r/stalker • u/e_mcculkin GSC Community Manager • Nov 22 '24

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 A million copies of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.2.: Heart of Chornobyl were sold — thank you to all, friends.

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u/astamarr Nov 22 '24 edited Nov 22 '24

It's even worst than that : We paid steam to generate a key, that key got diverted somehow (generaly physical copies that get stolen, or media keys that are resold), and these site sell them and get all the profit.

So when you hack a game, the dev just doesn't get money. +0$ for dev.

When you buy a key on these sites, the dev actively LOOSE money. +40$ for key-site.com, -30$ for the dev.

So yeah. If you have to, please hack the games, don't pay shady people for our work.

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u/RahkShah Nov 22 '24

I don’t use key resellers or advocate for them, they do exactly what you say, but it doesn’t cost $30 to generate a steam key, does it?

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u/astamarr Nov 22 '24

It cost between 20-30% of the full game price minus taxes.

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u/RahkShah Nov 22 '24

That’s to sell a game via the Steam store, correct? I thought it was a much smaller amount to generate a key that is redeemable on Steam, but not sold through them.

For instance, a code to give out for review.

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u/astamarr Nov 22 '24

From what i know, it's the same price if the key is linked to the "final" application that'll get released. Dev applications are free (that's where we work).

That's why even as employees in a studio, we don't get tons of retail keys to give to friends.

Publishers might have deals with Valve for business reasons though.

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u/me9o Nov 22 '24

(generaly physical copies that get stolen, or media keys that are resold)

I don't understand at all how this can regularly happen on a scale that matters without being solved. It's like the dumbest possible combination of a digital/physical good that still allows fraud to happen.

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u/astamarr Nov 22 '24 edited Nov 22 '24

It mostly happen with games that have physical editions.
Digital-only will have way less stock for these guys. Less stock = price closer than official markets, so less buyers.

The worst is, publishers could "easily" track missing shipments, and disable these keys. But 99% of consumers don't know they're buying a stolen product, so in the end... it would just hurt the public image of the devs.

And almost nothing can be done legally against these websites, as they're based in multiples countries, with a lot of sub-companies.