"In the example of G2A, if your game at the discount rate for someone from Russia costs half of the MSRP in the US, make it that. "Just make it super easy to make a snap decision," he says. Nichiporchik advocates "more aggressive regional pricing" among indie developers, where even neighbouring countries are treated as distinct business opportunities. If the alternative is that a given user turns to piracy or the black market, then even a single dollar earned still represents a profit where none would exist otherwise. The emphasis for developers, he says, should be to ensure that those people aren't alienated from legitimate commerce. It's part of my past, and I get where the people that drive the economies of these key resellers come from." "The average salary in my country was $120 a month. I had no money to buy legitimate games," he says. Indeed, growing up in Latvia, Nichiporchik was one of them. Nichiporchik is adamant that the price of games should be no lower than can be achieved by legal means, but he also acknowledges that there are consumers who will use a service like G2A to avoid being priced out of the market. A G2A reshaped in the way Nichiporchik describes may not be able to offer that same low price, leaving the door open for another marketplace that can. To a certain extent, a marketplace where game keys are resold at substantially below the going rate - Tinybuild estimates that the $200,000 in G2A sales would have earned $450,000 at the prices it set on Steam - is legitimised by consumers, who are content to take the better deal without spending too much time thinking about how that price is reached, or whether the money end up in the pocket of the game's creator. It seems unlikely that G2A will ever retreat so far from its established business model, but even if it did the problem would surely resurface elsewhere. We have to do something different, and each time it gets more and more difficult" "Essentially, in this industry you need to do magic tricks. It did move a little in the right direction when they announced their developer program, where you can get 10% of the sales.īut I'm like, 'You can get 10% of the sale of stolen goods?' It's like becoming a partner in crime." They just said, 'Yeah, hey, it can happen.' I wasn't happy with that at all. "They never acknowledged the facilitation of the grey market economy. We're going to shut it all down, we're going to become a legit store, we're going to partner with all of these legitimate companies, and everything is going to be great.' The only way I feel they can fix this is by coming out in the open and saying, 'Here's a problem. "It's huge, and they're making a ton of money. The week following the publication of that initial blog post was a flurry of statements from both sides, what Nichiporchik describes as a "political-ish press release fight." Tinybuild's stance had an impact - certain YouTubers backed out of sponsorship deals, and Humble Bundle reiterated its own policies around fraudulent transactions - but G2A's own response fell short of what Nichiporchik believed the situation demanded. Nichiporchik has no regrets over highlighting the problem, but he claims to be less than satisfied with the way the situation played out. Or what if you're actually wrong? The reason we had to call out is because they supplied us with the data, and then said they wouldn't pay." "This industry is very small, so it's always extremely scary to call someone out," Nichiporchik says, several months on. It's part of my past, and I get where the people that drive the economies of these key resellers come from" A lack of even the most basic checks meant that G2A's model was, to use Nichiporchik's description, " a black market economy." Much of this money had come from keys purchased with stolen credit cards, Nichiporchik said, meaning that not only was not a single dollar making it back to the developer, but the developer was also being hit with chargebacks when the fraud was discovered. In June this year, Nichiporchik did just that with G2A, a popular online marketplace for the resale of Steam keys, which had hosted around 25,000 sales of Tinybuild games for some $200,000. Copycat design is just one of many issues that indie developers face in this ultra-competitive industry, and Tinybuild is clearly unafraid to meet those issues head on. This isn't the first time Nichiporchik has felt moved to speak out in this manner. Nichiporchik issued a copyright takedown, and explained his reasoning in a typically candid blog post. There were glaring similarities, he said, between N-Dream's browser game Runorama and Speedrunners, the sleeper hit that helped to establish Tinybuild as a rising force in indie publishing. Earlier this week, Tinybuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik called copycat.
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