Man of Honour
I wouldn't hold your breath
Okay. Perhaps a better choice would be "into the next phase of the cycle"?
Steam prices! Grey key sites! and the I love/hate developers thread - Enter if you dare!
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Okay. Perhaps a better choice would be "into the next phase of the cycle"?
Soldato
Good luck with that.
Incidentally I always paid full price for games when I was younger, as cheaper keys werent avaliable, and as a result when I took a gamble on a game that might not be of good quality and it turned out not to be, I felt more jaded than I do now.
Also paid full price two days ago for Xcom. Why? I wanted to play it, its by a dev team who have a good track record with previous games and oh, it wasn't £60 ******* sheets for half a game.
Man of Honour
Indeed. I actually don't use grey market sites much myself and for smaller/indie devs I try to support them as much as possible. However, I have an issue with 'having an issue' with people choosing to spend their money how they wish.
Anecdotal evidence for what I've been saying...
One thing I miss from those days (the 90s) is how common demos were. They were the norm; a game not having a demo was seen as a warning that the game was terrible.
In fact, talking of XCom, I played the UFO (Mythos) demo for about 7 days solid, whilst I waited for the full game to come through the post
By contrast it seems that devs aren't interested in demos any more. Probably because so many people are pre-ordering on the strength of hype alone. Why release a demo, and risk putting people off your game, when you can just create a massive hype train, and sucker many millions into pre-ordering?
^ But i still fail to see what is wrong with buying something at a low price in one country and selling it to make a profit in another. It is called capitalism and whether you like it or not, that is what is going on at some point with 99% of the goods you all buy.
I honestly fail to see why people are so up in arms about it
I have raised this twice in this thread now and still haven't had a reasonable answer from those against grey keys.
Should no one be allowed to source things cheaply from another country and sell them elsewhere for a profit?
If not we have a problem as it is basically how the global economy works at the moment
Associate
Been dipping in & out of this thread for a bit and sorry if any of my points have been laid out already, but this total line of thought is crazy.... that the grey market for some reason is a major problem for games companies.
Now everything I'm talking about is surrounding sites such as CDKEYS etc, I'm not talking about VPN tricks but i will cover that at the end!
Simply if games companies had that big a problem with this style of market they would very quickly shut it down, as the CD keys we all use not only come from them but can & have been locked to countries never mind regions in the past and it would be easy for them to put a check back in place that revoked your key if found to be from a different region,
The business model for "digital games" has turned the whole games market model on its head, back in the day the games company made millions of copies of a game and sold them, it cost money just to make the disks, so selling them cheap hit profits big time & if they only made about 20% after everyone takes a share in the chain that's a big issue,
Now we have millions of people renting the same copy of the game, no disk, no manual & no box, with the only supply chain the digital store front & in most cases no supply chain as its on their digital store front, so that 20% profit of the past is more like 80%+ after factoring bandwidth costs of the downloads.
With PC gaming being almost all digital these days, the price of games should be lower to factor in the higher profits of that model, lets not forget the games market is worth near on 100 billion dollars, not really showing signs of a problem.
The reason grey markets are doing so well on PC is a simple market reaction to the price point of games & nothing else, even after digital has reached this level of saturation on PC (got to be 90%+) we are still paying near to console price and in some cases they are trying to sell it at the same price & consoles are no where near the level of PC for digital sales & they can trade in.....
Remember the digital download system is one of the few things that everyone can buy but nobody owns, not many companies can run that model but i bet they would all love to.
A simple set of thoughts for anyone who thinks grey market is an issue
Do you only shop at the manufacturers shops for the things you buy?,
Do you often try to find the cheapest place to purchase your goods?
Have you used online markets like "the bay" to purchase things due to the price being lower than the local shop/RRP?
If you answer
No,
Yes
Yes
This is no different to that...there is only 1 possible issue with grey market and its not an issue for the person from the UK to think about & that's VAT. As its the responsibility of the seller to make sure the VAT is part of the sale not the person buying unless they ask you to tick a box or something to that effect, in that case if you say pay no tax you are breaking the law.
Now onto VPN tricks.....which to be honest is a bit more black market than grey as this throws a moral & legal questions into the mix...
by its very nature it's a level of fraud, "YOU" are using a system to gain access to something not normally open to you to gain an advantage, in this case a money saving one, by your action you are avoiding paying the VAT & often its seen as a worse crime to cheat a computer than a human...the moral question for you is, do you think yourself a fraudster by doing this?
Now do the key sites like CDKEYS commit fraud to obtain the keys you buy, i don't know, if they where I'm sure the games companies would be able to shut it down, when i buy a key from them, its in good faith and i pay in pounds and they should be making sure the VAT is paid.
Do i pay in doritos money for EA games? maybe, do i think the UK tax man is going to come after anyone over it? no i don't, but that's your call to make
Now everything I'm talking about is surrounding sites such as CDKEYS etc, I'm not talking about VPN tricks but i will cover that at the end!
Simply if games companies had that big a problem with this style of market they would very quickly shut it down, as the CD keys we all use not only come from them but can & have been locked to countries never mind regions in the past and it would be easy for them to put a check back in place that revoked your key if found to be from a different region,
The business model for "digital games" has turned the whole games market model on its head, back in the day the games company made millions of copies of a game and sold them, it cost money just to make the disks, so selling them cheap hit profits big time & if they only made about 20% after everyone takes a share in the chain that's a big issue,
Now we have millions of people renting the same copy of the game, no disk, no manual & no box, with the only supply chain the digital store front & in most cases no supply chain as its on their digital store front, so that 20% profit of the past is more like 80%+ after factoring bandwidth costs of the downloads.
With PC gaming being almost all digital these days, the price of games should be lower to factor in the higher profits of that model, lets not forget the games market is worth near on 100 billion dollars, not really showing signs of a problem.
The reason grey markets are doing so well on PC is a simple market reaction to the price point of games & nothing else, even after digital has reached this level of saturation on PC (got to be 90%+) we are still paying near to console price and in some cases they are trying to sell it at the same price & consoles are no where near the level of PC for digital sales & they can trade in.....
Remember the digital download system is one of the few things that everyone can buy but nobody owns, not many companies can run that model but i bet they would all love to.
A simple set of thoughts for anyone who thinks grey market is an issue
Do you only shop at the manufacturers shops for the things you buy?,
Do you often try to find the cheapest place to purchase your goods?
Have you used online markets like "the bay" to purchase things due to the price being lower than the local shop/RRP?
If you answer
No,
Yes
Yes
This is no different to that...there is only 1 possible issue with grey market and its not an issue for the person from the UK to think about & that's VAT. As its the responsibility of the seller to make sure the VAT is part of the sale not the person buying unless they ask you to tick a box or something to that effect, in that case if you say pay no tax you are breaking the law.
Now onto VPN tricks.....which to be honest is a bit more black market than grey as this throws a moral & legal questions into the mix...
by its very nature it's a level of fraud, "YOU" are using a system to gain access to something not normally open to you to gain an advantage, in this case a money saving one, by your action you are avoiding paying the VAT & often its seen as a worse crime to cheat a computer than a human...the moral question for you is, do you think yourself a fraudster by doing this?
Now do the key sites like CDKEYS commit fraud to obtain the keys you buy, i don't know, if they where I'm sure the games companies would be able to shut it down, when i buy a key from them, its in good faith and i pay in pounds and they should be making sure the VAT is paid.
Do i pay in doritos money for EA games? maybe, do i think the UK tax man is going to come after anyone over it? no i don't, but that's your call to make
Soldato
One thing I miss from those days (the 90s) is how common demos were. They were the norm; a game not having a demo was seen as a warning that the game was terrible.
In fact, talking of XCom, I played the UFO (Mythos) demo for about 7 days solid, whilst I waited for the full game to come through the post
By contrast it seems that devs aren't interested in demos any more. Probably because so many people are pre-ordering on the strength of hype alone. Why release a demo, and risk putting people off your game, when you can just create a massive hype train, and sucker many millions into pre-ordering?
Quite, but then being let down by the hype, lack of demos, the fake gameplay vids at E3, review embargoes pre launch, preorder specials is exactly the reason I'd rather pay half the amount on a key when I'm dubious about the quality. SWBF? I could potentially have dropped £98 on that, and its awful.
It is, but then like you say lack of demo's wise I don't feel like big studios can get away with charging £60-70 per game. On the other hand, if I had tried it before hand and loved it, personally I wouldn't be bothered about getting it at full price at all, and I think others here feel the same.
I have raised this twice in this thread now and still haven't had a reasonable answer from those against grey keys.
Should no one be allowed to source things cheaply from another country and sell them elsewhere for a profit?
If not we have a problem as it is basically how the global economy works at the moment
It's not illegal. It's just shady.
It's a loophole. A bit like tax avoidance, if /everybody/ did it, the loophole would have to be closed.
I'm good at terrible analogies, so here's another. If an OAP bought up 20 concert tickets at OAP concessionary prices, then resold them on eBay for a good mark-up, but still less than non-concessionary prices. Well, it would be exploiting the pricing for OAPs.
Whilst you might applaud her for legally making some money, the OAP tickets are priced to let OAPs enjoy the entertainment for a bit less than working people; it's not there to let them make money from it.
But my opinion is not fact
Soldato
It's not illegal. It's just shady.
It's a loophole. A bit like tax avoidance, if /everybody/ did it, the loophole would have to be closed.
I'm good at terrible analogies, so here's another. If an OAP bought up 20 concert tickets at OAP concessionary prices, then resold them on eBay for a good mark-up, but still less than non-concessionary prices. Well, it would be exploiting the pricing for OAPs.
Whilst you might applaud her for legally making some money, the OAP tickets are priced to let OAPs enjoy the entertainment for a bit less than working people; it's not there to let them make money from it.
But my opinion is not fact
You're right, but thats why tickets and stuff are usually non-transferrable, to cut out this grey market.
In effect the devs, steam and other distributors are doing nothing to combat it, and its been going on for years now, which is why personally I don't think it can really be harming devs and such quite as much.
If it was, it'd have been stopped years ago, plus you'd have devs going mad about it. Not one company failure yet has been put down to grey key sales AFAIK.
It's not illegal. It's just shady.
It's a loophole. A bit like tax avoidance, if /everybody/ did it, the loophole would have to be closed.
I'm good at terrible analogies, so here's another. If an OAP bought up 20 concert tickets at OAP concessionary prices, then resold them on eBay for a good mark-up, but still less than non-concessionary prices. Well, it would be exploiting the pricing for OAPs.
Whilst you might applaud her for legally making some money, the OAP tickets are priced to let OAPs enjoy the entertainment for a bit less than working people; it's not there to let them make money from it.
But my opinion is not fact
But the global economy is based on buying things cheap and selling them on for a profit elsewhere.
No one has answered me on this yet but hopefully you will. Do you make sure absolutely everything you buy is bought from the authorised retailer for the manufacturer of the product?
Foxeye isn't bothered about non-transferrable clauses. He buys Nvidia bundled game codes cheap on ebay
Everything I buy is from mainstream UK retailers.
We've already said that physical goods aren't really comparable to digital goods. With physical goods you hardly ever buy from the manufacturer, because they don't have the warehouses and infrastructure, or local retail outlet stores. Normally they don't run their own shops or sell direct.
I don't buy services from non-UK companies unless it's a multi-national with a UK subsidiary (eg EDF energy or Amazon.UK or whoever).
I don't import stuff (don't make expensive purchases which would warrant it either). Don't buy from Jersey-based companies, Isle of Man or whatever.
Does that answer your question? I'm pretty sure that the above makes me a normal consumer in this country. I don't think everybody is importing their TVs from Bangladesh, or diverting their phone calls through an operator in India.
Most consumers in this country will be buying the vast majority of their goods from UK retailers.
As do I, except for when it is cheaper, and just as convenient to buy overseas.
You still didn't really answer about the authorised retailer bit. Often you will find Amazon are not an "authorised" retailer for certian manufacturers but still sell their stuff for example.
But again we're talking about physical goods, which don't compare well.
What is the cost to import a physical product, vs the cost to import a key code over the internet?
If two companies import a product manufactured in Taiwan, and one manages to reduce the cost of importation, and hence sells it cheaper... that's entirely fair, is it not?
But again, these grey market key sellers aren't cheaper because they're more efficient, or because they've reduced the cost of importing the goods. They're buying codes sold by the developer in one market, marking them up, and under-cutting the developer in a more lucrative market, where the developer sells the same product at a higher price.
They aren't actually adding any value, or out-competing the developer by reducing their costs. They're simply buying low and selling high, but in a very shady way.
It's not comparable to making efficiency saving with physical goods.
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Soldato
but its not shady!
They say where they source the keys, they pay the relevant tax in their 'home' countries, and neither HMRC is stopping them nor is the dev attempting to stop them.
They aren't hiding the source, valve, devs and other distributors are aware of them and happy to sell to them, wheres the shady part????
Because if everyone did it, they'd pull the plug. They aren't going to accept all future sales from the whole UK demographic having Day1 50% discount
That much should be self-evident.In effect, the grey market sellers are likely to become a victim of their own success. The more people use them, the more likely it is that in future all games will be region locked.
What is shady about it? They are hugely transparent about what they do.
CDKEYS.com say on their website:
"Why are your products so cheap? Our management team have over thirty years of combined experience within the industry with an extensive network of suppliers and contacts from which to source products. We buy from all corners of the globe to ensure the cheapest possible prices and as we only sell products in digital form we're able to make significant savings on postage and related expenses - we then pass these reductions on to you, which ensures our pricing is the most competitive around!"
I am sorry, but if they can legally source me a cheap key, good on them. .
Because if everyone did it, they'd pull the plug. They aren't going to accept all future sales from the whole UK demographic having Day1 50% discount
In effect, the grey market sellers are likely to become a victim of their own success. The more people use them, the more likely it is that in future all games will be region locked.
No, a more likely scenarios is that the game makers will realise what people are willing to spend on a non sellable cd key for a new game. It isn't £40-£50. It isn't even £30-£40. It is very much more like £20-£25.
I remember even recently getting boxed copies of games on pre order for ~£20 - £25 from even places like Game.
Heh. You're asking CDKeys if CDKeys is a legit business. And you're taking their word as proof
I have a goodpyramid schemeinvestment opportunity if you're interested...
You have very odd logic. You have been complaining that the problem is them buying codes overseas and selling them cheaper to us and they literally say themselves "We buy from all corners of the globe to ensure the cheapest possible prices ", yet you think they are lying....when they admit to doing exactly as you have described.
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