• These keys don’t magically appear from somewhere, developers need to generate them on Steam’s UI and give them to sellers
  • Maybe they sell them in bulk? It probably benefits them, since they can sell like 10.000 keys or sth at once, even if they are at a lower price
• I tried to search, and only found one case where the product being sold was bought with stolen credit cards.
  • But this can literally happen every time you buy sth from a random Amazon store… E.g. the mouse pad you’re buying can be from a larger shipment ordered using a stolen credit card
• Of course it’s better to pay the full price on e.g. Steam. But if you’re between buying the game from a key store, vs thinking of paying 10 times the price and always putting it off, I think the developers might even benefit because:
  1. they get money from the key seller, even if it’s less
  2. They probably benefit more from the larger online user base, more reviews, recommendations to friends, hype, etc etc
• If it was that shady and problematic, Steam would start banning users registering keys sold on CD key stores (e.g. I think Xbox already does this)
  • The only thing I kind of worry about (but not related to us as consumers for now), is that Steam probably currently doesn’t have a lot of benefit, since they’re losing a sell, and still need to provide the bandwith and online matchmaking etc; so I’m hoping instead of mayyyybe banning users in the future, they could like charge users or developers like €0.10 for each key used or sth

(Edit: I read “privacy” instead of “piracy” 😅 But most of those still stand)

But that is my point: downvoting the news will not keep people from using it; the people who will want to use it will find it anyway.

In any case, people still want to be aware about it, especially the people who disagree and downvoted it, so they should have upvoted instead, in order to have a proper discussion about the issue they supposedly care about.

Trying to bury it in downvotes to make it disappear from “Hot” does the exact opposite.

Wow, so many downvotes probably from people hating the news, this is not what the downvote button is for.

It’s about if a post or comment contributes or triggers interesting and engaging discussions.

Specifically for news articles, I find it important to upvote if I’m glad the article was posted at all, since it helps raise awareness about an issue etc, or if I probably wouldn’t have found the article posted on another platform, so maybe I wouldn’t have learned about it at all.

Even if it’s fake news, it’s better for me to be aware that misinformation in being spread about the issue, with people in the comments explaining why it’s fake with sources etc.

The upvote/downvote button is not a change.org petition for making a problem go away by disagreeing with it.