Fortress of Doors is a Lars Doucet’s personal blog. Who is Lars? He is an independent game developer who co-founded Level Up Labs. According to their website, they created one game till now: Defenders Quest. I haven’t heard about it before, but it seems nice, at least taking into consideration over 2k Steam reviews.
Story that makes sense…
Between 2012 and 2016, Lars wrote a series of articles, the last one talking about G2A – it’s generally a good read, but it included many false assumptions. The entire series introduced the basic concept of four currencies: money-dollars, time-dollars, pain-in-the-butt dollars and integrity-dollars. The entire series focused on how the perception of something can be classified with those four currencies. In the case of the article about G2A, Lars discussed three ways to get a game: by pirating, buying from an official retailer or from G2A. Pirating costs you no money-dollars (it’s for free, and that’s a great price!), some time- and PITA-dollars (’cause you need to find, download and then crack the game) and lots of guilt-dollars (’cause yarr a pirate).
According to Lars, in theory on G2A you pay the smallest amount of money, the same amount of time and effort as in official stores, and no guilt. Lars says, though, that in reality you need to pay for both game and G2A Shield, you spend more time and effort, as “a lot of” keys are acquired illegally. Plus, you pay a shitload of guilt-money, because buying games on G2A makes developers pay money for chargebacks.
…unless you know how gaming stores look like
The today’s reality is, as I wrote in another article, “Pirating games is better than buying on G2A”, slightly different. For many reasons:
- There’s no Shield, so you don’t pay for that anymore (not that was ever necessary)
- Cancelled keys situation hardly happens. There’s no public available stats, though. All I can be sure of it has never happened to me, and I buy almost all of my games on G2A.
- There’s no way these millions of keys on marketplace come from illegitimate sources.
Having everything that in mind, I think the true graphics should look like that:
By the way, I checked Lars’ game and what did I find out?
- The price on Steam: €12.49.
- The price on their own store: ca. €13.47 ($14.99).
- The price for the same title on G2A: €3.60.
Who would want to buy it in the official store and why?…