And yet. I’ve seen a lot of people deeply upset about such codes no longer coming on a paper flyer in box, but instead requiring you claim them through the retailer or manufacturer website. Using an order number, component serial, or credit card from purchase, or other proof of purchase to get the codes. Along with expo dates and other attempts to make them less transferable. But none of those things are new. I bought a graphics card around 5 years ago that came with 3 games. It required registering the card with an AMD website to generate the codes.
Even as these things aren’t copies of the games, but basically manufacturer’s coupons. Tokens that can be exchanged for the games. I don’t see an issue with those being transferable, and I haven’t seen much in the way of industry complaints on that front.
But that doesn’t seem to be where most of these resold codes are coming from. If a dev provides a YouTuber 10 codes to distribute to their audience as a promotional thing. I don’t see how its OK for that guy to turn around and sell those coupons instead. And codes intended to provide access for coverage, or as a sponsorship quid pro quo likewise don’t seem to fit.
So even if the front line claim of what these sites are for is whats going on. It doesn’t nest too cleanly into the whole digital media should be as transferable as physical media position. Cause its not physical media, the actual copy of the game remains unclaimed in this situation. There are no discs involved, or even game files, its a coupon for a digital copy. And a lot of what’s out there isn’t something people have bought or paid money for.
You add into it the credit card fraud issues @Grey_Devil was on about. Which is apparently bad enough that Xbox live subscription codes and cards have become a black market currency. And the issues with stolen hacked and cracked codes and it looks a lot worse. Apparently there are ways to get at or generate codes before they’re distributed or claimed. Leading to people paying good money for codes that don’t work. When the seller is either sketchy, or a person who doesn’t know the code has been used already (say someone with one of those promo codes that was stolen and sold). Buyers turn to devs and publishers for restitution. And its even hit retailers of legitimate new codes. Like I dont think you can actually buy PC download codes through Amazon right now. They quietly suspended sales a while back, and a bunch of other retailers have openly done so because of issues with codes being stolen before they’re sold or claimed by the buyer.
It just doesn’t fit the easy model. These reselling sites are pretty fucking sketchy top to bottom and warnings not to buy from particular sites or particular games are incredibly common. Publishers can mitigate a bunch of different ways. But many of the ways of doing so disadvantage, or at least piss off, legit customers who have legitimate reasons and rights (in my opinion) to redistribute these codes. And not going after bad actors leaves a lot of other people holding the bag. Including legit customers and important retail partners.
So I think Rob’s suggestion of a portion of sales to the publisher makes sense. Not if you think of it as publishers being due a cut of secondary sales. As this is all shit they either handed out for free or they’ve already been paid for (however legitimately) and in no other area does a company get a cut of resale. But if you think of it as a fee for publisher side services in validating, replacing, unlocking codes for transfer and generally policing the codes themselves. Then you got a way forward that doesn’t involve just shutting the whole thing down.
When the rules in question include “don’t launder money” and “don’t sell fake and stolen goods” you kind of hit the limit of that.
