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*
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