How Game Key Marketplaces Actually Work

The word "store" covers three quite different things, and the difference decides who is responsible when something goes wrong.

• A first-party store (the platform's own storefront) sells you a licence directly. One seller, one price, no ambiguity.
• A marketplace is a venue: many independent sellers list their own stock, set their own prices, and the platform takes a cut. Prices are low because sellers compete, but the seller you actually bought from may be a stranger, and quality varies between them.
• A curated shop sources keys itself and sells them under its own name. Fewer listings, one accountable party.

LootCodes is a retailer selling under its own name. We are responsible for your order and can help if a key does not work. We also sell through several third-party marketplaces, which is a normal thing for a key retailer to do.

None of these models is inherently dishonest. But "cheapest listing on a marketplace" and "cheapest price from an accountable seller" are different things, and knowing which you are buying is most of the battle.

Legitimate supply for a key retailer comes from a few recognisable places:

• Authorised distribution. Publishers and their distributors sell key allocations to retail partners. This is the same channel that supplies boxed-copy retailers.
• Regional editions. Publishers price the same title differently per country on purpose (see Global vs Regional Game Keys). A cheap regional key is a real, publisher-sanctioned product with an activation restriction attached.
• Bundles and promotions. Keys from expired bundles and promotional campaigns circulate legitimately in wholesale channels.

There is also grey-market supply, where keys are bought cheaply in one market and resold in another outside the publisher's intended channel. Grey-market keys are usually genuine and usually work — but they carry a real risk of later revocation if the publisher decides the original purchase was fraudulent, and you have no recourse to the platform when that happens.

This is the honest core of the whole category: cheap keys are cheap for a reason, and the reason is worth knowing before you buy.

Four things explain almost every price gap you will see:

1. Region. By far the biggest factor. Regional editions are priced by the publisher for local purchasing power.
2. Edition. Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate editions get listed under similar names. Check what is actually included.
3. Platform. A Steam key and an Xbox key for the same title are different products with different supply.
4. Who carries the risk. A seller who absorbs failed keys, chargebacks, and support costs prices higher than one who does not. That difference is the cost of someone standing behind the sale.

If one listing is dramatically below every other listing for the same region, edition, and platform, that gap is not magic. It is usually a regional edition mislabelled, or a seller who will not be there when the key fails.

Apply these to us as readily as to anyone else:

• Is the region stated plainly on the listing? Vagueness here is the most common source of unusable purchases.
• Is there a named, reachable support route — not just a contact form that disappears into nothing?
• What is the refund position on revealed keys? Any honest seller will tell you that a redeemed key cannot be refunded, because the licence has already moved. A seller promising unconditional refunds on revealed codes is either misleading you or absorbing fraud they will eventually stop absorbing.
• Does checkout run on a recognised payment provider? Card and PayPal payments carry dispute rights. Requests to pay by irreversible methods are a serious warning sign.
• Is delivery instant and to your account? You should never need to give a seller your platform login. Nobody legitimate asks for it.

You do not have to take any seller's word for its own trustworthiness — including ours. These are all things you can verify yourself before paying.

We deliberately do not publish comparisons against named competitors, and we do not publish a star rating we cannot substantiate.

We cannot verify another retailer's stock, margins, refund practice, or fulfilment reliability, so any table we produced comparing them would be guesswork dressed as fact. Plenty of sites publish exactly that. It is worth very little, and where it is wrong it is worth less than nothing.

What we can do is describe our own model accurately and let it be checked. That is what this page is.