Buying there is worse for devs as this is credit card fraud to buy keys and the devs will have to do chargebacks. Devs prefer piracy over key resellers.

It can be. Some of those keys might just taking advantage of regional pricing to buy keys in cheaper markets and resell them elsewhere, but some of them are purchased using stolen credit cards. Those actually cost the devs money from chargeback fees once the actually owner of the credit cards finds the fraudulent transactions. It’s hard to say how many of them are from stolen credit cards, and key-resellers try to stop it, but it still happens. This was back in 2019, but the Factorio devs had a couple blog posts talking about G2A:

Blog post saying G2A is worse than piracy

Follow up blog post where G2A reimburses them (at very bottom)

I remember reading somewhere, a developer was encouraging people to pirate their game instead of buying keys, as they lost money on keys.

All key sellers on http://isthereanydeal.com/ benefit the developer

Its better to pirate than buy from sites like G2A and kinguin where you could also sell your keys cause those are mostly fraudulent.

• These keys don’t magically appear from somewhere, developers need to generate them on Steam’s UI and give them to sellers
  • Maybe they sell them in bulk? It probably benefits them, since they can sell like 10.000 keys or sth at once, even if they are at a lower price
• I tried to search, and only found one case where the product being sold was bought with stolen credit cards.
  • But this can literally happen every time you buy sth from a random Amazon store… E.g. the mouse pad you’re buying can be from a larger shipment ordered using a stolen credit card
• Of course it’s better to pay the full price on e.g. Steam. But if you’re between buying the game from a key store, vs thinking of paying 10 times the price and always putting it off, I think the developers might even benefit because:
  1. they get money from the key seller, even if it’s less
  2. They probably benefit more from the larger online user base, more reviews, recommendations to friends, hype, etc etc
• If it was that shady and problematic, Steam would start banning users registering keys sold on CD key stores (e.g. I think Xbox already does this)
  • The only thing I kind of worry about (but not related to us as consumers for now), is that Steam probably currently doesn’t have a lot of benefit, since they’re losing a sell, and still need to provide the bandwith and online matchmaking etc; so I’m hoping instead of mayyyybe banning users in the future, they could like charge users or developers like €0.10 for each key used or sth

(Edit: I read “privacy” instead of “piracy” 😅 But most of those still stand)

The only gray markets I trust is CDKeys and even that is kindof shady. The thing is, we never know how exactly these people get keys to turn around and resell them. But it isn’t like they’re entrusted with keys like Fanatical, Humble Bundle, GreenManGaming are. These other places, like G2A, has to get them through illicit means which could be fraud and could lead to consequences if some sources take a closer look at what’s going on. Which in turn, could lead to compromise of keys or worse - permaban from Steam.

Regional pricing does also play a part, but it also still begs the question - how and where are they getting that much money to buy keys in bulk? Least enough to warrant staging a site where people can buy said keys from? It’s more questions than answers, but I would still favor piracy than chancing my luck at these sites.