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:
they get money from the key seller, even if it’s less
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)
(Edit: I read “privacy” instead of “piracy” 😅 But most of those still stand)