as a teenager i did a lot of business with shady key resellers. now iβm missing an unknown number of games from my library as a result of chargebacks and fraud. iβm fine to buy them again, but iβm gutted that i lost all my playstats, achievements, cloud saves, screenshots, etc. iβm not even sure what all is missing :/
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Wait, really? You lost your cloud data?
Factorio devs once put out a blog post about game key stores. Essentially, they were running into the issue of people buying factorio keys with stolen credit cards and then reselling them for cheap on G2A or whatever. Then the credit card would get identified as stolen, charge backs would be issued, and bank fraud departments would get involved. As a result, the factorio devs were actually losing money from stolen credit card sales.
Of course, factorio is in a somewhat unique position of never putting the game on sale, so if you're getting it cheap it's probably from some dude using a stolen CC.
This happened on stores like G2A and Kinguin. Generally stores that one way or another let users sell their keys, not stores that buy games in bulk and specially not stores where publishers and developers sell their keys officially.
It's pretty easy to find out online which do what.
As far as I know, gamesplanet.com is okay, they get a deal for buying in bulk from publishers and then resell them at a small markup. You won't get prices close to the games' historical lows and they rarely have indies or other smaller games, but it's a nice, non shady alternative for the bigger ones.
all the ones featured on isthereanydeal.com are legit
It took me several times to understand what they meant by content.
Those are keys for reviewers and streamers. Companies steal and sell them, without giving anything to the developers. Now that makes sense.
What do you mean "companies steal and sell them". How? Like they are hacking into the email accounts of streamers and stealing and selling the key before the streamer can activate it?
Or they are stealing them from the developer directly somehow?
I don't see how this would be feasible...
More likely that the streamer or reviewer receiving the free key is selling it on these marketplaces.
That's one option. Or the sellers scam the keys posing as reviewers or streamers. Or a streamer shares them with friends, and they leak that way. Some combination I imagine.
Well, for a start, a streamer sharing the code with a friend and them selling it is obviously not the marketplace stealing anything.
So do we have any proof that these sellers are scamming developers by posing as streamers or is this something that you are asserting?
I'm speculating. Those are possible ways they could get it. Likely more I haven't thought of.
I'm not making accusations. I'm putting together things based on what they said in the post. Just trying to make sense of it.
I'm not a researcher, investigator, or reporter.
I'm just a random Steve online. Feel free to ignore me
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers and acted like Karma was watching (as in, I donβt want my credit card stolen, so I wonβt benefit from those of others).
I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers
I always assumed it was largely money laundering.
Claim to have bought a key for 1$ sell it for 10$. Declare you made a 9$ profit. In reality there was never a key for 1$. You bought a 10$ key with dirty money and are selling it at cost.
Fundamentally no different to the mafia run pizza place.
So how do one of theses sites have not already been taken down by law enforcement?
Why haven't vinted, ebay or for that matter facebook been taken down by law enforcement?
To add to that, if they are using stolen payment info, then they'd probably have no qualms about stealing yours too
Crazy thing, but my credit card info was recently stolen and after closing it, making compensation claims for my bank and filing a offence report to the police I contacted the three different online store the card was used with.
The only one that responded was a key seller and they even refunded me the money.
Jeez, which country is this that you need to do this much work to deal with credit card fraud?
Maybe they're workinh in such a grey area that they want to avoid all possible legal trouble?
Indie game devs are bombarded with free game requests.
I read about one indie dev who woke up to a dozen emails a day asking for a game key to "twitch stream" their game.
It becomes extremely exhausting to verify every single one, and so many just hand it off and hope that one emailer really is who they say they are and they suddenly get a shitton of sales.
Use sites like deals.gg or isthereanydeal
There are usually many legit places cheaper than steam with legit paid steam keys
That doesn't even make sense tho, why are they giving out 1000s of free keys?
If you have no marketing budget, then shipping keys to streamers. Like small streamers, with 10 concurrent viewers, they might actually install it and play the game.
That's 10 more people exposed to the game. Now send out 10.000 of these keys, even if 1% that'd be 100 streamers, actually play it. That's expose to 1000 people, if you're lucky that's 20 extra buyers - But it's also buyers way more likely to leave a positive review, given they've already seen the gameplay loop before buying it.
The early reviews are incredibly important for Steam to determine whether or not it should boost visibility of the game
Maybe in hopes that youtubers and streamers will play the game on their channels if they got it for free? That's probably what is meant by 'to get content on our game'.
Is me paying for a free key meant for a reviewer or streamer so bad, I leave steam reviews lol
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I always assumed people used those sites because they didnβt want to get in trouble for βactuallyβ pirating software.
I assume the main issue is that downloading from somewhere like steam and activating with a code, largely ensures there's no malware included in what you just downloaded.
If you're pirating something and certainly if you don't know what you're doing, you can't be entirely sure the game you just downloaded isn't a security risk.
So, what happend to evaluation keys, valid for 20 days after activation.... Would solve a bunch of problems.
Some devs feel like itβs a dick move. If the content creator actually did stream or review it, itβs a bit of a slap in the face to then claw back the key.
What if the key itself had a limited available time to get activated, but after activation you keep the game?
This allows any interested content creator to play the game, while limiting the chances of abusing the developer.
100% possible with current steam key offerings I believe, itβs just a highly manual process.
I've seen demos/open betas have become a lot more common in the past year. So I do wonder if that's changing this paradigm a bit
Freeware used to be a whole thing. A demo version you could play freely, and if you wanted the full version you'd pay for it
It would be a dick move to claw it back like media companies are clawing back "bought" content, but if it's clear from the start....
Tell me about it. Have been given 5 keys so far for steam games, only 1 removed the key from me after a short time
No no.. It's fine. Just pirate it. You got a free ticket now.
so this is where those stores get their keys from
Are there any legit, non-shady key sites though? I regularly use loaded.com (formerly CDKeys) but have no idea if they're legit or not.
Loaded should be fine if they're operating as they did when their name was CDKeys. π
gamesplanet.com should be legit, see my other comment in this thread. As a result they have pretty high prices compared to the shady sites though. My main use case is throwing some money at an independent games journalist I like through his affiliate link (and getting a 10-20% discount in the process)
on gg.deals you can compare multiple ones, then filter the store section for "official"
edit: loaded is a keyshop, not an official one
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