Game accounts: how the second-hand market works
Search any competitive game and you will find people selling accounts. It is one of the oldest markets attached to gaming and one of the least straightforwardly explained, mostly because the people writing about it are usually selling something. Here is the plain version.
Why accounts have value at all
Three reasons, and they are different from each other. Some accounts carry time - a rank, a level, a collection that took months. Some carry access - a region, a title that is no longer sold, a beta. And some carry a clean slate: a second account for playing with lower-ranked friends without dragging matchmaking around, which is the ordinary reason most buyers give.
What the terms of service actually say
This is the part that gets skipped. Most major publishers - Valve, Riot, Activision, Epic, Ubisoft among them - state in their user agreements that an account is licensed to one person and may not be sold, transferred or shared. That is not a grey area and it does not vary much between them.
What varies is enforcement, which is why the market exists at all. A publisher that cannot see a transfer generally does not act on one; a publisher that can - through a login from a new country, a payment method change, a support ticket that contradicts the account history - sometimes does. The risk is real and it sits with whoever holds the account afterwards.
How listings are priced
Price tracks four things, roughly in this order: what is on the account, how old it is, whether the original email can be handed over, and how quickly the seller wants to be done. That third one explains most of the gap between two listings that otherwise look identical. An account without its original email can be recovered by the previous owner at any time, and the discount on those is the market pricing exactly that.
What people check before money moves
- Who controls the email. The one thing that decides whether an account can be taken back. Everything else is secondary.
- Whether two-factor is on, and on whose phone. An authenticator still bound to the seller is the same problem in another shape.
- Region and currency locks. Some accounts cannot buy anything, or cannot play, outside the country they were made in.
- Purchase history. Items bought with a payment method that is later charged back are removed, and the account often goes with them.
- How long the account has existed. New accounts made to be sold behave differently from real ones, and matchmaking systems notice.
The honest summary
The second-hand account market is large, openly advertised and squarely against the rules of the games it serves. Nothing about it is hidden - what is usually hidden is that the buyer carries the whole risk, and that the cheapest listings are cheap for a reason that is written down in the terms nobody opens.