By Dexerto | Created at 2026-08-11 19:33:25 | Updated at 2026-08-11 19:53:45
20 minutes ago
Dicehit Games urged players to pirate its roguelike rather than buy from gray-market key resellers peddling free promo codes.
The sting that arrived just weeks after another indie developer watched 55,000 copies vanish through Steam refunds. Now, the four-person team behind roguelike deckbuilder Runeveil fired off the warning on X after spotting ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs going for pocket change on Instant-Gaming, explaining that rock-bottom prices usually mean someone flipped a free promo code meant for creators rather than anything the studio actually sold.
Indie dev says pirate its game instead and not resold keys
In an August 10 thread, Dicehit Games explained that the keys floating around reseller sites were never meant for sale. The studio had handed them out free to content creators and media in exchange for coverage, only to watch them get flipped for profit while the team saw zero revenue.
“We do not get content and our good will is abused this way,” the studio wrote. “If any of our games are too expensive for you and you are going to use a code site, just pirate it.”
For those who do not know, sites like this sell the codes we sent out for free to get content on our game. We do not get content and our good will is abused this way.
If any of our games are too expensive for you and you are going to use a code site, just pirate it. https://t.co/xJM3YzJKvy
— dicehit games (@dicehitgames) August 10, 2026
However, the developer was careful to separate this from legitimate bulk sales, noting that some studios did sell keys in volume to resellers as a funding strategy. Dicehit Games was not one of them.
Moreover, with only four people on the team, tracking which keys were activated by real reviewers and which got resold proved impossible, so the studio chose not to deactivate any rather than risk punishing honest critics.
In a follow-up post, the team spelled out the math: whether a player pirated the game or bought a resold promo key, the developer earned nothing, but at least the reseller did not pocket the difference. Besides, the studio reasoned, a pirate might still have spread the word, whereas a reseller simply pocketed the cash.
The plea joined a growing chorus of small studios pushing back against a marketplace that often left them empty-handed, much like the Farthest Frontier developer who last year called out a player for demanding bug fixes on a pirated copy.
