I don’t think the majority of those keys are from stolen credit cards. A lot of them are just purchased in countries where the game is extremely cheap then resold for a profit.
It pushes the price of games up in countries where the median income is a small fraction of places like the US. So it either takes away the gaming experience or encourages piracy from people who would have loved to support the developers and enjoy the game that way.
Fair enough. But devil’s advocate: presumably they’re still selling it there at a profit?
Yeah the devs are still making their money. Just not the big first world money they want.
The indie dev behind Factorio spoke out about the grey market resellers in their blog. They talked about G2A, where they had received a bunch of fraudulent purchases, and had to pay fines to the credit card processor for each chargeback… Effectively making reseller sales cost the developer money instead of earning it. Here’s the 4 blog posts talking about the issue.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-171
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-303