A marketplace, not a store

The single most important thing to understand about Kinguin is that it does not sell you the key. Its sellers do. Kinguin has run as a marketplace since 2013, in the same way eBay runs one: thousands of third-party merchants list digital codes, set their own prices, and Kinguin takes a cut and provides the platform and the safety net around the transaction.

What is on offer goes well past PC games. You will find Steam, Epic, GOG, Xbox and PlayStation keys, but also Windows and Office licences, Adobe and antivirus software, subscription top-ups for Game Pass, PlayStation Plus and EA Play, and gift cards for the major stores. Listings run into the millions, delivery is an instant digital code, and the storefront handles a spread of currencies and languages for a global audience.

How Buyer Protection works

Because a stranger is selling you the code, Kinguin's whole trust model rests on one optional add-on: Kinguin Buyer Protection. At checkout it is offered as a small extra charge, a low single-digit percentage of the order, and it is the mechanism that gets you a replacement or a refund if a key is dead, already used or does not activate.

Here is the part the marketing page glosses over: without Buyer Protection, resolving a bad key is far harder, and a refund is far from guaranteed. Skipping it to save a few cents on a cheap game is a reasonable gamble; skipping it on a $60 AAA release is not. Treat the add-on as the actual price of buying safely on a marketplace, and factor it in when you compare Kinguin's total against an official store.

Why the keys are so cheap

The savings are real. Prices on Kinguin, spot-checked against Steam in August 2026, often sit well under the official-store list and comfortably under authorised resellers on popular titles. That gap exists for structural reasons, not magic.

Sellers source keys from cheaper regions, from bundle overstock, and from wholesale allocations, then compete against each other on price on the same product page. That competition is why you will see the same game listed by a dozen sellers at slightly different prices. It is also why the cheapest listing is not automatically the one to click: the price sits next to a seller rating, and a merchant with thousands of positive sales and a high score is worth a few cents more than an unknown one. Read that rating before you check out.

The risks worth knowing

This is a gray market, and it comes with gray-market trade-offs. The most common surprise is region locking: a key sourced from a cheaper territory may refuse to activate on your account, and the region is listed on the product page, so check it before you buy rather than after. Currency and platform restrictions work the same way.

There is no publisher warranty behind your purchase. If a code turns out to have been revoked or bought fraudulently upstream, that is a dispute for you, the seller and Kinguin to sort out, not the game studio. Buyer Protection is your only real lever there, which is the whole reason to add it. None of this makes Kinguin a scam. It makes it a marketplace, with the ordinary marketplace rule: check the seller, read the region, and protect the order.

Who should buy here

Kinguin is a good fit for bargain hunters who understand they are shopping a marketplace, not a first-party store. If you are willing to check a seller's rating, read the region field, and add Buyer Protection to anything you would be annoyed to lose, the savings on games and software are worth having, and this affiliate link supports the site at no extra cost to you.

Buy elsewhere in two cases. If you want a guaranteed publisher warranty and clean support, buy direct from Steam or the official store and pay the difference for peace of mind. And if a region-lock surprise would genuinely ruin your week, an authorised reseller such as Fanatical or Green Man Gaming sits between the two on price and carries none of the gray-market risk. Kinguin rewards the buyer who does ten seconds of homework, and punishes the one who does not.

Browse the Kinguin marketplace and compare a title you already own against its official price before you commit.