Ask Lemmy

• 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)