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[InquisitorAles]

Without attacking the core of this post, don't these people also need a copy of such a title on Steam to get their badge? I thought they do. Note that you would just sell some of those 300'000 copies to them instead of cards.

No, it's not required to have game on account to craft badge for it. For example, this guy have 64 games and 5083 badges - http://steamcommunity.com/id/Its1965/

 

[LaFr]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

I imagine an easy way to deal with this amount of abuse is just make each key cost 1 cent. It would be such a drop in the bucket to any developers using the system honorably. Keys given away for free would cost something to the developer but very little and that could just be considered a marketing expense.

 

[InquisitorAles]

I imagine an easy way to deal with this amount of abuse is just make each key cost 1 cent. It would be such a drop in the bucket to any developers using the system honorably. Keys given away for free would cost something to the developer but very little and that could just be considered a marketing expense.

Additional 1 cent fee won't change much for fake games either, and this is not a really good idea to suddenly start to charge fee for something that was completely free.

 

[llien]

The fact that Valve takes a cut?

Developers want to use Valve's bandwidth, Valve's support resources, Valve's Steamworks features, etc., but they don't actually want to pay for it. So they markup their games on Steam to try and shepherd customers into an environment where they don't have to pay Valve, but can still take advantage of Valve's infrastructure.

Surely, you aren't saying that Valve should just not make any money?

Could we keep Valve's expenses on distributing an Indie game somewhat real, please?
What does it cost Valve to distribute typical indie game, several cents?

And if you think, yeah, even several cents is still too much, think about things like getting people onto your platform:

Companies are eager to spend money just to get a new potential customer onto their platform, just check this out:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-pay-10-a-month-go-to-the-movies-all-you-want

Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive who now runs a startup called MoviePass, plans to drop the price of the company's movie ticket subscriptions on Tuesday to $9.95. The fee will let customers get in to one showing every day at any theater in the U.S. that accepts debit cards. MoviePass will pay theaters the full price of each ticket used by subscribers, excluding 3D or Imax screens.

 

[KHarvey16]

Could we keep Valve's expenses on distributing an Indie game somewhat real, please?
What does it cost Valve to distribute typical indie game, several cents?

And if you think, yeah, even several cents is still too much, think about things like getting people onto your platform:

Companies are eager to spend money just to get a new potential customer onto their platform, just check this out:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-pay-10-a-month-go-to-the-movies-all-you-want

The two business scenarios are completely different. The considerations to take into account on both sides are so far apart that this comparison is useless.

 

[Eila]

The fact that Valve takes a cut?

Developers want to use Valve's bandwidth, Valve's support resources, Valve's Steamworks features, etc., but they don't actually want to pay for it. So they markup their games on Steam to try and shepherd customers into an environment where they don't have to pay Valve, but can still take advantage of Valve's infrastructure.

Surely, you aren't saying that Valve should just not make any money?

Oh but Valve make plenty of money.
And the problem with trying to keep your cut is all those assholess hitting you with chargebacks and stolen cards. It's why most devs just don't sell the keys themselves, and instead go to humble, that also take their cut.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

Could we keep Valve's expenses on distributing an Indie game somewhat real, please?
What does it cost Valve to distribute typical indie game, several cents?

And if you think, yeah, even several cents is still too much, think about things like getting people onto your platform:

Companies are eager to spend money just to get a new potential customer onto their platform, just check this out:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-pay-10-a-month-go-to-the-movies-all-you-want

But look, many people are pissed that there is too much junk on Steam as it is, if a dev which's game traffic causes a cost of 2 cent per owner (and think of cloud saves, possible steam workshop support and so on), asks for 10,000 keys ($200 cost for Steam), but has only sold like 500 copies over the Steam store, for which Steam's cut made them maybe $500 because the game's relatively cheap and only really moved during a sale... I can tell you, I wouldn't want that guy's game on my platform! Meaning I think it's absolutely right not to automatically hand out those keys.

 

[PrinnyBomb]

This is fine and just hinders potential exploits.

Good on you valve, making a good business decision

 

[Kayant]

At least some sites are safe but as it's been said surprised it took this long/never was the case.

I guess Bundle Stars would be affected? Gamesplanet? Not sure about that one as they said they keys directly from pubs

 

[DealWithIt]

Steam should be careful. I already buy drm free whenever possible. If you make your platform too unattractive yo will lose the benefits that come from anchoring people to the service.

 

[The Technomancer]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

Holy crap

 

[Qassim]

It was always a very, very generous system. Don't blame them, really.

 

[Natasha_c13]

Smart move by Valve, should have been done much earlier. Grey market key resellers are cancer. Note that I said grey market - this does not include legit operators like GMG (and this shouldn't affect them either).

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

This likely won't affect anyone but shovelware Devs selling hundreds of thousands of their games for 3 to 6 cents in Russian websites.

Yeah, this is not going to affect anyone making Valve money. As long as you sell well or at least decently on Steam, you will be fine.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Could we keep Valve's expenses on distributing an Indie game somewhat real, please?
What does it cost Valve to distribute typical indie game, several cents?

The actual cost is having Steam be flooded with shitty asset-flips that move hundreds of thousands of keys on third party stores while Steam sells 50 copies.

And at any rate, this has nothing to do with my comment. If you had read my comment (lol), you might have spotted the question I was responding to:

There must be some incentive for developer to sell it elsewhere.
What, do you think, it is?

To which the answer is that devs want the benefits of Steam without the costs (Valve's 30% cut). Are you contesting this, or are you just latching onto random posts that seem vaguely contradictory to your opinon?

 

[danthefan]

Steam should be careful. I already buy drm free whenever possible. If you make your platform too unattractive yo will lose the benefits that come from anchoring people to the service.

The average customer will never have any idea this has happened and will notice zero difference.

 

[Self_Destructive]

Good. This is totally logical from Valve's point of view.

 

[Conkerkid11]

Bunch of weirdos in here opposed to this.

 

[Nzyme32]

Steam should be careful. I already buy drm free whenever possible. If you make your platform too unattractive yo will lose the benefits that come from anchoring people to the service.

Should be careful of what?
What they are doing here is only "unattractive" to the minority that are circulating "spam" games. This has no affect on the vast majority of devs, pubs, bundles and alike

 

[Instro]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

Great post. I was only vaguely aware of this going on, but it's helpful to see it laid out.

 

[staticneuron]

First, this is not even remotely close to what they said, second, why the fuck do you care if people are buying games cheaper? As long as it's not stolen keys or something similar it shouldn't be anyone's business. Best Buy gives 20% off and people cheer them for that.

Of course valve cares. Steam has always been a digital distribution platform in addition to the services provided. Of course they care if you take the keys and use them elsewhere but have a low amount of sales. Since they are looking at each game individually they may be looking at how things are monetized as well. There are many free to play games on steam and I am willing to bet they generate income for the service.

 

[BasilZero]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

That makes sense and dayum sons that's really clever how they can bank on that.

Would explain bundle stars with hundreds of dollar bundles packing 20+ games no one's heard about

 

[Htown]

Bunch of weirdos in here opposed to this.

It's actually kind of impressive how reading comprehension goes out of the window in any Valve-related thread.

 

[Jawmuncher]

RIP bundles

 

[HowZatOZ]

Bunch of weirdos in here opposed to this.

It's the usual case with Steam's handling of spam indie devs. Some people just love to argue and bicker over Steam's choices despite this one clearly being a net positive. I wouldn't be surprised if those opposing this were exactly those asset flipping devs who abuse the system.

RIP bundles

May want to actually read the thread before replying. Bundles aren't going away.

 

[giant_frying_pan]

They should name this the 'Why we can't have nice things' policy.

 

[Jawmuncher]

It's the usual case with Steam's handling of spam indie devs. Some people just love to argue and bicker over Steam's choices despite this one clearly being a net positive. I wouldn't be surprised if those opposing this were exactly those asset flipping devs who abuse the system.

May want to actually read the thread before replying. Bundles aren't going away.

I did. My trash ass bundles for +1s will definitely be affected by this. Oh well I haven't been buying much just for the +1s lately anyway.

 

[Gattsu25]

Can't say I blame them. A lot of people just use Steam as a showroom, and then buy the game for $20 less somewhere else.

You mean a lot of people are using Steam in the way that Gabe Newell said he envisioned the future of steam looking like?

 

[FinaruDensetsu]

Ok i have another question. So why wouldn't a developer get a bunch of codes say during a steam sale where their game is $5 on Steam and they just sell them for $5 on their own site?

Wouldn't that allow them to skirt giving Valve their cut of the sale?

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Additional 1 cent fee won't change much for fake games either.

It will if each account is making one cent of fake trading cards, as spindoctor is describing. If that's not enough, fine, raise it to 2 cents—still a tiny drop in the bucket. Or only charge when the ratio of keys to sales is beyond a certain threshold. Or only charge for games that have trading cards.

This is not a really good idea to suddenly start to charge fee for something that was completely free.

Better than simply taking that thing away.

The problem is, this isn't about trading cards. Which is also why they didn't say it was about trading cards.

 

[llien]

The two business scenarios are completely different. The considerations to take into account on both sides are so far apart that this comparison is useless.

The main thing that is completely different here is the cost of:
a) attracting new customer
b) keeping him/her

MoviePass's expenses dwarf Steam's.

To which the answer is that devs want the benefits of Steam without the costs (Valve's 30% cut). Are you contesting this, or are you just latching onto random posts that seem vaguely contradictory to your opinon?

No, I'm not only not contesting it, this part is spot on.
Would devs sell it on another platform if over there they would need to pay the same 30%?

 

[Stumpokapow]

Ok i have another question. So why wouldn't a developer get a bunch of codes say during a steam sale where their game is $5 on Steam and they just sell them for $5 on their own site?

Wouldn't that allow them to skirt giving Valve their cut of the sale?

I can't really follow the proposed scam here.

I did. My trash ass bundles for +1s will definitely be affected by this. Oh well I haven't been buying much just for the +1s lately anyway.

I suspect this won't impact IndieGala / Groupees / other regular trash bundles. I suspect this is about truly shady situations like the bulk key buying sites and developer-initiated scams like review bombing, card manipulation, etc.

It might affect those turd giveaway groups that give away tens of thousands of keys with shady promises of reviews or whatever

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Ok i have another question. So why wouldn't a developer get a bunch of codes say during a steam sale where their game is $5 on Steam and they just sell them for $5 on their own site?

When you buy a game, you don't get a key. It gets added to your account.

 

[DroneBrother]

https://twitter.com/Steam_Spy/status/898208219675447296

So is that how cdkeys etc work? Buy cheap keys from distros and sell outside of steam?

 

[Durante]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

Yeah, this is what this is about.

Valve are not out to prevent legitimate games from being distributed via legitimate alternative mechanisms (Kickstarter, humble, retail, etc.)

It will if each account is making one cent of fake trading cards, as spindoctor is describing. If that's not enough, fine, raise it to 2 cents—still a tiny drop in the bucket. Or only charge when the ratio of keys to sales is beyond a certain threshold. Or only charge for games that have trading cards.



Better than simply taking that thing away.

That's not what is happening. They are not taking it away -- they explicitly describe it as being based on a ratio of sales, with the example of selling a "few thousand" on Steam but activating 500k keys no longer being possible..

 

[MUnited83]

Ok i have another question. So why wouldn't a developer get a bunch of codes say during a steam sale where their game is $5 on Steam and they just sell them for $5 on their own site?

Wouldn't that allow them to skirt giving Valve their cut of the sale?

Yes, and Valve allows that.

 

[GameAddict411]

This will kill off cdkeys.com for sure. Their whole model revolves around buying retail copies of games from countries where the prices are adjusted for local stores. Then they sell them worldwide where games are super expensive in the United States or Europe. No keys means no games on Steam where the majority release. I highly doubt Their model will be sustainable by Origins or GOG, or any other major online PC stores.

 

[Kssio_Aug]

This is sad news. Won't affect me TOO MUCH cause I still buy most of my games on Steam, but some, such as Bethesda overpriced games (in Brazil at least), I always choose somewhere else to buy the key.

Edit: Nevermind. Everything is just fine!

 

[Chobel]

It will if each account is making one cent of fake trading cards, as spindoctor is describing. If that's not enough, fine, raise it to 2 cents—still a tiny drop in the bucket. Or only charge when the ratio of keys to sales is beyond a certain threshold. Or only charge for games that have trading cards.



Better than simply taking that thing away.

The problem is, this isn't about trading cards. Which is also why they didn't say it was about trading cards.

Eh, they're not taking it away. Devs will still get their Steam keys, as long as nothing feels shady about the request.

 

[Durante]

This will kill off cdkeys.com for sure. Their whole model revolves around buying retail copies of games from countries where the prices are adjusted for local stores. Then they sell them worldwide where games are super expensive in the United States or Europe. No keys means no games on Steam where the majority release. I highly doubt Their model will be sustainable by Origins or GOG, or any other major online PC stores.

This sad news. Won't affect me TOO MUCH cause I still buy most of my games on Steam, but some, such as Bethesda overpriced games (in Brazil at least), I always choose somewhere else to buy the key.

Seriously, it's very unlikely that this will affect key distribution of the large-scale "actual games" you guys are thinking about.

 

[Kssio_Aug]

Seriously, it's very unlikely that this will affect key distribution of the large-scale "actual games" you guys are thinking about.

I've just read the posts above. Everything seems fine then, I'm relieved!!!

 

[KHarvey16]

The main thing that is completely different here is the cost of:
a) attracting new customer
b) keeping him/her

MoviePass's expenses dwarf Steam's.

Also literally everything else. These games now exist on servers and are listed amongst products for sale to the market on that service. How is that anywhere close to buying a movie ticket?

 

[GameAddict411]

Seriously, it's very unlikely that this will affect key distribution of the large-scale "actual games" you guys are thinking about.

After reading the other posts, I agree.

 

[Alienfan]

I hope this doesn't affect Cd Keys. It's one of the only ways I can actually afford most new games. I live in country where our wages are lower and our taxes are higher than the US, and yet our games are around $75 - $80 USD. It sucks.

 

[saunderez]

This will kill off cdkeys.com for sure. Their whole model revolves around buying retail copies of games from countries where the prices are adjusted for local stores. Then they sell them worldwide where games are super expensive in the United States or Europe. No keys means no games on Steam where the majority release. I highly doubt Their model will be sustainable by Origins or GOG, or any other major online PC stores.

Do you think Valve is going to kill the retail PC gaming market? I mean I'd like to see them try.....some anti-trust might get them to take their regional obligations seriously. But it ain't gonna happen.

 

[Alexander DeLarge]

Smart move by Valve, should have been done much earlier. Grey market key resellers are cancer. Note that I said grey market - this does not include legit operators like GMG (and this shouldn't affect them either).

Who is Valve to say what a private individual in Russia does with the keys they're ripping out of the game boxes they're acquiring from distributors or right off the shelves? It's up to the publisher to decide whether they region lock.... And so far, the benefits of sites like CDKeys seemingly outweigh the cons.

This is stupid. Sure, Valve loses a little bit on bandwidth costs but they're not the ones being hit with chargeback fees so what's the problem? They're already making an incredible amount of money.

 

[Mozendo]

Not surprised, I remember having this discussion with my friends but I assumed they would make devs pay.

So fucking shit though

 

[KHarvey16]

Who is Valve to say what a private individual in Russia does with the keys they're ripping out of the game boxes they're acquiring from distributors or right off the shelves? It's up to the publisher to decide whether they region lock.... And so far, the benefits of sites like CDKeys seemingly outweigh the cons.

This is stupid. Sure, Valve loses a little bit on bandwidth costs but they're not the ones being hit with chargeback fees so what's the problem? They're already making an incredible amount of money.

I don't think you're really understanding what's being done.

 

[tuxfool]

I don't think you're really understanding what's being done.

And neither was the person he was responding to.

 

[InquisitorAles]

It will if each account is making one cent of fake trading cards, as spindoctor is describing. If that's not enough, fine, raise it to 2 cents—still a tiny drop in the bucket. Or only charge when the ratio of keys to sales is beyond a certain threshold. Or only charge for games that have trading cards.



Better than simply taking that thing away.

The problem is, this isn't about trading cards. Which is also why they didn't say it was about trading cards.

But adding this fee would also harm legitimate developers who are getting profits from cards too, but not in that shitty way like asset flippers. As spindoctor tried to explain, it can look like cards are not a big deal and those cents are just "tiny drop", but in big margins it can make noticeable difference and hit every developer, not just card farmers. Also, trading cards can be added long after release date so it's pointless to charging only games with cards, because dev can generate 1 million keys and then add cards to the game to bypass fees.