Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Are keys on G2A legit?

I saw that D:OS2 was avaible for pre order on G2A, they even have a tweet advertising it. Are the keys legit?

Keys on G2A should usually be genuine.

The problem is that these genuine keys can be obtained illegitimately, by using stolen credit cards. Once a key has been purchased using a stolen credit card, some developers/retailers have had trouble matching the invalid payment to the key they've released. I'm not sure if this includes Steam.

The result is worse than piracy, as the credit card charge back actually costs money and you're giving your money to a criminal.

Meanwhile, the thief gets away with a free genuine key, and can resell this somewhere like on G2A.

My (potentially naive) point of view is that it's actually pretty stupid if a retailer is unable to link a transaction to a specific key in order to have the key flagged as not genuine once illegal activity is identified. That said, if it's Steam's fault, then Larian shouldn't have to suffer for it.

There will also be legitimate keys on sale on G2A from people who contributed to the kickstarter but got more keys than they needed.

Before the Enhanced Edition of D:OS was released, Steam revoked a bunch of keys for various games, including D:OS, that had been bought from G2A (which Steam censors mention of in their discussion forums) originally purchased with stolen credit cards.

Dear NotAPyramid,

Firstly I would like to commend Ayvah for being very knowledgeable and understanding. Adding on top of the posted information, while fraudulent transactions are very serious, those are only a tiny fraction of the global purchases done at G2A. Nevertheless we take the situation very seriously and we have recently launched a modified version of our strict seller verification system, which should help deter frauds.

If you have any further questions, keep in mind that you can always find additional information on G2A's FAQ page or by contacting us in 8 languages on helpdesk(at)g2a.com. Our consultants are there for you 24/7.

We hope to see you soon again at G2A.COM!

Rob

G2A Team

OP - it might be possible that there's a legitimate key on that site right now, but it would have to have been sold by a Kickstarter backer.




Somehow I doubt that you're a long-time lurker. So do you regularly do a Google search for "Are keys on G2A legit?" posts so you can helpfully step in with corrections?

There is a good reason why G2A and similar sites are cheaper, alot of their keys comes from criminal activity and other shady stuff.

One feature of G2A that seems pretty dodgy is that they make you pay extra for "G2A Shield", in which case they actually insure your purchase against fraud. There was one time Ubisoft identified a large number of black market keys and revoked them, but then all the users who bought those keys through G2A complained and Ubisoft caved in, saying they could keep their copies of the game. Ubisoft didn't want to be the bad guy, but that only helped the black market. If you buy a black market key, don't blame Ubisoft or Steam if it later gets revoked.

Both G2A and retailers both need to clamp down hard on illegal activity so that it is not profitable. Retailers need to revoke these keys and G2A needs to take full responsibility every single time for any black market they're facilitating.

At best, G2A is a grey market. Even when the keys are 100% legit, publishers and retailers dislike it. But they also hate it when a console gamer resells their physical disc (unless they're the retailer reselling it). PC gaming is one of the few industries to have successfully destroyed the second-hand market. I'm not going to argue it's the end of the world.

At this stage, it doesn't appear that there's any way to obtain a D:OS2 key except legitimately via the Kickstarter (any fraud should have been detected by now), so any keys for sale would have to be from this.

But if you're interested in supporting Larian, grey market sales don't help them. The best way to support them is to contribute to a Kickstarter directly or purchase a copy directly from an official retailer like Steam or GOG. I expect it will be sold at a similar price on Steam in a few days anyway.

At this stage it's very likely offered G2A keys are the 'second' or more key of backers who want to get some of their money back from selling the additional copy they have little interest in myself.

Of course that's of questionable legality.