Buy European

It does.

Private companies are - often - not driven by pure greed. The people work hard for their company to be successful and they are much less likely to fuck it all over with a stupid move.

Public companies, however, are controlled by a bunch of money motivated monkeys that couldn't give a rats ass about a company's future. They'll bleed it all dry and go to the next company.

Third party key market places are kinda iffy, and there have been numerous cases of the keys being offered on there having been bought with stolen credit cards, or otherwise generated in ways that aren't quite above board.

I remember one interview with an indy dev in which they said they prefer people pirating, because chargebacks from stolen cards are actively costing them money.

For people who feel they need the entertainment games provide, but can't afford current prices, I feel pirating games from conglomerates, and buying from smaller studios and indies is the most socially responsible way to do it, but I'm not your mum.

Edit: Huh, looks like greenmangaming gets their keys directly from the publishers. Didn't know that was a thing. Guess I was a bit quick on the trigger there, should have checked first. Sorry about that.

isthereanydeal.com

No grey market key sellers, only legit.

Huge plus that they aren't publicly traded and forced to chase profits above all. Plus their employees are far and wide the best paid in the industry, and they never do mass lay offs.

I don't believe gog will ever have a full library. They require all their games to be DRM free. Until corporate gaming changes GOG won't.

Yep, if you want a reason why Valve are "less evil" than other companies, one big thing to point to is the huge investment they've made into the Linux ecosystem. Even though it's in their own interests (Microsoft locking out steam would cripple their income), we can see with Epic suing Google/Apple that there are other, shittier ways that they could have attempted the same thing. The investment they've made into Linux, Proton, KDE etc benefit everyone and can't be taken away on a whim.

I realised that those who censor themselves on the Internet, grew up on the Internet when YouTube started demonitising profanities and thus picked up the habit.

We are getting old.

Looks like it was baked into the image template they used

Both things are currently true, they are a monopoly which is not good, but they are also acting nicely for the most part and not fucking people over despite their position

Most important of all they compensate their employees like they are actual humans.