I have bought games for 1-3€ on allkeyshop a few times, you’ll get a steam gift or key for the full game for your steam library. Obviously they’re from shady sources. Maybe it’s mostly a trick with regional pricing or something like that though? So some of the money goes to the devs?
I like it because I get updates, automatic steam Linux support and everything, but piracy is good for games just to try them out. Of course buying for full price also is a good option.
It can be. Some of those keys might just taking advantage of regional pricing to buy keys in cheaper markets and resell them elsewhere, but some of them are purchased using stolen credit cards. Those actually cost the devs money from chargeback fees once the actually owner of the credit cards finds the fraudulent transactions. It’s hard to say how many of them are from stolen credit cards, and key-resellers try to stop it, but it still happens. This was back in 2019, but the Factorio devs had a couple blog posts talking about G2A:
Blog post saying G2A is worse than piracy
Follow up blog post where G2A reimburses them (at very bottom)