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Amazon is selling pirated digital copies of games
- Thread starter SteveWinwood
- Start date
Might just be that I was talking them prior to word having got around.That is weird, I didn't even have to say an additional word. I thought this had been widespread enough that they were just doing refunds as soon as asked now.
Edit: tbh, I don't care that much about my refund, I just want them to do something about this whole situation.
What I really want from Amazon:
1. Full refund for myself + anyone they sold pirated software
2. Apology + financial compensation for any dev who's games they have sold pirated versions of
3. Assurance that this will never happen again
4. Procedure for what to do if it happens again
This is 100% unacceptable and Amazon needs to act swiftly on this matter. This is hurting devs and facilitating the sale of pirated games, which is 100% illegal. Hopefully this will be resolved soon once someone who isn't a "read from the script" CSR gets involved.
The idea is this:
"It's not a physical item so it does not cost money to replicate it, so therefore it is not piracy."
Which makes his car analogy even stupider.
Well, at least I've got my refund for the copies that I purchased earlier today, though they seem to have left the games on my account despite me asking for them to be removed. I can't say that I'm wholly convinced that they're going to do much in the way of the follow-up that I suggested.
Uninstalled; perhaps we'll see legitimate deals for Steam copies before too long...
Uninstalled; perhaps we'll see legitimate deals for Steam copies before too long...
But these were sold by them. I'm definitely going to second guess buying digital games from them if they can't guarantee the stuff they sell directly is legitimate or not. These games could've been filled with malware or worse and no one would've even suspected a thing. It would be one thing if it was clearly from a third party seller, but from Amazon themselves!? That's not good.
Well, maybe we already have. Grey Goo was featured in the initial thread. It's being sold for just $1.99. It's a legit Steam code with it.
Or maybe Grey Goo could just have a crazy sale right now, which made last night so confusing for people. There was no way of knowing if what was a legitimate sale, price error, or something else.
Bro, I don't want to be an ass, but you're wrong.
He is not selling a disc that he bought. He bought a digital copy of the game, 1 purchase. And is duplicating it infinitely.
In your car example, you cant duplicate the car, can you?
Can you buy 1 car, change it, and then copy it and sell it forever?
No.
Its like if I took the latest Drake music cd, and added an extra song on, and burned 50000 copies and sold it.
"Herp a derp! Its not piracy because I added a song!!!1111"
Like, come on man.
I think it's been mentioned already but Amazon has been selling knock-offs of physical items for years as "legit" without any real checks on the sellers, and a lot of them end up passing into the "Fulfilled by Amazon" umbrella. It's gotten really bad, to the point where it's becoming common knowledge, but it's literally been a known issue for years and Amazon has taken no real steps to correct it.
Maybe it'll never hit critical mass, but something like this DRM-free reselling is a serious exposure of their policies, and I've already stopped buying anything "cheap" from Amazon because as likely as not it will be a cheaper version of the cheap thing I wanted. It's not worth saving $3 when you have the thing break instantly or not work or worse, and then try to deal with the exceedingly random customer service. They basically incorporated the worst parts of eBay into their store.
Maybe it'll never hit critical mass, but something like this DRM-free reselling is a serious exposure of their policies, and I've already stopped buying anything "cheap" from Amazon because as likely as not it will be a cheaper version of the cheap thing I wanted. It's not worth saving $3 when you have the thing break instantly or not work or worse, and then try to deal with the exceedingly random customer service. They basically incorporated the worst parts of eBay into their store.
The key distinction is that there's only one car involved that transaction. With a GOG game, it's all data that can be duplicated infinitely. You could buy one copy of a game from GOG, then sell it a million times. That's why they were only charging $3. There wouldn't be any profit margin in that unless only one copy of the game was purchased from GOG or pirated.
As for people who bought this... what did you expect? You didn't find it suspicious that relatively new games were being sold for $3 when they weren't available anywhere else for anywhere near that price? You either knew it was shady or you thought it was a price mistake and wanted to exploit it before it got fixed. It's remarkable how people can condemn piracy while essentially stealing products during obvious price mistakes.
Yeah, I'm not buying that. Grey Goo is an old game that's been bundled multiple times and seen significant discounts in the past. It being $2 is a lot more feasible than Frostpunk, a new game that has never been bundled or discounted below $20, being $3. That said, if the Grey Goo keys are being sold by a third-party, they're probably bundle keys.
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Wait, are you comparing a single physical product with one that can be duplicated endlessly with no further resources?
This thread immediately brought to mind this week's episode. I'm done with Amazon, especially after listening to that. The site is just a literal garbage dump at this point and highly unreliable.
The episode in question, for any curious people:
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player
You make this sound like a negative thing—I don't see anything wrong with it as long as the actual games are being sold with the permission of the copyright holder. Why redo work?
You don't own any software that you buy, you own a license to use it. This is typically non-transferrable, so you cannot re-sell it - though I do think that people should have that right, and platforms such as Steam/GOG should allow it.
But that is not what's happening here. It isn't someone buying a game from GOG and reselling it on Amazon, it's someone buying a game on GOG, repackaging it, and then selling an unlimited number of copies.
I just hope this doesn't discourage any developers from releasing DRM-free games, because it's no different from someone selling a cracked version of the game on Amazon.
I would hope that they are at least sourcing these games from GOG or the publisher/developer directly, and not someone impersonating them.
Many older games sold on Steam are the "GOG version" too, but are sourced from the correct developer/publisher.
So long as that is permitted in their contract with GOG, there's no issue with them doing this.
I expect at least one of the developers would have come out and said something about the Twitch Prime games if someone impersonating them was being paid instead.
I believe that Ubisoft have done that before with their own games too.
Many older DRM schemes don't work on modern versions of Windows (blocked for security reasons, for example) and the company no longer has a DRM-free executable for the game.
It's not their work to sell.
Unless it is open-source and licensed appropriately, I don't think many modders would be happy for developers to steal their work and resell it without any financial compensation.
It doesn't matter if it's freely available; that changes when someone else tries selling it.
As far as I am aware, Amazon doesn't sell any Apple products. Only third-parties do.
The games in question are downloaded directly from Amazon and then launch an installer.
I think Amazon can get away with whatever they want, unfortunately. Every single day there are more examples of the law not meaning anything as long as you have money.
Yes, that should be fine.
This is for reselling repackaged GOG copies. It's a separate installer, not a key.
The games industry is large enough to sue Amazon into not selling these unofficial products but they could be slow to react because most of the biggest products won't be affected by this piracy.
Any value in contacting Trading Standards? I've never come across a situation where they may be relevant before, but this seems like it'd be in their wheelhouse.
Edit: Obviously not applicable to Amazon US, but the Surviving Mars copy is on Amazon UK.
OP
OP
GOG would've been exploited to shit back in the 90s. Everyone would've been selling you CDs with GOG games.
Okay I've gotta ask, because I notice some users do this a lot. Why are you posting your own tweet here? You could just easily post normally. Or copy paste the text and image. It just seems like you're trying to shill your own Twitter.
As someone who posts a lot of Twitter links, I have to say embedding tweets is way easier than copy/pasting text and image, and if the info is exactly the same as the tweet, why not post the tweet instead of writing a post?
Mainly so people can (if they so chose) see the context of the whole twitter thread, and anyone looking at this post can in the future see any updates or followups posted to twitter.
Isn't that kind of why twitter embeds are supported?
My tweets were already in the OP.
What's cool about GOG games is when you use their installer it advertises GOG.com and other GOG games. GOG pretty much anticipated their installers would get distributed this way, and they've even said there are people who only found out about GOG after they pirated GOG installers, found the site, and started buying games there.
It's a canned response. I believe digital games fall under the same category as digital music when it comes to customer service on Amazon.
If people really want Amazon to do anything about this, the news needs be headlined on prominent news sites like IGN, Kotaku, Gamespot, etc.
Lol I missed the boilerplate customer service response from Amazon. I got something similar and 5$ credit after I bought some crappy android software from them. Most people take their refund and their 5$ certificate and go, because life is too short and Amazon isn't exactly trying to fix shit unless lots of similarly aggrieved people get involved. Like what happened when they discontinued a paid version of TuneIn for a newer paid version of TuneIn, trying to force everyone to use the new Sports Network sponsored version.
yeah - I don't think yelling at low level customer service employees that most likely can't do anything besides forward you to a supervisor is productive. word would have to actually reach the media for this to have any effect on a company as large as amazon
In my follow up communication, where I got escalated to a supervisor (again), I gave them some specific questions I wanted answered, and made it clear that I'd be sharing those answers with games media/social media etc.
They might not do anything, but in that case I'd like to get a statement from them, from someone in a relative position of authority, admitting that they won't do anything.
Hopefully they just do right by their customers and by the developer's who's games they are selling pirated versions of, but if not I'm going to do what I can to ensure that they feel the pressure.
I emphatically disagree. GOG didn't invent DRM free games, you can pirate a wide variety of games (including those not on GOG). Amazon could simply opt to not sell pirated software.
Their policies do not allow for "unlimited resales", and this is as clear a breach of copyright infringement as you could expect. Amazon are in the wrong here, not GOG.
I would have far less of an issue with this if Amazon weren't lending these pirated games an appearance of credibility. People kind of assume that stuff sold on Amazon, especially when not through a third party seller, is what it is described to be.
DRM has proven to be worthless.
As has been pointed out in this thread there's nothing to stop someone doing the exact same thing with a non-GOG game by just packaging it up with a crack and then submitting that to Amazon.
False.
DRM is a prevention tools, it doesn't give any legal protection. It is all about the terms and conditions when you purchase software, which both Steam and GOG have. As other pointed out, it is possible to crack and repack the game files even with DRM. Steam DRM is absolutely worthless as the game will be cracked on the launch day if it doesn't use additional measures.
DRM-free copies still need unique identification to access updates and online features.
Oooh, thanks for the explanation. I never would have guessed that.
The devs really should start filling DMCA notices if they haven't already. This is actually the intended purpose of those.