Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Steam Account · Global · Gamivo
- Live offers
- 17 offers · 9 stores
- Our pick
- Standard · Steam Gift · Global · Gamivo — €
Want to see more from Gocdkeys on Google?
You need to be signed in to your Google account.
The copy of Bombanana! that ends up in your own Steam library costs €3.99. It is a Standard code at Kinguin, a euro under the €5.05 Steam charges for it. Our page for Bombanana! shows eight offers from five stores today, and four of them undercut that €3.99. None of those four puts the game in your account.
A five-euro co-op game with 656 positive reviews out of 683
Bombanana! is the kind of PC co-op that spreads through a friends list. Somebody buys it, drags three people into a lobby, and by the weekend the whole group owns it. Steam has it at Overwhelmingly Positive: 656 of the 683 reviews are positive, around 96%. That band is rare, and rarer still on something this cheap.
Steam asks €5.05 for it. Everything below that number on our page needs a second look, because the four cheapest sellers are not shifting the same product as the fifth.
Kinguin at €2.70 is selling a password
Sorted from the bottom up, the first four offers are Kinguin at €2.70, Driffle at €2.79, K4G at €2.91 and G2A at €3.54. All four are marked Steam Account, and that label is doing a lot of quiet work. You are not buying a code. You are buying the username and password of an account somebody else made, with the game already sitting in it.
So the game never arrives in your library. You play as a stranger. If the original owner changes the password you are locked out, and if Steam flags the account for being shared you are locked out too, with nobody to appeal to. Then there is the part that bites harder here than it would on a single-player game: you cannot play from your usual profile. Bombanana! is something you fire up with the people already on your friends list, and from a bought account not one of them is there.
What changes when you redeem the code yourself
The fifth offer is Kinguin again, €3.99, Standard edition, and this one is a key: a string of characters that goes into your own Steam. Open the client, drop down the Games menu, pick Activate a Product on Steam, paste it in and accept. The game lands in your library next to everything else you own. It takes under a minute and there is nothing to renew, share or hide.
After that it behaves like anything else you have bought. Achievements count towards your profile, cloud saves follow you between machines, your friends see you playing and drop into the lobby. If you want to buy Bombanana key and be done thinking about it, that is the offer.
The two gifts on the page ask more than Steam does
Driffle at €6.82 and G2A at €8.49 sell it as a Steam Gift, which is a copy sent from another Steam account to yours. It does stay in your library, so it is a real copy, and the seller may need you on their friends list first, while gifts occasionally carry a region restriction. There is nothing wrong with the format. The prices are another matter: Steam sells the same game for €5.05, so the G2A gift is asking €3.44 more than the shop it comes from. Somebody put that offer up anyway, and it is still there.
The whole saving is €1.29
From the cheapest account at €2.70 to the cheapest code that becomes yours at €3.99 there is exactly €1.29 of difference. That is the money on the table. On a €70 release the temptation makes sense, because a shared account can save twenty or thirty euros and people take the risk with their eyes open. Here you would be handing over your library, your friends list and any chance of a refund for less than the change in your pocket.
Worth saying plainly too: €3.99 for a game that 656 people out of 683 recommend is a good buy, and no borrowed login is needed to get it.
Two days of tracking is not a price history
One honest caveat. We only started following this page on 3 September, so there are two days of readings behind it. Two days cannot tell you where the floor sits, which way the trend runs or whether next week is cheaper, and we would rather say that than dress up a chart. Come back when there are a few weeks on file.
I have been a gamer for as long as I can remember, and for the last 14 years I have been making life easier for other gamers. CEO and co-founder of Gocdkeys.
LinkedIn profile More about Luis Abrines