RimWorld Ditches Free Steam Keys Due to Fraud

With more and more games coming out, it’s not hard to see piracy and fraud becoming even bigger problems for small time companies. This has affected RimWorld developer Tynan Sylvester , effectively forcing the company to stop offering Steam keys with the external purchases of the game thanks to “refund requests” costing them money.

When the game first debuted on Steam Early Access last week, the developer stated that people could go to their site and buy the game, saying that getting it from Ludeon Studios website means “we get significantly more of the money, since Steam isn’t taking their cut. You can still immediately grab your Steam key and put the game on your Steam account.”

While people who have purchased the game prior to July 17th will still get a free Steam key, people who purchased the game from their site after this date will get a DRM-free version of the game instead, no steam key included.

Sylvester wrote:

“We’ve been getting hammered by fraudsters who are obviously more experienced at this than I. Shutting it down for now is the only way to avoid thousands of dollars in chargeback fees and lost sales. It’s time to take a breather, because I can’t fight this ‘live'”

Explaining how the hackers were doing it Sylvester explained that:

“Hackers steal thousands of credit cards, use them to buy copies of the game from our website, redeem the Steam keys, and then sell these keys at half price. The credit card holder eventually notices the fraudulent purchase and gets it reversed. The end result is that the scammers keep the sale money, and we lose a sale, and we lose the chargeback fees incurred by payment providers”