Any website is fine as long as the keys work (or if you are prepared to get another key for the winner if it doesn't). I mostly use Humble Bundle, Indie Gala and Fanatical. My main issue with Green Man Gaming is a lack of clarity with regards to region locks. I have used GamersGate before and they are decent but rarely have the best deals. I wouldn't personally trust HRK, G2A and the various other key resellers for giveaways but I know plenty of other people do.
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You aren't going to get banned for it. If you get a bad key and give it out you can get another and fix it (as I did the weekend - long story) or just take a 'not received' which may look bad if you are trying to get into certain groups or whatever but isn't going to be the end of your steamgifts life. You are only going to get into trouble if support think you are making fake giveaways intentionally and the occasional bad key isn't going to make them think that...
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GoGo and otaku should be fine as I see threads for their bundles nearly every day.
GMG is also fine having bought from them before also.
I personally have bought a game or two from voidu and cdkeys and haven't had issues with them but I wouldn't rely 100% on them.
Chrono.gg should be alright but never bought from them so I cant be sure but I think they are alright.
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CDKeys is one of the most "legitimate" grey market sites in my opinion, I wouldn't expect to ever get scammed there. Doesn't mean it isn't still risky though. Whether you want to support something that is hurting the game industry and directly killing game bundles and huge discounts is up the person I guess, but I wouldn't touch sites like G2A with a ten foot pole regardless. They not only screw over developers but they go out of their way to try and screw you the customer over too with shady complicated to cancel subscription services
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I've only bought from g2a once in the past I think and that was for one of the bundles they used to do. I just don't trust the keys and the shady shield thing they do as well as the subscription thing leaves a sour taste in my mouth so I avoid them like you've said.
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First time seeing this thread now that it's suddenly revived, haha. Saw this and got so sad because I miss TremorGames, I used to love that site so much, haha. :'(
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Sites like, Humble Store, Indiegala, Fanatical, GMG are Retailers. G2A, Kinguin are Key Resellers. The difference is, When Retailers make a sale, a portion/large portion of the profits go back to the Game Devs/Publishers. Key Resellers are usually individuals whom purchased a bundle or a batch of keys at a discount and resell them on the site.
This harms the Devs as they do not receive anything from that portion. In the 1st place they had already made a discount or bundle the item at a lower profit. In some extreme cases would be credit fraud where, games are purchased at full price/discounted using a credit card however the credit details are stolen. Afterwhich the payment bounces and the Devs are left with deficits. The keys are then sold on Reseller sites. However Reseller sites do not work with the Devs to track those keys.
Cheers, Cruse~
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No, Steam is just a medium/retailer site like Humble, Indiegala. Fanatical. GMG. These other 4 sites works with Steam Keys, they also get offer from the publishers for discounts or bundles. The profits go to the publishers/devs as mentioned. I am not an insider but if you look at it, Retailers take a cut, Publishers take a cut, the Devs end up getting lesser of the pie. Thus there are so many indie studios now.
Steam also takes a profit cut probably even more as it has a large user base and is the medium for most games. As SteamGifts are Steam based games. GOG is good retailer site too, games offered are DRM-Free. Personally, if there are bundles and great discounts on GOG I am hopping to move towards GOG. Sadly, the lack of bundles are killing the competition. GOG has very good discounts too, they are also subsidiary of the makers of Witcher series CD Projekt. You cannot offer GOG keys for giveaways here as its not recorded, perhaps in future.
Edit: What I meant is All these Retailers/Marketplace which is Steam/Steam related does provide the Devs with profits unlike Reseller sites. As they are legit and recommended, look out for great deals! To support the devs also saving your wallet from malnutrition. :D
Cheers, Cruse~
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Hahaha, yeah if you want to make one, GOG has public profiles starting this year too. Its not very different from Steam but its games are DRM-Free which means you can download the game on your PC, Laptop and you do not need internet connection to play!
Cheers, Cruse~
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If you are looking to ensure that the devs and/or publisher get the full amount you always want to buy off their site directly if you can. If you buy off of any client or website store often 1/3 of the purchase goes to the store selling the product, sometimes more depending.
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I . . . Don't think so? Kinguin came after G2A and Kinguin used to be an Esport team. I think they were sponsored by G2A before? Not sure I don't follow them. They may have some association in the back but I do not have the info. I am staying clear of both sites anyway. :D Cheers, Cruse~
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well, i might be wrong about this though.
Ordered quite some keys over Kinguin during the last few years, mainly personal use, and never encountered any problems. You just have to make sure to buy the "Buyers Protection" - otherwise they won't exchange the key if it's a bad one 😐
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You just have to make sure to buy the "Buyers Protection" - otherwise they won't exchange the key if it's a bad one
Maybe if you live in a country where corporations > customers, but in civilized world they have ro replace faulty product or give you your money back -and if they say "you didn;t bought protection" you reply "you didn't bought protection from chargebacks".
Buying that Protection is just buying 24/7-contact with support.
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Really? I feel like buying the buyer protection pretty much defeats the purpose of buying it from the grey market in the first place. It's like buying something off eBay for cheap, then getting charged shipping until it's the normal price. May as well wait 'til a sale, then.
Then again, I have yet to have an issue with any dodgy grey market seller. Okay, maybe 1, but they resolved it ASAP, no protection bought. I might be lucky?
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CDkeys and Instant-Gaming are grey market resellers similar to G2A, I think, not sure why you'd put those under approved by members. Like others said before as long as the key works there's no way for anyone to know where it came from and most won't care anyway.
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CDkeys are grey market resellers and just because of that some users consider them exactly as dependable as G2A, etc. Other users consider CDkeys far more reliable - from what I hear they mostly sell keys from physical products acquired cheaply due to regional pricing, etc rather than the less transparent methods used by other sites. But at the end of the day with anybody other than official vendors you pay your money and you take your chances...
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I've never actually seen someone ask that honestly. Personally I stick to the official resellers that I see on isthereanydeal.com. From what I've read on this site most grey market sellers are safe too though, and even official resellers can be difficult in compensating for a non-working key, so...
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Regardless of your stance on Grey Market, I find it ill-advised to use them for Giveaways. It's one thing if you try to buy a game you want and run into trouble there, but running into trouble with a key from there that you try to give away will give double trouble, because you have find a replacement for the winner AND deal with that site about a replacement for you. Which may or may not take longer than the grace period you have on SG.
That said, being still somewhat new-ish (it feels) myself, I know that you first need to form an awareness for the good, the bad and the ugly. I know people who highly praise places like G2A and those that blacklist you for so much as suggesting to go there. While asking around for advice is not a bad idea, ultimately you'll have to see for yourself as well whether some place other than certified or approved key sellers is something you wanna dabble with.
As someone who's still learning things here and there about Steam as well, I can definitely say I appreciate the topic, if naught else for seeing sites I may not have heard of before (and what people have to say about them).
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G2A is like a private market (with individual sellers) run by the mafia. The sellers are okay, but G2A shield, unsubbing for.it, 'protection money' (publish your games with them, and then they will care about shady resellers) are all fall well into the dishonest practices category.
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It's just the 'publish with us, and then we will help you if you have issues on our platform' is exactly the so called protection money, which was just money extertion :/ their user-marketplace is still different and okay(ish, depending on the seller) but the corporation itself is shady as fuck.
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All shops covered by https://isthereanydeal.com/ are reliable, by my experience.
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And I said all and I meant all. I checked their store list and I have accounts on 21 of those stores and wouldn't have any reason to recommend to not use them. Among the rest there are familiar names like Razer and none is a grey market key reseller.
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For me personally.. Square Enix, Battlenet, HB, Fanatical, IG, GMG. I've never had issues with any of these and all from my experience have good customer support.
I also want to add GOG, Uplay, and Origin. I haven't used these in awhile but you can include these also.
I don't use grey market but I have heard a lot of good and bad from people I'm friends with.
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I haven't used them in awhile but those 3 definitely fit into my comment above.
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In addition to Humble, Fanatical and Chrono.gg, I would recommend Wingamestore and Bandai Namco - I believe both are retailers and frequently offer some nice discounts. I very much like the charity aspect of Humble, they have hundreds of charities to chose from, and many are very worthy if you do a bit of research.
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Bandai Namco are not just retailers, they are the Developers and Publishers, they make physical toys too. I just did not realise they are selling games so frequently, are those all Steam Keys?
I am not sure about Wingamestore, not heard of them.
Cheers, Cruse~
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They seem to be, though it's often not obvious until you load into a cart. Then the steam logo appears. I've gotten some very decent deals from Wingamestore. Just make sure they are checked off on ITAD and you'll find them. But their deals don't last as long as Humble etc. - just a day or two, so you have to be quick.
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I searched on IsThereAnyDeal for Wingamestore and I saw Macgamestore listed below it. I smiled. hahaha It appears to be funny for me. On the level of trusted site and legitimacy, I will not consider them to be high like Humble, Fanatical, Indiegala and GMG. You can also add Razer game store to trusted site imo. I wrote more in my latest reply to the thread.
Warm regards, Cruse~
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+1 on Wingamestore. I've bought quite a few games from them. Nice site.
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CDkeys is the same kind of key grey market as G2A or Kinguin. It just has the only remaining vocal minority who like it.
Gamesplanet, Gamebillet, and GamesRocket are all authorised resellers. Heck, the first one has been in business longer (11 years) than most any other stores.
Essentially, if they are on IsThereAnyDeal, they are usually trustworthy. If not, then they tend to deal in keys that sometimes happened to fell off from a truck.
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I think Groupees should be on the approved list too.
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Thanks for adding it. Btw, from the referrals page, these seem to be approved by Steamgifts?
fanatical.com, gamersgate.com, greenmangaming.com, humblebundle.com.
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Oh yeah, I was looking at IsThereAnyDeal for information about Wingamestore I came across Razer Game Store the makers of Razer peripherals. They started the store recently and of course its very legit. I however isn't clear about their policy so you may want to check it out.
To be honest, alot of members above mentioned that sites listed on IsThereAnyDeal are legit, for me I can not agree. Its hard to interpret so as there is no official standings for sites like IsThereAnyDeal. The site is Great! A great reference, however, i will not use it as a mark as every site listed is legit.
Recently, as I was occasionally commenting on GMG forum, there was a thread of someone asking about the legitimacy of GMG. Linking Reddit and Steam posts from a Support member of the recent Pathfinder. The support member accused GMG to be a Key Reselling site but rather, they are Retailers and deem they do not work with GMG. What happened was that I realised the support member mistook GMG for G2A. If at this point, you are wondering what's the difference between a Retailer and a Key Reseller, just google "G2A tinyBuild".
There's certainly need to be a "place"/site where the Devs/Publisher agrees on. That place is Steam for now. You can also follow Devs on their twitter or other social platforms. Those site they occasionally listed on is of course a legit partner, at least for that game itself. Then you can work on whether the site is legit.
Edit: I forgot to mention Indiegala is a game dev too. GMG moved on to Publishing too. You can search games by both companies on Steam. Humble is owned by IGN the game reviewers magazine. Humble does some publishing too. Fanatical, previously is Bundle stars, they specialise in bundles. Some really good bundles. They are british, I do not know if they do publishing or other things.
Warm Regards, Cruse~
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Actually, I would use "recommended" instead of tolerated. Tolerated already has some negative touch, like something you don't like but have to tolerate, e.g. "tolerating pain". I suspect that's not what you had in mind when creating this topic, but rather that you wanted to compose a list of sites that are recommended and safe to use for buying keys for giveaways. That being said, Gamesplanet is an authorized retailer and should be safe.
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HRK on the untrusted list? I feel it's alright personally, i've bought keys from them plenty of times and never had any problems
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Hiya guys
First of all i was thinking about an easy title but something didn't come out my head and i don't know if there is a post about it.
Since i know Keysellers website sell games for -5 to -90% i was wondering even i already spend money and start giveaway since yesterday > Which websites are tolerated or recommended by SteamGifts for giveaway ? And tolerate by Steam
i have list who i can trust but i need your help to clarify for the other websites
site to know trusted website and got some voucher code (GMG voucher code isn't working or i miss something)
IsThereAnyDeal
gg.deals
Approved by Steamgifts:
Approved by members
Green Man Gaming (official Keysellers)
GamersGate (Official Keysellers)
Voidu
CDkeys
Instant-Gaming
Groupees
WinGamesStore
Gamesplanet
Gamesbillet
Direct2Drive
Daily Indie Game
2Game
DLGamer
Opium Pulses
Allyouplay
Untrusted by members:
HRK
G2a
G2play
Kinguin
Gamivo
Gaming Dragons
Games Rocket
Ceased to sell / Vanished
Chrono.gg
GoGoBundle / OtakuBundle
Still waiting for approval by Steamgifts: (needs more feedback)
So as you can see i didn't list all of Website who sell games' keys.
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