For what happened here, Nichiporchik explains that scalpers bought copies on Steam priced cheaper in certain regions. If you release a game on Valve's store and don't set the price in each region individually, universal pricing creates discrepancies where this can happen. These were then being sold on less regulated marketplaces.

Regional pricing error caused the game to be much cheaper than it should be in some region. Resellers bought a lot of keys at that incorrect price to sell on shitty key sale storefronts at a profit.

Those keys are invalid by the Steam ToS.

It's not scalping. The keysellers are what fuck over regular consumers. Steam sales used to be known for their crazy discounts, but as soon as keysellers began buying thousands of keys at those sale prices and then reselling them for a profit that pretty much died and now it often takes years for well selling games to get a decent discount.

This has nothing to do with Steam being the only legal store front. It doesn't matter how many legitimate store fronts there are, if key resellers scum profit for themselves out of a game ever having a sale on any of them then those sales stop happening.

Of course if you buy a product you should own it, but if you buy it from some guy in an alley wearing a trench coat for 20% of the actual price then you don't get to be surprised when the thing doesn't work. It doesn't matter if it's software or hardware, when you see something being sold for a fraction of the price the actual creator sells it for at a place that isn't an official store front there's a reason for that and that reason might be that it's stolen and effectively worthless. If you don't buy from the creator or an official seller of their product then you don't have the right to complain to them. It's not Nintendo's fault you bought a stolen Switch 2 of of a social media ad and they bricked it because it was reported stolen by the actual owner.

I'm in my late 40s and have used Steam since it started for thousands of sales including dozens of keys to gift to friends. You are acting like a whiny child, and so will just go to the handy block list.

Why are you advocating for taking keys offline just because of who’s hand it went through when they were bought perfectly legally?

Buying keys on Steam to resell them is directly against their policy specifically so that developers feel comfortable putting products on sale. If a key was purchased by a reseller from Steam then they can legally use it, however they can't resell it. Many do. They're the one doing something wrong and fucking people over, in order to insert themselves as an unofficial middle man and leech money.

Resellers are shit. Period. It's like buying something from a guy in an alley and then complaining to the manufacturer when it doesn't work. Buy through an actual authorized seller. Those exist for a reason.