I dont understand why every game client supports CD-Keys. Steam, Uplay from Ubisoft, Epic – even the Microsoft store. I find it the weirdest with Ubisoft, because they have almost exclusively their own titles in the library.
Surely they must know how much turnover sites like instant-gaming have selling just keys.
So what makes gamekeys more profitable to these publishers and platforms than just “disabling” them?
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These are not game clients, but gaming clients. Game client is the .exe you run when you open the game (ie when you run a game on steam, it opens the exe of the selected game)
Also, you can buy a game from other platforms like Itch and run the game on their client. (if I remember, Among Us first started on there). The keysharing is a nice way to authenticate the copy of an original game, to share it with other platforms.
It’s a great approach to get more clients on their platform, because by using them, you’re now a potential client that might buy other games from their platform, and use their marketplaces such as Steam’s Community Market for selling/buying. Each sale there profits them.
Also, there’s a huge competition in the gaming platforms as everybody wants to be the leader, to have more people on their platform.
Therefore, profits don’t really matter here. The amount of customers is.
*I’m a game developer*
There are several reasons, but the simples one is that by not offering this they’re giving their competitors a competitive edge, as sales on other stores draws customers to your storefront. Valve might not earn anything from sales on the Humble store, but by constantly making sure that you’re getting drawn to Steam through these sales they figure that it will increase sales there as well. After all, how likely are you to buy a game on a platform that you hardly ever use? This is also why Epic keeps giving away free games, because they want to draw you to their platform.
In the case of Uplay, it’s primarily selling Ubisoft games, and while they might earn a bit less if you buy their games elsewhere you are still buying their games, thus money goes into their pockets.
There are customers that buy only keys, why should they quit that money ?
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