I understand that this conversation is wearing thin, but I feel like my point is being misrepresented. This will be my final bit on this, unless my view is misrepresented further. I apologize in advance.
I don't really. The DRM free games have value, too. If the trader were to assure me he hadn't downloaded and installed them and just gave me a link to the bundle page for my use, I would put about as much faith into him as if he gave me a Steam key with the promise he spent more than a dollar.
Except for the first bundle, he WOULD have had to pay at least a dollar for his bundle. The real issue is your problem with people making ANY kind of perceived profit off of deals or promotions, despite the clear unwillingness of the actual developers, bundle creators, promotion creators, or developers involved in promotions, to actually legally or in other ways attempt to restrict the activities you want to shame people out of. You have no justifiable basis for your openly stated desire to shame people out of flipping or trading bundles. BTW, why aren't you in the GAF Steam Trading 2012 |OT| thread heckling those moral/ethical degenerates?
I actually don't really understand what you're saying here. You say that you see the problem in buying a key for a penny and flipping it... why doesn't it scale up? What if the proposed penny purchase was flipped for a dollar? That's 99 cents profit. Compare it to the Humble Android example, where it was bought for a $1 and flipped for $2.50. That's $1.50 profit.
Look, I understand that it's small change we're talking about and the idea of doing this to any kind of scale is pretty hard to actualize (and is admittedly silly), but if you take issue with the penny payment being sold for a 99 cent profit, why don't you take issue with a $1.50 profit?
No, it doesn't scale up. Because I would have purchased the Humble Bundle at a price I felt was decent enough. But then again, that is up to me and my own justifiable sense of worth, not some white knight trying to ridicule and shame people out of doing something entirely reasonable, legal, and allowable by the promotion/bundle creators and developers, and something that actually has an entire official GAF thread devoted to it.
I'm not arguing against trading in general. It is usually impossible to know what a person spent on the item they are trading, but let's not pretend the case of the Humble Bundle applies to all items everywhere. We know that, to legally obtain a Humble Bundle key, $1 must be spent. You can not make that reasonable assumption about basically anything else, certainly with videogames.
Except that you have been arguing against trading in general, and against drizzle specifically. He gave you the specific example of trading for an indie bundle and you shot him down. Hello "scuzzy move"! Now you want to walk your comments back? Whatever. Except that you don't really, you still state that the actual price paid for games is unknowable, which reduces the argument back to "scuzzy move" territory, because anyone making ANY kind of perceived profit is inherently involved with "scuzzy moves"...
I think I take issue with the intent of taking a free key only to resell it later, when the free keys are no longer offered. It's not all that different from the derision often lobbed at people who go to a console launch to buy as many systems as they can with the sole intent of flipping them on eBay. (Before anyone comments, I understand it's not a perfect analogy because a console is a physical product with limited availability, but I think the comparison I make still stands).
It just rubs me the wrong way. I'd like to think the people that post here aren't trying to rip me off and are just interested in the community.
It doesn't stand, it is weak. The promotion creators/developers have specifically decided to sell or give their product away for some perceived benefit. If they don't require an immediate activation, then they are implicitly allowing for people to hold onto that product at length. They are also specifically giving it out in easily tradable code form and without legal or product restrictions regarding the sale or transfer of those codes.
People buying consoles at bulk at launch are cornering the market and exploiting the limited number of available products, there is nothing immoral or unethical about this either. But despite BOTH examples involving other parties that are finding value in the trade/sale of those goods, you describe it as trying to "rip people off". Most reasonable people adhere to their own decent sense of propriety and common sense. If they are happily buying a product at launch or that was once free and now heavily discounted, who is it hurting, beyond you and your own lofty unrealistic personal ideals that is?