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.

I always assumed key sites were using stolen credit card numbers and acted like Karma was watching (as in, I don’t want my credit card stolen, so I won’t benefit from those of others).

So, what happend to evaluation keys, valid for 20 days after activation.... Would solve a bunch of problems.

I always assumed people used those sites because they didn’t want to get in trouble for “actually” pirating software.

Use sites like deals.gg or isthereanydeal

There are usually many legit places cheaper than steam with legit paid steam keys

so this is where those stores get their keys from

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.

My problem with pirating anything isn't the principle, it is the reliability and risk of viruses.

Depends a lot on the game company though. Sometimes I am willing to pay for the convenience while ensuring that I fuck over the publisher/developer. Sometimes you want to play a game developed by a company you dislike.

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.

as a teenager i did a lot of business with shady key resellers. now i’m missing an unknown number of games from my library as a result of chargebacks and fraud. i’m fine to buy them again, but i’m gutted that i lost all my playstats, achievements, cloud saves, screenshots, etc. i’m not even sure what all is missing :/

That doesn't even make sense tho, why are they giving out 1000s of free keys?

When it comes to committing piracy, one element is whether or not the money would reach the actual developers of what I bought. I usually don't give a toss about publishers, unless they have a reputation of actually caring for the studios. If the developers are dead, my money goes to someone who isn't.

Aside from that, my main use of piracy is to get stuff that isn't sold anymore, to avoid DRM, and being free of the cloud's tyranny. Autonomy is more important than money.