Is it safe to buy games from website like g2a ?

[Fall Guy]

How do they sell games so cheap and Is there a chance that someday these games may disappear from my Steam library?

[fux]

Originally posted by inventer777:

Originally posted by fux:

I bought hundreds of keys on third party sites (not the one you mentioned) and only had a problem once which got solved, so I can't say I have a bad experience. It's still a risk tho so you have to decide for yourself

Can you list these websites with authorised sellers ? Steam sales only happen few times a year, competition is healthy. Buying only from steam is like promoting monopoly.

Someone else said authorized, looking at the prices I paid I don't think they are lol
But I can try, lets see if something ends up without hearts (but you can see it anyways if you press quote)
Mmoga (bought most stuff here I guess. Had a used key once, but got a new one after proving it was redeemed before I bought it)
Fanatical
Hrkgame
Instant gaming

[Overseer]

Its pretty simple. The trustworthy resellers are sandwiched in between you and the publishers. The chain looks like this:
Publisher -> Reseller -> You

With the shady grey market sites that get blocked on Steam its like this:
UNKNOWN -> Seller -> You

Its like buying from a dude in a back alley and hope for the best.
And its not just about buying keys for cheap. If you really care about the games you play, you should ensure the publisher/developer actually get a cut.

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Miss Ann Thrope:

Originally posted by Overseer:

And its not just about buying keys for cheap. If you really care about the games you play, you should ensure the publisher/developer actually get a cut.

Definitely. If no money is going to the developer or publisher, it's no better than piracy.

It's worse. An indie dev recently asked people to pirate their games instead of buying from fraudsters.

[Kargor]

Originally posted by feytharn:

Originally posted by inventer777:

Can you list these websites with authorised sellers ? Steam sales only happen few times a year, competition is healthy. Buying only from steam is like promoting monopoly.

As far as I know, there is no definitive list.
https://isthereanydeal.com/
Is usually said to only list authorized sellers.

This is correct on both accounts.

The thing is, in a free market, a game developer/publisher can call up a store and ask them whether they'd like to sell their games (I really have no idea how it REALLY works, though). If they do, they just send them a bunch of keys etc.

So, there's no need to go to some central game-shop-repository and tell them that your games are now sold on that store. It's between you and the store, nothing else. Thus, you can't go somewhere to ger a definitive list of good shops, because such a list does not exist.

isthereanydeal, on the other hand, tries to help people. They are inherently interested in avoiding black sheep among their covered stores, as that would just give them a bad reputation as well. Think of it like a bar/pub that has a reputation of being frequented by a lot of drug dealers -- it's not really going to help them if they keep insisting "but not all of our customers are drug dealers".

However, it does NOT mean that a store that's not on isthereanydeal is bad. To my knowledge, isthereanydeal doesn't publish a blacklist -- so we can't know whether a shop is not covered because it IS bad, or because they don't even know about it, or the store doesn't want to be listed, or the store doesn't really have a good way to be monitored.
Still, I only use stores that ARE covered, but knowing that this is an arbitrary decision never hurts.