How do Steam download keys work?

I see people online selling Steam download keys for this game, Dirt3, but when I searched Steam it showed up as not available.

How does this work? Steam still has it but you can only get it thru re-sellers like these guys? Does Steam sells wholesale keys to re-sellers? I'm confused.

Solution 1:

In general, games no longer available to buy on steam can still be played, if you bought it before it was removed from Steam, so it definitely is still there.

However, whether you can activate a key for a game no longer in the store is basically a lottery. Some games you can activate, others you cannot. Personally, I had a key for Nekro, which I couldn't activate after the game was removed. Since Dirt 3's removal is due to a licensing problem, it certainly isn't guaranteed that keys work. You just have to try.

According to threads in the Steam forum (a month old) the keys offered by resellers still work, so feel free to give it a shot. Just be careful, as I can only find those keys offered by resellers of moderate to low reputation.

As to where those keys come from. They were either bought wholesale for cheap, datamined or stolen. Back in the days when resellers were great (2013-2014), they used to buy keys for cheap in less powerful markets. E.g. you can buy games in Russia for a handful of dollars. They then offered those keys on their resale page for a fraction of the cost in EU or NA. Steam introduced region locks at the end of 2014, which means that a key bought in Russia can also only be activated in Russia. This pretty much killed the reseller business as their main and most legal source of cheap keys vanished. Nowadays the shady resellers mostly deal with stolen keys, which is the only reason why they can sell it so cheap. You generally risk the key not working, being for the wrong region or it eventually being flagged as stolen and your game removed from steam.

In the case of Dirt 3, I can see them getting a good deal on tons of keys in early 2017 when the game was removed from sale from the large authorized key resellers (e.g. fanatical, green man gaming, humble, gamersgate). It was removed due to them being unable to sell it as well, as they are official publishing partners. Resellers like G2A don't care about something like that.