• Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip
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    19 hours ago

    To make his gripes here clear, he shares a news story from 2016, where tinyBuild says it lost $450,000 due to key resellers

    The assumption being every one of those users would otherwise have bought the game at full price.

    As is the case with the same argument against piracy, most of them weren’t and you can’t really count those numbers as ‘lost sales’

    • Obituarykidney@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      That’s fair, but the point of piracy is that it’s free. This is just someone else making money off of their work now.

    • Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
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      18 hours ago

      Meh, for piracy I agree, but here the users were willing to fork over money for the product. So its not unreasonable to assume at least a significant part would buy it normally as well. Not all obviously, so it would be better to name it “up to xxxx $” or something like that.

      • gedfromgont@piefed.ca
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        18 hours ago

        Agreed but there is a price difference to take into account to. Likely the key resellers sold the key for much much cheaper than Steam, that’s the whole appeal, isn’t it? So maybe some people would have still bought it on Steam but others may have been put off by the price. Now if the game on Steam went on discount later for the same price as the key reseller sold it for, you could definitely argue for lost profit since no one would buy the key twice.