[HotRandomKeys] Strategy Bundle

I'm just a silly fox >.< U are awesome :3 thanks for all your hard work , sharing the infor about the bundles with up and taking your time to put them in here with creative polls <3 Squeezes

Yes, these are good questions to ask and while I certainly have my own theory about this matter, these questions should really be answered by the people behind HRK.

After all if there isn't anything they need to hide, answering these questions shouldn't be any problem for them and it would only help their business to debunk some bad rumors if they are a legitimate service. You said you had a conversation with them, did they answer all these questions or simply avoided them? If they did answer them, I would certainly like to know what they said.

From what I understood, that protection service is provided by G2A, not HRK and you can disable it before you make a payment by unchecking the checkbox. If it's not visible on your phone for some reason, then I would suggest you to use that website only on your computer.

Keys are acquired from the publishers in case of HB and IndieGala, yes. Usually they make a contract of a set number of keys for a set price (these are the limited bundles), or more often one where they buy X number of keys with a return clause: so after the bundle ended, all unused keys are returned to the publisher untouched. This protects the bundle site though since if the bundle is unsuccessful, they don't have to sell the leftover keys in their store. (And many of them don't even have a store.)

Also, keep in mind that the main idea behind bundles is the same as DVD or television airing rights, where you put a few lucrative products into a package that is only sold as a whole: this way less successful titles also get sales and increase their presence in Steam stats. (Since most stats only deal with number of people owning a title, they never see the percentage of those who spent time with it, especially since card farming is a thing.) These numbers can also be shown to investors or potential new publishers. (After all, self-publishing rarely works, but the other side is that the indie scene is full of hyena publishers like the infamous Xing.)

HRK and the like differ in the sense that they buy keys from bundles and other sites, so they are selling keys sold from people who were in contact with the product owners. Hence why G2A is always more expensive than the cheapest available price or why HRK has an insane profit of asking 2 USD for keys that were sold for about 12 cents in 1 USD bundles. The profit rate is enormous this way, and since they spend a good part of it on advertisement, more poor sods fall into their trap and buy for a higher price than they could have elsewhere.