This hurts the locals, because they have less copies available to them, and this is a big problem because they can't just go online and buy it from some major retailer because their local currency is worth so much less than the USD that instead of the $40 BRL they would have spent at the site catering to locals, they'll have to go spend $120 BRL from some international site that doesn't cater to local prices. Then the key reseller takes those keys and flips them via their site for, let's say a 50% markup from what they paid, so about 16 USD. Let's say a game goes on sale in Brazil for 40 BRL (About $11 USD.) Key resellers will use VP services and spend $11 USD per key to buy up a significant portion of the stock from the site that hosted the sale. Non-game-focused retailers that also carry games are more likely to give legitimately good deals during seasonal sales.Īctually one of the bigger problems with key-resale is regional purchases. The best legitimate way of getting the game cheap is to go to physical stores and to use sales or coupons to score a good deal. Realistically things are going to be fine the majority of the time, and the worst that should happen it you losing your game without an opportunity to get your money back. When this happens you are almost certainly shit out of luck, and may even be considered to have committed a crime by purchasing stolen merchandise at a suspicious price depending on where you live.
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And that creates a small but also very real possibility of the code being invalidated by the publisher.
What this means for you is that there's a very real possibility of the code you're buying originally being sourced through criminal activity. And, of course, decently priced copies are often the result of re-selling from legitimate regional distributors with very low overheads. The most legitimate way in which keys will end up priced very low is when a large legitimate retailer is emptying inventory, which can happen below cost, and someone market-savvy picks up copies to move to key sites. There have also been cases of large shipments of physical games being stolen and pawned to key sites. This makes them an attractive place for money laundering, through things like credit card thieves buying lots of copies of games and pawning them to key sites. This means that, while most large physical stores will source all of their games from authentic and verified regional distributors or directly from publishers, key sites will buy from anyone willing to sell at the right price. They don't explicitly deal in illegally obtained keys, but are largely indiscriminate about how they source keys. Basically all online key sites, including the largest ones, are what's called 'grey market' retailers.