G2A pays Factorio developer $40k over illegally obtained game keys

How is that different than someone selling products on eBay or Amazon that were purchased with stolen cards?

That's actually way too high a price for a windows 10 OEM licence. You can get entirely legitimate ones on eBay for <7€.

The reason they are so cheap is that EU laws protect the consumer right to resell things they purchase, and EU feels very strongly that this extends to software licenses. Most pre-built computers come with a bundled OEM Windows, which any EU resident can legally sell. Since a lot of computers bought by businesses, schools, hospitals, etc also contain Win 10 Home licenses, which are promptly replaced by whatever OS the site actually uses, and then immediately sold to someone reselling them, there is a healthy marketplace that has pushed license prices very low.

Yup. I grab all my Office keys from eBay too. Guess I'll look at G2A as well.

I should have been more specific and said 'for traffic generated by the developer', ie. even when they have the Steam widget on their website.

I don't know what you mean. Someone who wanted a key would have to buy one that wasn't fraudulently obtained, thus supporting the developer. The seller in fraudulent transaction would still have to eat the chargeback fee, but it would be a better overall result than now where the fraudster profits. Eventually they would do this quick enough that it would become pointless to attempt the fraud, thus reducing the chargebacks.

Only one developer, who only develops one game, applied for the audit/refund process.

It's interesting, they actually might not.

I've always assumed that since I have money I can just walk into a hotel and pay "room rate" on the spot unless they're actually full, because why wouldn't they take the money? The advertised room rates are high, but in a pinch it's much better than sleeping under a bridge.

And then one night (after midnight) I arrive at my pre-booked hotel for the night and as I'm checking in an obviously drunk person in a tuxedo staggers in with a half-full bottle. He wants a room, he has cash, and I stopped for a moment to see if that works how I'd expect. It does not, the night staff tell the man their hotel is "full" (it's a quiet weekday night, fat chance) and so it's impossible to give the drunk man a room. The man tries arguing, displaying the cash, it makes no difference and he is escorted out of the hotel. Interesting.

Nothing that they said is wrong. The Big Four are a huge problem, and it's particularly interesting that the US hasn't done anything about it. Maybe not under its current (extremely corrupt) administration, but some of the previous ones seemed like they were at least sometimes shooting straight. This would for example, definitely be the kind of thing I'd expect an alternate universe President Warren to "have a plan" for.

London has an obvious excuse, three of the four are legally based there (the Big Four are all organised as groups of franchised firms, to reduce overall legal exposure, but they each have a group HQ and three of those HQs are in London). Even if you are quite sure they're committing billions of dollars of fraud (which I can't prove but you'd think a government might have the resources) some of those billions go into the UK economy via these HQs, so driving them away seems like a bad idea. The US doesn't even have that incentive, any replacement audit system would also spend a lot of money in New York and Washington as the current one does, but it could hardly be any more corrupt, so why not intervene?

I'm pretty sure the comment you are replying to is talking about the group/company/person that runs the bundle. They ask for 20,000 keys, sell 150 legitimately, and then sell the rest of the 20,000 on the gray/black market. Reselling a key you bought legitimately isn't the issue here AFAICT.

I think the point is that the people -running- the bundle are reselling all of the keys that didn’t sell as part of a bundle. Not the end customer who purchased a bundle.

The first is probably Fraud by False Representation if you do it in England and Wales. ("Made a false representation, dishonestly, knowing that the representation was or might be untrue or misleading, with intent to make a gain for himself or another, to cause loss to another or to expose another to risk of loss.")

Is it the same price everywhere in the world though?

Not OP. A bit out of the game but when I was watching streamers a few years ago Buildcraft was pretty popular.

https://www.mod-buildcraft.com

Another comment mentioned this modpack:

https://www.feed-the-beast.com

You can start at /r/feedthebeast on reddit. Modern industrial-theme-modded minecraft has some massive and well crafted modpacks.

If you want a concrete insane example, try Project Ozone 3.

As a game player probably look at mod packs rather than individual mods to change up the game. The best packs put together a bunch of different mods, tweak the resulting balance of the game and might offer a "quest" system if you're the kind of person who needs to be told what your objective is rather than making their own way. Feed The Beast linked by others is the best way to find such packs these days, they make their own but also offer others.

Somewhat like Factorio, most modded Minecraft assumes you already know what you're doing so it can be pretty daunting for a beginner. Obstacles that come to mind (but I'm far from a beginner and may well have forgotten some):

JEI ("Just Enough Items" and predecessors including "Not Enough Items", "Too Many Items") knows all the "things" that exist in your game, and usually how to get them or what to do with them, but it mostly assumes you actually knew and were just looking for a reminder. I know I can probably make an electrum ingot by melting gold and silver ore in this TiC smeltery and waiting for the alloy to form, and technically the JEI says that, but chances of a beginner going from "I need an electrum ingot" to "I need to build a TiC smeltery" are almost zero without help.

Some "vanilla" Minecraft trivia takes on a great significance in most mod packs. Knowing how to make a "Cobblegen" (a structure with lava and water which produces one or more cobblestone blocks that when mined are replaced each time) and a "Mob farm" (a place where enemies are endlessly created and, perhaps later, killed automatically in order to get the "loot" they drop) are things you'll do in modded Minecraft that you may never have needed in casual play of the original game.

If it doesn't hurt your enjoyment, try watching a "Let's Play" of a pack you think you might be interested in. The nature of random seeds and different preferences means you will end up doing something different than what you see unlike in a linear narrative game, but you can pay attention to how the gamer you watch deals with problems you had, and you will likely see techniques you want to imitate or clues to how something you didn't understand works.

As to specific mods though (packs will usually advertise which mods are used, though the pack might change how they work or when you get access to them):

AE: Applied Energistics (these days most commonly Applied Energistics 2): What if instead of storing things in chests you had a storage network to keep everything in, so you can type "Gold" hit tab and see all the gold things you own? What if this network could also be used to automate crafting, now you can type "Gold" and it'll offer things you don't have yet but the network knows how to make from what you do have? Doesn't building and debugging this network sound like fun too?

RFTools: Everything should clearly be powered by electricity. Smelting, obviously, but also potion manufacture, planting and harvesting food and wood, creating and destroying enemies, making entire dimensions to explore...

Integrated Dynamics: Obviously under the hood Minecraft is just a bunch of data you could program. Some mods expose parameters (an RFTools machine with 4059RF that needs 5000RF to do something is exactly 941RF short) but many do not, however those details must exist. ID lets you dive down there. e.g. I have built a Predicate (a boolean function that given an input returns either TRUE or FALSE) that decides whether my Astral Sorcery crystals are "finished" or not and then that Predicate is installed in a machine that pulls TRUE crystals out of the liquid starlight they're bathed in for further processing. Astral Sorcery isn't a technical mod, but ID doesn't care, there's a data structure and so you can write a predicate to examine the structure and make decisions.

Extreme Reactors (previously Big Reactors): Just the fun "optimisation" part of managing a fission power plant without the explosions and deadly radioactivity (if you want those other mods can do that, I find dying in an explosion to be unsatisfying but each to their own).

For modded minecraft, you're looking at finding a good modpack. Modpacks are often built around a handful of mods (sometimes even a single mod can define the feel of a pack), but will invariably contains dozens or hundreds of mods. Just configuring everything to work together can be a major challenge; there's a similar amount of work and creativity that goes into curating a modpack as a mod.

As for what modpack, I'm not sure. I haven't played in a couple years and the scene moves fast, and plus, there's a lot of different types of packs. For example:

Some packs are tech focused, and expect you to start from sticks and mud and grind your way up the tech tree to create an enormous factory dedicated towards building a massive fusion reactor.

Others are magic focused, and instead want you to build elaborate alchemical labs, summoning circles, or similar.

Skyblock packs start you in a vast empty void, often on a single block of dirt, or a 3x3 block of stone, or on the branches of a single tree or similar, and expect you to build from there up to a "normal" endgame; generally there are special mechanics to help you do this (like being able to place barrels to collect water when it rains, or being able to sieve gravel looking for nuggets of ores), and often a quest system to reward you with key items by completing certain challenges. There's more work to do (you have to build the island from scratch, one block at a time, and there's always risk of falling off), but you have more control than if you just found a flat-ish plain and started building huts.

Some packs are "kitchen sink" packs that just have every mod the curator can find and get mostly working, focusing on changing the game as MUCH as possible.

Some packs are narrowly focused on a theme or mechanic, or have an actual story line. Crash Landing (https://ftbwiki.org/Crash_Landing) is a bit old now (but should still work fine!) and could EASILY have been a standalone game; it was a great story of trying to survive in a hellish desert after your ship crash landed and is one of my top 50 favourite games period really.

Some packs focus on making things hard. Their tech trees are aggressively deep, and your starting tools are sharply limited. These often contain GregTech (if tech focused).

Some packs focus on allowing creativity. Some mods let you create extremely elaborate base designs and decorations, or craft enormously powerful custom armor.

I'd recommend looking around the Feed The Beast (FTB) subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthebeast/), installing the FTB launcher, trying out a couple recent packs, look at what packs people are chatting about, etc.

I haven't played any of these, but based on how things worked previously:

Direwolf20 1.12 Pack will be a middle of the road pack, and a popular streamer (Direwolf20) will have a very extensive lets play series of videos about it, so it's easy to get started.

FTB Stoneblock 2 is a reverse skyblock (you start in an infinite world of stone) with lots of quests and tweaks to make that work.

FTB Builders Paradise is more about building cool stuff than grinding out crazy tech trees.

FTB Continuum is just about grinding out crazy tech trees.

FTB Interactions is meant to BIG, well integrated, and since it has Gregtech, probably a bit slow.

There are many other packs (some of the most popular packs are NOT official FTB packs, but it's easier to find info on the current FTB packs), and many other launchers, and the above may not be right for you, but if you try a couple of those, and poke around the FTB subreddit, you should at least get a feel for what direction you'd like to go in.

Also, I highly recommend finding lets plays to watch at first; modded minecraft can be hard to get into because it's basically a series of new games, built out of mods, built on top of a hacked API, built on top of a sandbox game; there's a LOT of layers to the onion, and not a lot of documentation. :) Stuff like learning how to use JEI to quickly lookup items and how to craft them is critical when trying to understand a new modpack that might literally add thousands of items and recipes.

> the full tech tree

Thanks to modding, such a thing does not exist.

Bob's & Angel's is the most popular big mod. Krastorio2 is a recent 'vanilla+' offering that I've been enjoying a lot recently. The 'familiar but different' feel is very compelling. There are loads of smaller mods, but I've always like the modpack approach a la Minecraft.

It's noteworthy that Wube has unofficially supported the Krastorio2 modders. It demonstrates their commitment to the community, and was just a great decision all around.

The factory must grow to meet the needs of a growing factory!

Usually they blame the developer and then go buy someone else's games on G2A