Last verified 2026-09-12 by ReviewGamers Editorial
The question people ask is “is this site a scam”. That is the wrong question, and it is why the answers online are so confused.
Almost all of these sites are legal businesses. The useful question is narrower and much more practical:
Can anyone tell you where this specific key came from?
Everything follows from that.
Two business models, not a good list and a bad list
Authorised resellers hold a direct relationship with the publisher or distributor. Keys arrive through official channels and the seller is permitted to sell them. Coverage names Humble Bundle, Fanatical and Green Man Gaming among this category.
Because provenance is known, keys from authorised resellers carry effectively no revocation risk — the publisher knows where every key came from. Prices are still competitive, because publishers set regional pricing and offer wholesale discounts. The discount is real, it is just smaller and boring.
Grey marketplaces are different in structure, not necessarily in legality. They are platforms where third-party sellers list keys. The platform is legal and delivery is usually instant. But the keys are of unverified provenance, and as reporting on the model puts it: you may buy a key from a third-party seller that is invalid or later revoked by the publisher, with responsibility for resolving it typically falling on the buyer rather than the platform.
Grey-market goods are legally produced but distributed through unauthorised channels, and frequently come without manufacturer warranty or direct support.
That is the whole distinction. It is about channel and provenance, not about whether a company is “dodgy”.
What revocation actually costs you
This is the part people underestimate because it is rare rather than impossible.
If a key is revoked — typically because it was bought with a fraudulent card or obtained outside its intended channel — the game disappears from your library. You did nothing wrong, and you are still out the money and the game.
Your recourse is against the seller, which may be an individual on a marketplace, in another jurisdiction, behind a dispute process you did not design. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it is a lot of effort for a $15 saving.
Run the arithmetic honestly: if you save 20% on a $60 game, you saved $12. If one key in fifteen is revoked and unrecoverable, you are behind — and you have spent hours on support tickets.
How we assess a key store
Published so you can disagree with it. We ask:
- Is the seller authorised? Does it state a direct publisher or distributor relationship, and does the publisher acknowledge it?
- Who owns the transaction? First-party seller, or a marketplace where the platform is an intermediary between you and an unknown party?
- Is key provenance stated? Can the seller say where a key came from, or is that information structurally unavailable?
- What happens on revocation? Is there a stated policy, and does the seller carry the risk or push it to you?
- Is regional restriction disclosed before purchase, or discovered at redemption?
- Is there a real support path with a human and a resolution timeframe?
- Is there a paid “protection” add-on? A fee to insure you against the seller’s own supply risk is a signal about that supply.
A store failing 1 and 3 is a marketplace, whatever else it says. That is not an accusation — it is a description of the model, and it tells you what you are accepting.
Where Australian Consumer Law helps, and where it does not
Australian consumer guarantees apply automatically to goods and services, including digital goods, and they supersede retailer and manufacturer warranties. Goods must be of acceptable quality and fit for purpose, and match their description. A key that does not work, or is revoked, plainly fails that.
So you have rights. The honest caveat is enforcement:
- Against an Australian or publisher-authorised seller, exercising those rights is practical.
- Against an offshore marketplace, you have rights that are difficult and slow to enforce, which in practice means the protection is weaker than it looks on paper.
The useful Australian framing: the discount on a grey-market key is often smaller than the expected cost of the one that goes wrong. Buy where you can actually enforce your rights.
This is general information about consumer guarantees, not legal advice.
What we do
We link only to authorised channels. We do not and will not link to grey-market key resellers, and that is a permanent editorial position rather than a current preference.
The reason is simple and self-interested as well as ethical: we would be earning a commission on a transaction whose risk we would be pushing entirely onto you, while writing elsewhere on this site that we tell you what your money actually buys. Those two things cannot both be true.
If you choose to use a marketplace anyway, that is a legitimate decision with a known trade-off — use a payment method with strong chargeback protection, buy the cheapest thing you are willing to lose, and do not use it for a title you would be upset to have revoked.
The short version
- Authorised reseller → boring, slightly smaller discounts, provenance known, revocation risk effectively nil.
- Grey marketplace → bigger headline discount, unknown provenance, revocation risk carried by you.
- In Australia → your consumer guarantees are strong but only as useful as your ability to enforce them locally.
- Our position → authorised channels only, no exceptions, no affiliate arrangement with any grey-market reseller.
Watch the games you want and we will alert you when they discount at an authorised store — and once we hold enough price history, whether that discount is actually good.
