Inside the PC Game Gray Market Economy

The PC games “gray market” isn’t just a couple of shady websites. It’s an economic behavior that exploits regional pricing and promotion timing to siphon revenue away from publishers. In this episode, Our host, Alexandra Takei, Director at Ruckus Games, sits down with Vadim Andreev, CEO of Rokky (and former founder of PlayKey), to unpack how retail-era code resale evolved into today’s global key-arbitrage machine.

Vadim breaks down two core leak points: regional price arbitrage (buying keys in cheaper markets and reselling in premium ones) and promo stockpiling (buying deep-discount keys during sales, then reselling...