
The majority are always right
Unless they aren't? Or is it that because you're in the majority /this time/, the majority is right /this time/.If you, FrenchTart, find yourself in the minority in some future argument, will you automatically cede?
Soldato
I don't know how this works and I'm guessing not many of us do.
Do Steam and other sellers buy in bulk and pay up front or do they get a bunch of keys and pay the publisher depending on how many they sell? Reurning keys if they don't shift them.
Because if that's how it works then the grey market sites could actually help the publishers a bit. They probably order in bulk and pay up front, so they then take on the risk of having to sell the keys.
If Steam can work it more as a pay for what they need approach and grey market pay for what they expect to sell up front then there is an element of risk involved for the later.
If the game is hyped, say the next Tomb Raider, and G2A buy in 100,000 keys but it turns out the game is a real stinker and gets much lower sales than expected selling only 40,000 copies on G2A, then G2A have 60,000 codes left to make their money back on. The publisher has their money from G2A. I doubt G2A can return unused codes. Sure they might sell slowly, but G2A bought them at launch price. By the time Steam or Amazon are selling their 90,000th code they might be months down the line when they can get them cheaper from the publisher.
Are we saying, from a moral point of view:
Person A, buys from Steam for £40 - Angel & pillar of the community.
Person B, buys from grey market for £20, gives £20 to RSPCC - Evil, morally corrupt person that should be shunned by decent society.
Do Steam and other sellers buy in bulk and pay up front or do they get a bunch of keys and pay the publisher depending on how many they sell? Reurning keys if they don't shift them.
Because if that's how it works then the grey market sites could actually help the publishers a bit. They probably order in bulk and pay up front, so they then take on the risk of having to sell the keys.
If Steam can work it more as a pay for what they need approach and grey market pay for what they expect to sell up front then there is an element of risk involved for the later.
If the game is hyped, say the next Tomb Raider, and G2A buy in 100,000 keys but it turns out the game is a real stinker and gets much lower sales than expected selling only 40,000 copies on G2A, then G2A have 60,000 codes left to make their money back on. The publisher has their money from G2A. I doubt G2A can return unused codes. Sure they might sell slowly, but G2A bought them at launch price. By the time Steam or Amazon are selling their 90,000th code they might be months down the line when they can get them cheaper from the publisher.
Are we saying, from a moral point of view:
Person A, buys from Steam for £40 - Angel & pillar of the community.
Person B, buys from grey market for £20, gives £20 to RSPCC - Evil, morally corrupt person that should be shunned by decent society.
Man of Honour
Am I not allowed to defend my position?
Somebody said earlier that because it was legal there was no case against it. Then we went down this line of reasoning.
Now you're telling me that this line of reasoning is invalid.
So basically, I shouldn't bother with any line of reasoning, because I shouldn't be arguing against the majority.
The majority are always right
If you, FrenchTart, find yourself in the minority in some future argument, will you automatically cede?
There's nothing wrong with defending your opinion but it's pretty tedious to read the same point repeated over and over again. You repeating yourself isn't going to convince anyone and you using completely incomparable examples to try and justify your points isn't going to help either.
edit: If you posted something like "I don't think it's moral but I can accept that other people do even if I don't understand it" I'd respect you a lot more than I do for the grandiose claims accompanied with
smilies. It just comes across as a bit childish to be honest. I imagine this thread would also have died 10 pages back. I'm not saying it is all you btw. Just the example I'm using in this post.
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This is my own long winded and personal take on what I believe the issue of grey market sellers and developers is:
Tldr; Grey market sellers generate additional sales by increasing demand for the game whilst it is still relevant and reduces the risk of frugal buyers forgetting about the game or buying something else whilst waiting for its price to drop in the long term. As they would only ever pay less or equal to the price that they personally have valued the game at anyway.
First of all you have the development, R&D and all the other stuff that has already been paid for to create the game. Once the game has been created that cost has been paid to create the one singular copy of the game.
Then there is the cost of mass producing the game for sale. Costs of DVD discs and copying to them are miniscule probably within the pennies, generating a new key for Digital download even less but then you have additional costs of hosting somewhere for the game to be downloaded from, bandwidth etc. The majority of games nowadays have multiplayer online or some form of, so the major companies already have servers for the game to distribute from anyway. In other cases that is dealt by third parties (Steam etc..) I believe where they will incur those costs most likely for a fee or set percentage of the sales.
Finally you have distribution and marketing costs, these can be expensive in some countries but for PC games in UK specifically, physical copies are almost non existent on high streets and are mostly stocked in warehouse stores (Amazon, Shop To etc..) Or sold as Digital keys. In fact I have received some physical copies of games where it is a DVD case with nothing but a key inside and a website to download it from. So again minimal costs.
The price of the game does not matter AT ALL since the costs of the game can be less than £10 and still cover manufacturing and distribution costs and contribute to paying the initial development costs, it is just unlikely you will sell the volume to recuperate the losses and make a profit. Now when you buy from "Grey market" sellers they have taken keys from cheaper regions and have sold them to you. This is because the local distributors for that part of the world believe that they cannot sell the copy at RRP in their locale which is justifiable considering that the RRP of a new game would probably equal a months wages in some places.
Due to the way the EU is structured it is just good business sense to buy something in one part of the EU and sell in another at a profit (Free trade and as mentioned earlier non-existent distribution costs) we get our bacon from Ireland, Holland and Denmark, Oranges from Spain and so on, so why cant we get our PC games from Poland or Romania. VPN's are slightly different and would be up to the distributors (Steam, GoG, Origin, Uplay etc..) to figure a way to stop people using them to buy and download games from countries that the customer is not present. That is likely to be the absolute minority probably even less so than Piracy, if someone is willing enough to set up VPN's every time they want to play and then pay an extra £5-10 for the game it is barely any more effort to obtain a pirated version for nothing.
There are people who will pay RRP for pre orders or pay a significant premium for "Limited edition" releases which include massively overpriced souvenirs or DLC. The costs of selling these to those people (Getting the game from the developer > retail > customer) are no greater than the cost to sell it to people who pay less, all this means is there is more money left over after costs of selling contributing to covering their initial costs.
Everybody has a certain value they place on the "game" in question. There are people who will pay no more than £30 or £20 and so on... The likelihood that someone who is only willing to pay £25 for a game to pay £49.99 at release is very low. They are most likely to wait until it drops to that price, ergo the company will only EVER receive £25 from that specific customer for their product. In this case if grey markets didn't exist you could probably expect the hypothetical customer to just buy games later in their lifecycle so you could probably just tack on something like release date + 2 months and still own all the same games as RRP release date customers just a few months later, since the demand for the games have waned and to get new customers you need to lower price.
What grey market sellers do is provide the "game" to the customer at the price they were willing to pay earlier in its lifecycle, when it is still fresh in the minds or marketing is still active. In essence they are just speeding up the time in which someone buys the game. In any event I believe they HELP the companies sell the games as someone who waits for games to fall in price (e.g.. 2 months later) there will be a number of those who forget or find something else and never buy the game in question thus losing the developer a sale in total.
This does not include grey market sellers that sell stolen copies or ones acquired by fraudulent means such as credit card fraud since obviously the developer gets no money from those.
Then there is the cost of mass producing the game for sale. Costs of DVD discs and copying to them are miniscule probably within the pennies, generating a new key for Digital download even less but then you have additional costs of hosting somewhere for the game to be downloaded from, bandwidth etc. The majority of games nowadays have multiplayer online or some form of, so the major companies already have servers for the game to distribute from anyway. In other cases that is dealt by third parties (Steam etc..) I believe where they will incur those costs most likely for a fee or set percentage of the sales.
Finally you have distribution and marketing costs, these can be expensive in some countries but for PC games in UK specifically, physical copies are almost non existent on high streets and are mostly stocked in warehouse stores (Amazon, Shop To etc..) Or sold as Digital keys. In fact I have received some physical copies of games where it is a DVD case with nothing but a key inside and a website to download it from. So again minimal costs.
The price of the game does not matter AT ALL since the costs of the game can be less than £10 and still cover manufacturing and distribution costs and contribute to paying the initial development costs, it is just unlikely you will sell the volume to recuperate the losses and make a profit. Now when you buy from "Grey market" sellers they have taken keys from cheaper regions and have sold them to you. This is because the local distributors for that part of the world believe that they cannot sell the copy at RRP in their locale which is justifiable considering that the RRP of a new game would probably equal a months wages in some places.
Due to the way the EU is structured it is just good business sense to buy something in one part of the EU and sell in another at a profit (Free trade and as mentioned earlier non-existent distribution costs) we get our bacon from Ireland, Holland and Denmark, Oranges from Spain and so on, so why cant we get our PC games from Poland or Romania. VPN's are slightly different and would be up to the distributors (Steam, GoG, Origin, Uplay etc..) to figure a way to stop people using them to buy and download games from countries that the customer is not present. That is likely to be the absolute minority probably even less so than Piracy, if someone is willing enough to set up VPN's every time they want to play and then pay an extra £5-10 for the game it is barely any more effort to obtain a pirated version for nothing.
There are people who will pay RRP for pre orders or pay a significant premium for "Limited edition" releases which include massively overpriced souvenirs or DLC. The costs of selling these to those people (Getting the game from the developer > retail > customer) are no greater than the cost to sell it to people who pay less, all this means is there is more money left over after costs of selling contributing to covering their initial costs.
Everybody has a certain value they place on the "game" in question. There are people who will pay no more than £30 or £20 and so on... The likelihood that someone who is only willing to pay £25 for a game to pay £49.99 at release is very low. They are most likely to wait until it drops to that price, ergo the company will only EVER receive £25 from that specific customer for their product. In this case if grey markets didn't exist you could probably expect the hypothetical customer to just buy games later in their lifecycle so you could probably just tack on something like release date + 2 months and still own all the same games as RRP release date customers just a few months later, since the demand for the games have waned and to get new customers you need to lower price.
What grey market sellers do is provide the "game" to the customer at the price they were willing to pay earlier in its lifecycle, when it is still fresh in the minds or marketing is still active. In essence they are just speeding up the time in which someone buys the game. In any event I believe they HELP the companies sell the games as someone who waits for games to fall in price (e.g.. 2 months later) there will be a number of those who forget or find something else and never buy the game in question thus losing the developer a sale in total.
This does not include grey market sellers that sell stolen copies or ones acquired by fraudulent means such as credit card fraud since obviously the developer gets no money from those.
There's nothing wrong with defending your opinion but it's pretty tedious to read the same point repeated over and over again. You repeating yourself isn't going to convince anyone and you using completely incomparable examples to try and justify your points isn't going to help either.
edit: If you posted something like "I don't think it's moral but I can accept that other people do even if I don't understand it" I'd respect you a lot more than I do for the grandiose claims accompanied with
I'm not saying it is all you btw. Just the example I'm using in this post.
Heh. If somebody comes at me with an argument I can pick holes in, then I will do.
It was stated that "if it's legal it can't be wrong".
What do you expect me to do, except try to disprove that by giving examples of other legal things that people object to?
Seriously, what do you expect me to do there? Just say "Oh, you're right. If it's legal than surely my objection is null and void."
It's a great way to mute me, but not a great way to guide a debate.
Man of Honour
*shrug* Keep at it if it makes you happy.
Grey Market Simulator 2016
Permabanned
An now the childish side of debates makes an appearance
You've even got to **** on my jokes :/ For no other reason than being on a different side of the debate
If anyone else had posted that, you'd have ignored it.
Besides, it wasn't a question that had any bearing on the topic at hand. There are tons of <£8 games in the Steam sale right now. Perhaps it was meant for the Daily Deals thread?
Permabanned
You've even got to **** on my jokes :/ For no other reason than being on a different side of the debate
If anyone else had posted that, you'd have ignored it.
Besides, it wasn't a question that had any bearing on the topic at hand. There are tons of <£8 games in the Steam sale right now. Perhaps it was meant for the Daily Deals thread?
Not a different side of your opinion, as i stated earlier you made some good points
Im sat on the fence with a big tub of popcorn watching the traffic go around an around
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Soldato
Just to point out that this actually hasn't been proven at all...
There are some of us who believe that people buying grey market keys reduces the money generated by the game because of the lower prices.
There are some of us who believe that the increased number of sales from people buying grey market keys increases the money generated by the game despite the lower prices.
Ultimately "belief" is the only thing either side has to go on, as there are no figures, no control experiments, no evidence of any kind to support either side.
Personally, I'm erring on the side of "grey market reduces the money generated", purely because I don't believe the number of extra people buying copies of the game is enough to offset the lower prices.
In many cases, the grey market price is 50% or less of the UK price, meaning you'd need at least double the number of sales just to generate the same amount of money, and I find that level of increase (from people who would otherwise never buy the game) unlikely.
As I said though, that's just my "belief", as I have no evidence to back it up.
However, I do feel that when the next Call Of Duty Black Advanced Ghosts Warfare or UbisoftGame(tm) comes out and people moan about how generic it is, and how there is no innovation in gaming anymore, perhaps they should stop for a moment and reflect on maybe why that is...
Man of Honour
Agreed for the most part but CoD is a terrible example to back up your belief - the CoD series makes ridiculous amounts of money. The reason that it's terrible is that it is rehashed regularly by a company with Bobby Kotick for CEO. Masses of people then lap it up for whatever (baffling to me) reason.
Permabanned
Of course it's a loss, Piracy lets people who want a game get it without paying, If they could not pirate it they would have two choices go without or buy it and if they want it they would buy it so piracy costs sales.
I don't know how you come up with piracy matching key codes though.
The dev or whoever it is who deals with sales allows keys to be sold in bulk at a reduced price, when they do that they know that they just sold as an example 1,000 copies of the game and those copies will be part of the end sales number. They are willing to do it for whatever reasons they do it knowing full well it doesn't mean a miraculous 1000 extra copies of the game will be sold, They sell the codes knowing full well who sells them and who buys them so if you somehow consider buying legal key codes to be akin to pirating then you must have the same opinion of buying games in Steam sales etc. That's completely flawed reasoning.
Soldato
A pack of 12 cans of coke costs £3.55 in Tesco, that's 30p/can (actually 29.5, but lets round it up for simplicity)
A single can of coke costs 68p
So, question:
Say Tesco started opening up the multi-packs and selling the cans inside for 35p.
The cans do say on the side "From multipack, not for individual resale" or similar, so this would be against the manufacturers conditions, however, it's not illegal. So basically the same as grey keys.
Would people be OK with this? After all you're getting a 50% discount on on your can of coke.
Do we think that there would be over twice as many cans of coke sold?
Do we think there would be no effect on the manufacturer's revenue?
A single can of coke costs 68p
So, question:
Say Tesco started opening up the multi-packs and selling the cans inside for 35p.
The cans do say on the side "From multipack, not for individual resale" or similar, so this would be against the manufacturers conditions, however, it's not illegal. So basically the same as grey keys.
Would people be OK with this? After all you're getting a 50% discount on on your can of coke.
Do we think that there would be over twice as many cans of coke sold?
Do we think there would be no effect on the manufacturer's revenue?
Associate
Have any devs/publishers come out against key sites? or stated that they are suffering because of key sites? or is this just manufactured outrage?
Whilst i am no business expert I hardily think the 2 are comparable.
Physical goods have completely different cost calculations to take into account. Storage costs/logistics costs etc. to name a few.
Remember we are talking digital media here!
Soldato
Surely if they wanted us in the UK to pay e.g. £15 for a new release, they'd set the RRP at £15?
How does manufacturing/transporting/storing 12 individual cans of coke cost more than twice as much as manufacturing/transporting/storing 12 cans of coke in a single box?
Soldato
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I'm all for the cheaper websites,Games simply cost too much these days from the main places (steam,In shops etc),and devs are getting greedy and lazy.
Here is what annoys me in today's gaming industry.
1."early access" games been sold at full whack and never getting finished (mainly pc of course)
2.DLC DLC DLC..things that should have been in the game to start with...yet they have to squeeze that extra money out of us...its just greed.
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