Dicehit Games Urges Players to Pirate Runeveil Instead of Buying Resold Steam Keys

On August 10, Dicehit Games said it had spotted Runeveil keys on reseller sites and urged players to avoid paying gray-market sellers for them. The indie studio said the listing it found was going for very little, while the developer itself received nothing from the sale.

The team said those keys were originally free promo codes sent to creators and media in the hope of getting coverage for the game. Instead, the studio argued, some recipients appear to have put the codes up for resale, leaving Dicehit Games without the exposure it wanted and without any revenue.

Dicehit Games also said it could not tell which activated keys belonged to real reviewers and which had been resold. Because of that, the studio chose not to deactivate any of them, saying it did not want to punish honest critics along with the bad actors.

The developer added that some studios do legitimately sell keys in bulk to resellers as a way to secure upfront funding, but Dicehit Games said it did not use that model. In its view, whether a player pirated the game or bought a resold promo key, the studio still earned nothing — the only difference was whether the money stayed with a reseller or not at all.

Is Dicehit Games right to prefer piracy over gray-market key resales?