Ethical Key Buying

Just Cause is out next week, and I really want to buy it. I'm a very price concious consumer and almost never pay full price for my games, even on day 1. That said, I am really starting to question whether I am OK with buying keys from resellers. There is talk of organised crime links and such, but those are fringe cases and not something I can factor in. The larger, more rampant issue is either reselling of free keys taken from hardware bundles or manufacturer deals, and the selling of keys purchased in countries where the market prices are much lower (usually Russia).

I can get a key for £20 from a shady reseller, I can give steam £35 and be confident it's not messing with sales data or exploiting anything, or give slightly less to a place like GMG which is somewhere in between the shady resellers and the legitimate outfits (though mostly on the legit side). It's an ethical quandary that doesn't have high stakes but I want to know what people think. Is anyone harmed by me purchasing from a reseller? I stand to save money but what will that do to the developers?

I buy things for the best legal price. So if something goes on sale I don't find looking for that bargain. But, I really only buy from reputable retailers.

I'm not a fool, I know some corporations profit very well from games - make more profit than they need. Yet, i think the price is the price. If I don't like the price, I just don't buy the game. Moreover, I think you're right, - a lot of keys are fraudulent. On teh other hand, with PC games it sometimes hard to know. Is someone selling a pack-in code? Is someone selling a code they were gifted? It is hard to know sometimes.

You can check out this article on Polygon about that very thing. It seems like there is often a bit of a weird supply chain when it comes to where the keys can originate from. I guess the tough part is not knowing where they do come from. Buying keys that were bought fraudulently originally is different from buying keys that were a bonus with a graphics card that the buyer didn't want.

I have a question on that actually. Anyone know what happens when Nvdia give away copies of say Batman or MGSV with a new graphics card purchase? Do they just buy a huge bulk of games from the publishers, or are they offered as a goodwill gesture for some reason?

@paulmako: I belive those are covered in a cross promotional deal. I believe it's essentially just an advertisement expense.

If in doubt, I usually go to the official website of the game and look at the part where it says how to buy the game and see the sellers. I assume that sales from anyone that isn't listed there will not give any money to the developers.

E.g. Just Cause's official website says, for those in the US, you can buy the game on PC via: Steam, GreenManGaming, or Square Enix's Online Store.

I typically buy as cheap as possible whilst also making sure my money is going to support the developer/publisher meaning I don't buy from gamestop unless new. I will only buy used games if the game is last-gen or older.I try to stay conscious of this during my purchases. I by no means am in a financial position to act this way I just feel it is right.

Thank you for the responses. I am also unsure about situations where a key was purchased legitimately in a country like India or Russia, then sold at a low price to the west. It skews sales data, and publishers get less money. It's not illegal, but I find it morally questionable since I play a lot of games but if all my keys are from other countries, none of my purchases count for my country (or whatever demographics they track) and I'm the ideal consumer who buys a lot of games on every platform. On the other hand I am unemployed and always look to spend as little as possible. Though I don't think that balances it out and makes it OK.

Most shady key reseller sites get their keys either by making dummy accounts to mass-purchase bundles and free promotions or, in the case of particularly nasty ones, use spyware and keyloggers to gain access to paypal/steam/etc accounts of both customers and non-customers. Refusing to use any site which you suspect of being less-than-honest ends up helping everyone, including yourself.

While you may think you are getting a great deal by utilizing these sites, chances are that you could have gotten a much better deal somewhere else without the risk of getting one of your accounts hacked (and without the risk of indirectly supporting such actions). It sometimes requires a bit of patience, but using more legitimate sites and tools serves as a better way of supporting the publishers and developers, a way to give support to legitimate sites, and a way to save yourself a whole lot more money than you think you're saving, all while being far more ethical and safe.

Here are a few useful sites you might be unaware of:

1) Indie Game Bundles - This site does not have any bundles of its own, but it is great at keeping track of bundles going on at other sites which, with the possible exception of Green Man Gaming, are all entirely safe and legitimate to the best of my knowledge. I usually check this site once or twice per day as not only is it faster than trying to check individual bundle sites, but it's also a good way to find out about new bundle sites or ones you just never heard of.

2) Cheap Shark - Another site which doesn't sell games itself, but which is fantastic for finding the prices for specific games. It shows current deals at a large number of online retailers and even includes information on the lowest recorded price for each game, so you can more easily tell if an ongoing sale is actually all that great for the game in question or not.

3) Indie Game Stand and Daily Indie Game are both somewhat more obscure sites which always have at least one game on sale for 'pay what you want' (starting at $1) and often at least a few other sales or bundles going on.

Otherwise, just try to be on the lookout for coupons, discounts, promotions, and giveaways and get into the habit of making sure to get all the card drops from Steam games with cards (extra bundle games which you don't actually intend to play are still useful for card idling purposes) and sell them on the steam community market as they can add up. Other than being at the very least potentially unethical, using unofficial sites for keys only results in a loss of profit and exposure for developers, publishers, and legitimate sellers while not actually saving you as much money as possible; if you're shopping for games while on a tight budget, going about it through ethical means with a bit of patience and persistence will almost always save far more money than jumping at a 'great deal' on questionable sites.

I've never heard of anything like this before. Do you have examples of this happening?

@mike:

Here is an article where keys for Natural Selection 2 were sold on grey market sites were originally obtained via what is believed to be a stolen credit card. Here is a similar article concerning Far Cry 4 and Watch_Dogs keys. This is an article which in part describes the dangers of keygens, but also talks about online key resellers which 'conveniently' offer questionable VPN clients for customers to download and install in order to circumvent the region locking on the keys they sell. This is a GOG.com forum thread in which several people discuss both GOG and Steam accounts being hacked either for reselling the entire account or for selling individual items/keys tied to the account. This forum thread and a good number of other ones like it speak of the risks of buying Steam keys from resellers as there is a danger of your account being hijacked if the key was originally from a boxed copy as the reseller would be able to provide 'proof of purchase' (Steam's more recent mobile-based security updates likely help with combating this). On a similar note, this article describes how grey market resellers posed as reviewers or YouTube personalities in order to obtain free keys which they then sold. Lastly, a similar grey market, gold selling (aka real-money trading or RMT), is a massive problem in many MMORPG's and is frequently tied directly or indirectly to hacked accounts.

@seeric: Hardly any of those links has anything to do with what you originally claimed. There is nothing there that directly implicate any sites in any kind of account or credit card stealing scheme. Which sites are you talking about in particular? Are you referring to no-name sites that don't even exist anymore that you found vague references to in years-old articles? Honestly it seems like you just did a quick Google search and then provided a bunch of largely irrelevant or tangentially related links that don't actually support what you said.

I'm not saying the big third party key resellers are always legit, but claiming that there is a danger that these sites are somehow stealing users' credit cards and/or Steam accounts is another matter entirely.

@mike: Yes, I was referring to the more shady 'no-name' sites as you call them (and these sites are *constantly* popping up and running off, it's far from a done and gone issue) and not the much larger ones which are still tied to questionable practices, but are 'in it for the long run' and are unlikely to get their hands dirty in such a direct manner (though getting keys from sources who are willing to get their hands dirty doesn't seem to be above several of them). Hence why I said "in the case of particularly nasty ones" (i.e. ones which verge on being black market) and not stuff like Green Man Gaming, which are unlikely to have much in the way of safety issues even if they are ethically questionable at times and buying from them may result in indirectly supporting more blatantly unethical practices.

It certainly a grey area. As an indie developer this can be frustrating. A lot of the time these key sites scam keys somehow and then undercut the prices of the games I am working on, and we don't see a share of that money.

@mike said:

Many of these key resellers (G2A and Kinguin, for example) go out of their way to sponsor Twitch streamers and esports tournaments to appear more legitimate. I'm pretty sure most of them use a third party (like Skrill) for transactions and don't even get to see your credit card information. These sites also allow you to purchase insurance for keys, so if you don't receive your key or it doesn't work, you'll get a refund or a new one. You'd be lying if you started accusing these companies - who probably make hundreds of thousands of dollars - of trying to scam you. After all, they meticulously build their reputations, and even just one credit card getting stolen could burn their entire reputation down and put them out of business.

What you do have to worry about is where these sites actually source their keys. If you asked them where their keys came from, I actually doubt they'd know, but it's reasonable to assume that they were acquired in some sort of shady somewhat illegal way. It's just up to you whether or not you want to endorse these types of business practices.

If it were me, I'd just put blinders on and get a good deal. Unless you could get your credit card numbers stolen.

cdkeys.com are an established 3rd party seller, aren't an open marketplace, and aren't as legit as a place like GMG. If we rule out the possibility of keys bought with stolen credit cards and such, I have to imagine their main 'inventory' is bulk purchases from other countries. I can get a JC3 key for £15 now whereas it's £35 on GMG, a massive difference. Still don't know if I should. For me as a consumer, that is a £20 difference with no downside but I am worried about harming the developer in some way.

GMG? Key source is on every store page. Idk why everyone thinks they are shady. Most places buy keys in bulk for a discount and use that to undercut the direct sales on Steam.

I wanted to ask if the difference in price makes a lot of change in your life? If you are committed to the lower amount, and the higher amount doesn't impact you in a really significant way, then buying from Steam seems to make the most sense from an outsider observer like myself. I haven't bought a game from Steam in years, so I can't comment about what's recently going on in that regard. But what I can suggest is that if you truly are asking and wondering if what you're doing is ethically correct, then chances are you are asking this question because you want to feel like your purchase supports the game's creators in the most meaningful way possible. That to me suggests that you want confidence going forward about your purchasing decisions, and I think it's a good thing you're doing by bringing up a discussion like this one.

I know that for me, buying used games from GameStop used to be a normal practice, but these days I usually try not to do that if I can help it. Waiting for sales on the Nintendo eShop has been a blessing to me this year. The 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free on Used Titles' promotion that goes on was one of the greatest temptations for me. But now I have found that waiting for a discount on digital sales through the eShop or a nice promotion through retailers (like Buy 1 get 1 free at Best Buy) has worked for me the most, both in time and money. I don't buy as many games and the money I do spend on games helps to support the developer/publisher. It's a choice that I have made for this stage of my life, and I think what you're asking in this thread is about making a choice for the stage of life that you're in. Gaming is an expensive hobby, we all accept that. But if we can buy the games at a price that's right for us, and support those who make the games, I think that makes a lot of sense.

Are they not able to region lock the keys? Seems like an easy fix.

I'm seeing a lot of accusations and assumptions with little support.

It appears that some keys are in fact region locked and the key resellers tell people that they need a Russian VPN to redeem the code. Doing this is against Steam's rules and they warn you that you might get your Steam account banned for doing it, but it's unlikely that you will get punished for redeeming a key on a VPN. Purchasing games on the Steam storefront while using a VPN is another matter entirely, and is almost guaranteed to get you banned because you're directly breaking the law. I think that Valve advises against region locking codes because they're more convenient to distribute to reviewers and I doubt the Humble Bundle would be able to function properly with region locks on every code. Gifting games on Steam is already heavily region locked.