Online retailers, sorted by motherfuckery

Naturally, all enterprising and cultured anons favor share threads and >>>/scurv/ for their vidya acquisition needs, but even the best of us feel the occasional forbidden urge to go slumming with the plebs or to be good goys. So, when it's time to hand over shekels, who's got the best/worst rap sheets?

Steam, obviously, is the most well-known of the bunch. Huge market share, miserable customer service, sales that are a pale shadow of their former selves, but Gaben's greed ensures that they generally remain a one-trick pony when it comes to fucking customers over–the Activision of online retailers, if you will.

Except for the actual Activision of online retailers, that being Battle.net or whatever Blizzard is calling its thing these days. Weak sales, games with fantastic production values and a focus-testing group bigger than the actual playerbase, all of the political bullshit that they can physically fit into current-gen social media, and the fact that they literally don't sell any games outside of Blizzard whale-milkers and Destiny 2.

Ubisoft has Uplay, which works about as often as you'd expect from a bunch of French socialists surviving entirely on the involuntary generosity of international taxpayers. Also they've been making a reskin of the same game for over a decade now.

EA has Origin, which has toned down some of the more ridiculous bullshit from its launch and still seemingly exists only to wallow in the failure of the company's hubris, but every time you see it, you can't help but remember how many beloved franchises and developers EA destroyed before senility turned them into a crippled, flatulent husk of their former evil.

GOG is a couple of former Soviets embracing capitalism by charging you for repacks whose licenses they lawyered on the cheap, as well as the occasional console game cleverly disguised as a marquee PC title. But hey, at least most of their stuff is DRM-free.

Humble Bundle is a business model born and bred of virtue signalling whose sole virtues are the fact that they occasionally carry DRM-free versions of certain games and that, if you buy an actual bundle, you can mess around with the price sliders to display your contempt accordingly.

And then there's the periphery of weebshit retailers out there–DLsite, Nutaku, Mangagamer and what have you. I have no idea how many of them engage in censorship, price-gouging, forbidden shekelmancy, or other such arts. Who's shit? Who's mildly-less-shit? Anybody out there actually still trying to make an honest buck?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=vZq4UnkgZQI
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

thats impossible when your product is information, as soon as you sell it to one person its out there

-Green Man Gaming
-G2A

...

Is that Stallman's voice? I just realized I've never heard it before.

No, its Linus voice

Steam has and will always be the gold standard when it comes to online retailers.

Used GMG a few times–usually pretty cheap, but no refunds. Heard publishers complain about their key sourcing before, but I don't think anything ever really came from it. As for G2A, didn't they run a similar business model, except a bunch of their keys ended up getting banned because they were bought with stolen credit cards or something? I don't know anyone who's actually done business with them.

G2A actively and knowingly sells stolen keys, usually obtained with credit card info also stolen from their own customers. They're the lowest of the low chinks, who fuck over everyone. Publisher loses money because of chargebacks, customer loses money because of fraud and deactivated keys, and everyone elses loses because now Steam/GOG/Humble sales are tame as fuck compared to years ago because any time someone does a crazy sale these chinks snap up hundreds of keys and sell them at marked up prices later on. Multiple developers have actually gone on record begging people to pirate their games instead of buying from G2A because at least piracy doesn't hurt them directly.

G2A's response to being sued for knowingly selling fraudulent keys was to move their headquarters to China and ignore the lawsuit. Really gets your noggin' joggin.

Yeah

stop rusing

As a Walmart employee, I would say avoid Walmart's online shopping service. The company tries to do everything the competitor's doing, but they don't do it well, despite the pages of documents and best practices. Case in point

Got a few things to ask you. Why the fuck doesn't Walmart's brick and mortar stores price-match their own website? A few years back I went looking to get a game that had been listed as $10 on the site. I had assumed it would be the same price instore, but it turned out to be $45 (despite having been out for at least four or five years). Asking whoever was manning the electronics section at the time, I simply got a "we don't match our site" and that if I wanted them to price match to SOMETHING (given that even Gamestop was asking about $10 at the time), it had to be to an actual physical advertisement with whatever it was being given a temporary markdown elsewhere (thus they wouldn't match to "regular" prices).

On a tangential note, why the fuck does Walmart ask nearly full price for games years after release, when anywhere else remotely worth a damn has long since given them a more-or-less permanent price drop, even for "new" copies? I remember seeing, probably back in 2015 or so, copies of Other M for $45 on the shelves at a local one (shit was going for about $5 or less elsewhere, maybe $10 new), as well as Glory of Heracles DS being $35 at that point (I later got a new copy off Amazon for $8 or so). Does it even factor in that leaving them at almost launch prices for so long, without even trying to compete with other outlets, just makes them rot on the shelves? "Everyday low prices", my ass.

Walmart officially counts the website and store as two seperate entities, and its company policy that they are not allowed to price match the website since it would be "Competing with themselves."

Walmart really is fucking terrible. I ordered a TV from them with 2 day shipping. After a week it still didn't ship, so I cancelled the order. After that it took me a month of fighting dumb ghetto niggers on the phone to get my money back, for a TV that didn't fucking leave the warehouse. Fuck them, I don't even buy groceries there anymore.

As a VALUED WALMART ASSOCIATE, I get a fucking whopping 10% off.
Wow.
Other specialty stores like Loblaws or even a pharmacy usually give 20-25% off

I don't work front end so I didn't know that

They fucking should price match the online store though, because they do it for all competitors. Not only that, but cashiers ARE ALLOWED to write off any item up to $10 because they are supposed to "trust the customer" for errors and shit. $50 is when the CSM gets involved, which sometimes becomes a duty manager escalation.

You don't ever need a receipt to return shit. You're supposed to, but again, focus on customer service, they WILL give you your money back if you fight hard enough

It should work on all stores but typing #778 on the phone also makes an announcement on the PA system. Apparently we redid our phone system to allow inter-store connectivity, because we have numbers that are not phone numbers, but we have an ID number per phone

I've bought from G2A multiple times and haven't had any trouble with non-working keys. I usually go there to buy older games that one cares about on the CHEAP. I've considered using it to buy some games from pozzed developers, since I know none of the money goes into their pocket.

I've never bought anything popular or new from there, though, so I don't know if the experience changes much from there.

Walmart is one of the shittiest mega-stores out there, on par with BestBuy. I'm 100% sure anyone who's had to deal with either more than once has some horror story to tell. I'd rather cut my balls off than attempt to buy a laptop from Bestbuy again, and I'd rather just kill myself where I stand instead of even walk into a Walmart.

I bought a computer from Best Buy a few years ago and never had any problems. What was your problem with Best Buy?

Everyone is incredibly apathetic. Thankfully, the managers at my store and most employees aren't terribly annoying to be around. Some are lazy, but they aren't assholes.

Classic.

I know Geek Squad is a fucking joke, not to mention their "informed" associates on the floor bothering you. I also know a guy who's bought multiple laptops from there and something malfunctions after a couple of months every time.

That seems retarded. Either place having the same low price should move stuff off the shelves, right? Or does the rare dumbfuck dropping $45 on a game that goes for $7 elsewhere make up for the loss in overall sales or something?

Geek Squad got caught scamming charging a large amount of money over a simple computer error, something other computer shops repaired for free. I bet computer breaking down is intentional.

youtube.com/watch?v=vZq4UnkgZQI

Wrote a length greentext but I'll just surmise everything instead. Employee constantly trying to get me to buy a discount TV or a 500% price-inflated desktop, insane pricing, $1200 for 4gb ram nvidia 970m & bottom-tier I7 laptop, all higher-spec laptops have shitty LEDs, and every single attempt at finding or asking if or where it's possible to get a plain black version is met with some measure of difficulty. Shipping issues with their warehouse, site which doesn't just not have the same pricing as in-store but which has items they took off the shelves a year ago, and to top it off they shipped me the wrong fucking laptop two times in a row.

What the fuck I hate Walmart now. The company price lists one thing and then when you come in and find out its more expensive they tell you its actually another thing altogether so they don't "compete with themselves", the the most Jewish thing I have heard of in a long time

dlsite is "okay"
you straight up pay in yen so no price bullshit. they take an enormous cut of the profits though, but theres lots of big sales.
as far as i can tell westerners dont get points for R-18 purchases.
Nutaku is terrible, censorship and localization out the ass.
The rest of english DMM is an afterthought but that's not necessarily bad, as circles that refuse to put their shit on english dlsite can sometimes have their shit on DMM as they almost literally just machine translate the japanese site. I haven't had to deal with customer service and probably won't if i can avoid it. also you pay in yen.
The few things i bought from mangagamer had censorship but it's mostly ass covering EVERYONE DEPICTED IS 18 so they dont get reamed by a court.
sekai project / denpasoft im almost certain are front for japanese sjw.
sekai retweets their creators, and if you check those twitters 80% of the time its BLM / trump hate in japanese. I suspect some are expats but enough of them had real names / pictures on their twitters that it's kind of worrying.

...

I bet you're a white supremacist and a nazi too, huh?

Man that was funny

Anyone have any problems with Amazon before? Besides under stocking Nioh making me wait a month to get the game because I like owning physical copies I haven't run into any problems with them.

It's worse than that, user.

Walmart Online had made the sale. The other user intended to buy and the only step left was exchanging money for goods. Of course, he can't buy from Walmart Online directly for whatever reason.
But it's okay, Walmart Online is simply the online portion of the Walmart corporate entity, right? As user found out, not so. And because the prices were different, the sale was lost.
Or, in less confusing greentext:
Walmart's big box stores directly competed with their online stores in this instance. And Walmart basically cucked itself. Seriously, business 101 is "customer attention rolls downhill," with regards to prices.

I've only bought physical from Amazon before, and I live relatively close to one of their shipping hubs, so my experiences with them have been good overall. Their stuff generally ships on time, they occasionally toss in preorder goodies after release to get rid of excess merch, and the one time I had to deal with customer service (I received an empty case), they just sent me another copy and told me to toss the stuff they'd already sent. I'm not touching Alexa with a thirty-foot pole and I'm sure that their social media reach is full of pointless virtue signalling, but I have yet to run into a problem with their logistics operations.


Damned right I forgot. Half the point of this thread was to bring up options outside of the big guys. In terms of prices, customer service, lack of DRM, or some other quality, are any of those smaller guys significantly better than the industry giants?


You are my melanin matey, user. This is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. One question, though: What's DMM?

Maybe they should specialize in selling fightans for that authentic FGC thuggery experience.

Wtf I'm gonna buy everything there now?!

As a frequent DLsite customer, I can assure you that westerners most definitely DO get points for R-18 releases. There's no convenient place to view your points like on DMM though, as far as I know you can only see them on the shopping cart/checkout menu.


DMM (dmm.co.jp) is a big Japanese online media store which sells all kinds of stuff - digital comics, doujinshi, streaming media, games, and tons and tons of porn.

They're mostly noteworthy in that they carry some games/doujins that DLsite doesn't, or uncensored versions of games that were censored on DLsite. (DLsite tends to be a bit more cautious on the copyright side than most Japanese stores - you'll never see a Pokemon-themed doujin product there, and there are a few CG sets that have some characters replaced or removed in the DLsite version.)

The English version of DMM's site is most definitely an afterthought. It seems to just be written entirely with Google Translate. Honestly, parts of it would be easier to use in raw Japanese.

threadly reminder that Gamejolt and itch.io have been trucking for a few years as "Bandcamp for videogames", with all of the warts associated with Bandcamp included, like the optional pricing schemes from "pay whatever the fuck you want to pay" to "lol $5000 no lowballers". Both sites allow for both DRM-Free games and in-browser playing because Flash Portals will never have a comeback.

IIRC, GOG has got a p. decent selection of indie games beyond the reselling&packaging of old DOS games, sans the abandonware(?). Even the Ganoo/Linux segment of the storefront seems to have more content than it did a few years ago. Not sure how the store's holding water with their DRM-free sales pitches in the current year.

Apparently the Humble Bundle guys now have a "Humble Store" in this day and age. Haven't used anything from them beyond the v. old Humble Bundles that actually followed through with their promises of cross-platform DRM-free indie games, so I'm still in the dark about that.

Gamersgate and GreenManGaming resell Steam keys at lower prices, which is fine if that's your thing. Still don't know why the fuck devs shit out thousands of Steam Keys when all they need are just ~50 keys to forward an e-mail towards games media though.

Steam is a whole big-ass can of worms to unravel.

Origin, uPlay, Battle.net are all third-party attempts to move away from GameSpy(RIP) or Steam and only house games released under their own publisher umbrella (EA, Ubisoft, Acti-Blizzard respectively). If this shit happened with the Big Four music companies making their own useless streaming service, the media would throw a shitfit.

In terms of prices and customer service, Gamersgate is pretty solid, they've got pretty good sales and prices, a good selection of games (over 5k, approaching 6, about 3x larger than GOG, and half the size of Steam, which is actually really solid given how much shovelware and garbage exists on Steam)
I can't speak for their customer service, and some parts of their site are clunky and could use sprucing up to look nicer and less… sketchy.
In terms of DRM they're pretty good, they aren't as commited to "anti-DRM" as GOG, but they're far better than Steam and never put their own in, they will leave whatever the developer leaves in though (like Securom and whatnot)
The main draw for them would be them carrying games GOG doesn't, but being an okay alternative to Steam for said games, since you don't want to be supporting something that approaches a near-monopoly in terms of online storefronts
Plus they haven't gotten into any sketchy business like Valve does, like manipulating raffles and events, or working to push this "paid mods" bullshit or some of the other shit they've gotten involved in.
Plus they have a loyalty program that gives you "blue coins" for doing almost anything on their site
Think of it like Steam currency, except its far easier to earn (you can earn it in Steam through CS;GO boxes and selling game cards on the market) and you can buy games with it. That seems like a pretty solid reason to me.
Overall they seem like a pretty solid alternative to me.

...

do not buy PC games. If you aren't getting anything tangible out of it, you are being scammed.

Too bad they're swedish

...

nice

...

...

...

You haven't seen a shitty port in all your life then
Play Mercs 2.

It's completely unplayable because it starts crashing every 5 minutes after a certain point in game, I guess I should have said "experienced"

Get the Cuckdein mod, either Squeenix are faggots or Sony is paying them, either way the fixes are simple as fuck and yet have not arrived.

I did get the mod, I started the game with it.

How the fuck is it crashing then?
I got an RX480 and an i5 3570 and I'm getting 1080p 60fps across the board with some small drops to 50 when shit gets hectic.

No idea, it's not even certain effects crashing my game. I got to the robot village, saved there and from there on out it doesnt matter if I stand still or go to two big guys wrecking the city. I'm glad I didnt buy it because of denuvo. I am using a nvidia card so it's not like it could be amd bullshit

We do though. At least at mine. Unless its on clearence or out of stock online
T. Walmart associate who wants to kill himself everyday he is there holy fuck why is everyone so fucking incompetent

Its not because everyone is incompetent its that nobody else is actually trying because they don't care

Where do these sites rank?

indiegamestand.com
itch.io
dlsite.com/eng/
playism-games.com

...

I have a very stupid question
what is DRM and why should i care

The only one I have any experience with is playism. They're pretty good, most of the time DRM-free games come with a bonus steam code and they work really closely with the original devs of the games they localize.

your right that is stupid
its basically copy protection to keep you from doing something with software you own, it never really works that well obviously

Same user; As an update, I just bought nuDoom from G2A with no problems at all. I don't even buy "G2A Shield," and so far, I've never had to. This is the "newest" game I've bought from G2A too.

This might fit better. There was an issue at photo and I asked one of the top managers what to do, he said he didn't know. I've dealt with the "I don't know" shit from the managers for the 2 months I been there and snapped. I said something along the lines "No one knows anything around here, would be nice if someone knew something for once." I was not nice about it.
He just walked away, he is a broken man. I wanted an easy job while I was in college, I might just go back to what I was doing before.
God I fucking hate that place. I asked one of the cap 2 associates how he deals with it, he said he just forges a sword made out of hate and cuts away all other emotions to get through his day.
Electronics was supposed to be easy what is this horseshit.
Sage for off topic unless a walmart manager is around so I can bitch at him. Or what ever they are, I have like 8 of them and have no idea what they do, the department managers are glorified assosiates and have to deal with the same shit as we do.
Fuck I'm way off topic now.

...

Copy protection. In theory, keeps people from playing games they didn't buy. In practice, usually ends up hobbling the performance of actual paying customers, whether it's due to mandatory online connections for single-player games, phoning home, or just burning CPU cycles on making sure that the game's legit. Most DRM gets cracked by pirates easily enough, and most pirated versions of games remove the DRM completely, meaning that the pirates get a better product than the people who actually paid.

In short, DRM is good only for the people who actually make DRM. And it's goddamned everywhere.

...

dlsite?

You are a massive fag

nah

Hah, the joke's on you. I bought a physical copy of NuDoom a week after release for 5$ and some Kebab. and then resold it for 20$ to some faggot
Knowing an actual meatspace Albanian thief who also somehow worked at a tech store is much better than throwing money at digital Albanian thieves.

Funfact, not all things sold through their online martketplace store are returnable in a physical store, some are third party sold, which means you have to contact the individual seller, you can't just return the item at your closest walmart, you have to wait for the third party to send you the return label or whatever
Also walmart is notorious for poor quality shipping, so alot of things shipped end up damaged before arriving, ranging from food to tvs

You're a fucking retard and gave money towards a mediocre as shit game.

Didn;t you read the post dumbass? The user said they steal your Credit Card.

Thats a blatant lie

You are a massive fag

something something your opinion, man

That describes pretty much any online retailer that operates a "marketplace" that isn't Amazon. Why are companies so insistent on making the same mistakes Amazon did?

Well the ones I've been to sure wouldn't price match. Either that, or maybe policy changed over the years. I don't go there enough to know if it has, as there's very little I'm actually interested in buying there as far as games go, and don't even have a habit of going there for other things.

And no, I was talking about actual regular priced stuff in the cabinets, not the games in the budget rack or clearance bins.

Nigger you said the whole reason you use G2A is to avoid any attention from people, in which case you can use a fucking VPN
This also isn't about you being a fag for paying for a game you goddamn tard; G2A is fucking cancer and its only good for hurting devs (which actually isn't a bad thing if used against the slimy ones) but its also ran by chinks
Don't fucking contribute to them, they're huge and becoming a large cancer
Make up your damn mind on why you justify using the place, because right now it seems you have a pathological need to be a "good goy".

Bundle Stars is pretty good, surprisingly. Actually 100% above board too.

What level does my merchant need to be to unlock this skill tree?

itch.io?

Never heard of them. What's their deal? Steam keys, bundles, their own distribution system, or what?


You think that your greatest allies will just let you have that information for free?


Never used them. Summary?

...

...

Nice.

From Day -365, the very CEO posted on a gamedev forum about creating "Bandcamp for games" (literal quote) and then focusing more on discoverability later on (which BC hasn't succeeded well (WHERES THE FUCKING MULTIPLE TAGS SEARCH) at yet beyond an "ok" newsletter/blog thing.

What if .. one day you woke up, and you WERE Anthony Burch?

Cheap Steam keys in bulk, Valve doesn't get a cut though and the keys come directly from the publishers.

How does money not come back to valve even though it is steam keys they're buying?
Is it more so publishers are paying valve for the steam keys then selling them to itch.io?

Where is this cute anime girl from?

Hey, buy all the licenses you want. I'll stick to getting games.

I am glamored at how completely technically correct you are
Since they can shut down your console over the internet at any time, you can just give gamers their videogame anytime

Valve take a cut (I think 25%?) from every sale through Steam but they give Publishers (or Developers in the case of indie games) unlimited free keys if they want them to help maintain their position as the default platform for PC vidya. For example if you buy a copy of Warband directly from Taleworlds you can optionally register that key also on Steam and it'll work fine. It costs Valve nothing to do but keeps everyone focussed on Steam (players and Publishers/Developers), it's actually a fairly smart move on Valve's part. Valve also still get money from such games when people play their market nonsense (cards, badges, emotes etc).

the irony being that this video is in mp4, which is nonfree software.