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Digital distributor 7 Entertainment has been found to be reselling PC keys obtained from Humble Bundle.
Game Informer reports some developers have confirmed that 7 Entertainment’s sites such as Fast2Play, Kinguin and G2Play are currently offering codes that were originally supplied to Humble.
Effectively this means that the codes – which are offered at significant discounts to raise money for charity – are being acquired on the cheap and then sold on to the public for profit. Which, moral implications aside, is specifically against Humble’s T&Cs.
A representative of 7 Entertainment has subsequent to the report attempted to resolve the company of any responsibility.
We would like to apologize for the situation,” a statement explained. It was never in our intention to expose any indie developer to any financial losses or to cause them troubles.
Kinguin is a digital platform for vendors from all around the world to sell theirs digital goods. Kinguin is not the owner of those products. If you can put it simple – Kinguin is like an eBay for gamers.
We have already contacted vendors selling those products in order to receive some information regarding the origin of those keys. We are sure that this situation will be resolved within next week. Our Terms of Service is really clear – it’s prohibited to sell games commonly offered as free or games from any charity events.
Fast2play.com is our other project – [an] English e-store with a wide choice of products. All products come from official suppliers and again, we don’t have any means to verify the source of codes. We were assured those products come from official distribution and we are still waiting for explanations from the supplier. Until the resolution of this problem, all those products were removed from our site.”
Some developers have previously said that 7 Entertainment has removed keys from sale when approached directly.
Indeed some, such as Proteus co-developer Ed Key, have said that they would rather gamers pirate their titles than use questionable services such as Fast2Play.
I don’t really consider this to be any different from piracy in my mind,” he said. The only difference is that they’re charging money for something that The Pirate Bay would give out for free. It’s the same kind of breach of license conditions with a digital good, and the few pence we’d have got from the initial bundle purchase doesn’t really excuse it.”
