Key shops, resellers and marketplaces

«Key shop» covers three different things, and the difference decides who you are actually buying from.

Three kinds of seller

An official store — Steam, GOG, Fanatical, Humble Store, Green Man Gaming — sells keys it got from the publisher. A reseller buys keys and sells them itself, so the shop is the seller. A marketplace hosts other people's listings: the shop handles the payment, but the key comes from a private seller, and the price you see is the cheapest listing at the moment we checked.

We mark every offer with which of the three it is, because the answer to «what if something goes wrong» is different in each case.

What can go wrong

The region does not cover your account — the common one, and the reason for the regions guide. The key was already redeemed. Or the key is cancelled later by the publisher, which happens when it was bought with a stolen card: the game disappears from the library of whoever redeemed it. On a marketplace, what you have then is the marketplace's own buyer protection — read what it actually covers before you need it.

What the price on this site includes

The price we show is the shelf price: what the store asks for the key itself, as its own product page shows it. What a checkout adds on top differs from store to store and from country to country — tax, a service or payment fee, sometimes paid «buyer protection» offered as an extra. We compare on the shelf price because that is the one number every store states the same way, and the only one we can put side by side honestly. So treat every figure here as a price tag, not a receipt: the total is the one at the store's own checkout, and it is worth reading before you pay.

What we check, and what we don't

We check that the offer exists, what it costs, which platform it activates on and which region the seller states. We re-check every six hours and stop showing an offer we have not confirmed for 48 hours.

We do not rate shops, and we don't tell you a shop is safe. We have no way to test that, and a site that earns a commission from the same shops is the wrong place to claim it — see affiliate disclosure.