I've seen some game developers say they rather their games pirated than bought from unauthorized third party websites.
Until last year was a user of a website called G2A, but I noticed that the site has a bad reputation on steam and reddit. after reading about the topic a lot I decided that, yeah.... that website should be avoided. In this post I tried to express "why?".
Games Reselling
Steam keys reselling websites allow people to sell the extra steam keys or gifts they have. Most of the sellers get the games from sales and bundles so they sell them cheaper than the Steam Store.
In my opinion this is a good thing even though it doesn't exactly follow Steam's TOS making it a grey-area thing.
If this was all there is, I'd be one of the supporters of G2A and the websites that work like it. but the problem is the stolen keys.
Stolen Keys
Since steam keys reselling websites allow anyone to sell on them. There are sellers who sell stolen keys.
There are many types of key stealing, like those pretending to be youtubers and ask for review copies.
The worst of those sellers are ones who buy large amounts of games from steam and other authorized sites with stolen Credit Cards. And when the owner of the cards discover this, they'll refund the transaction. the developer/publisher of the game revokes the key and
If you buy a stolen key from them, everyone other than the seller lose!! You lose the game and the money you've paid... the developers lose the money they got and the time to revoke the keys and even some money in fees. the real owner of the credit card moght lose some money for fees to get their card back. One publisher said that the time required to fill the legal papers of this costed him more money than the money they actaully lost with the stolen keys.
The only winners are the sellers and G2A because they already got your money, if you are subscribed to G2A guard then the revoked key will get replaced by a "real" one but that's the trick here.. G2A knows that some sellers offer keys that get revoked after some time, but instead of banning these sellers. G2A staff try to maximise their profit out of them, all while maintaining the "surface" of legitmacy.
That's why I'm against this website. They can make a system that punish those sellers (as you'd see in alternatives, it's possible) and they choose to not make that system and try to profit off them as much as possible.
One Developer talked about the whole thing in detail, It's a great read!!
Most of games that are stolen frequently are pre-orders and recently released games. That said there are games on G2A site that are almost guarnteed to not be stolen, like the games that were in a bundle recenty or games that are very old since many people buy legitmate copies from bundles to profit from them later.
Alternatives
Bundles are the best alternative but each one is available for a limited time, getting games from Bundles is cheaper than any cheap reseller or official website. Bundle websites like HumbleBundle, IndieGala and BundleStars take steam keys from the developers directly!!
The second best option is buying from the authorized websites during sales, there's almost no week passes without a big sale in one of them. One of the best websites to track sales for any game you want is IsThereAnyDeal.com.
The problems with these however is that you'll have a hard time if you want to find pre-orders and recenlty releaesed game any cheaper than the steam price.
But if there's a game you really want "Here and Now" you can go to the gray-area option: Keys Trading!!
Keys Trading
This works just like the reselling sites but instead of dealing with a website, you'll deal with people directly. While this has the most of the downsides of those websites I talked about above, they are still grey-area thing and money isn't guaranteed to have reached the developers, and some sellers still sell stolen keys. All of that plus the time required to meet a seller that have the game you want.
But one advantage is that you know who you're dealing with!! yeah, there are scammers but the community is helpful and you can talk to each seller before deciding if you want to buy from them.
There are two options I know for this:
The reputation system is helpful too. Anyone who has rep of +100 is safe, no scammer can reach that number of successful trades if they gave stolen keys, and most of the sellers who sell stolen keys don't want to show themselves in public means they won't tell you a lot about themselves. If someone have that enough rep I bet you can trade safely with them.
Conclusion
Due to the system that encourages sellers who sell 'stolen keys', sites like G2A are better to be avoided, because most of time there are alternatives for them.
I said all that, and I know I've talked bad a lot about G2A and other keys reselling websites. I won't tell anyone to stop using them if they know what they are getting into. But many people don't know the truth and use sites like these while thinking they are supporting the developers, (or at least to make themselves better than those who torrent).
This post is just sharing the facts and my opinions on the matter, so you can decide for yourself if you should use G2A. If you want my advice? avoid them when you can!!
First image is created by me using public domain sources, Second image is a meme.