The shady online key reselling marketplace has recently come under fire as it keeps turning out to be the “bad guy” for developers.
Several indie developers have been publicly speaking out about how G2A is hurting their business by selling stolen/illegal keys through their market. This way not only do developers not earn anything, but they instead lose money by wasting time in customer service, which potentially could’ve been used in actual development.
“Please, if you’re going to buy a game from G2A, just pirate it instead! Genuinely! Devs don’t see a penny either way, so we’d much rather G2A didn’t see money either.” – Mike Rose on Twitter
This issue has been going on for many years, with many indie developers even asking people to rather pirate their games instead of purchasing from grey markets like G2A and supporting actual “thieves”.
This has even led to developers starting a petition asking G2A to stop selling Indie titles.
“G2A’s platform hurts indie devs time and time again, by allowing anyone to sell illegitimate keys for their games online, with incredible ease, and no ramifications or checks.” says Mike Rose.
But it doesn’t end here, as a G2A employee made it even worse by trying to pay the press for favourable coverage, which got out on the internet. Thanks to Thomas Faust publicly posting snaps of the email he received.
“We have written an unbiased article about how ‘Selling stolen keys on gaming marketplaces is pretty much impossible’ and we want to publish it on your website without being marked as sponsored or marked as associated with G2A. It is a transparent and just review of the problem of the stolen keys reselling.”
They faced a lot of criticism for this dirty failed attempt to try to clear off the PR backlash by bribing the press. Sponsoring without disclosure isn’t even legal in most places. They could possibly even face legal issues regarding this.
G2A was quick to post a reply to the tweet claiming that it was one of their employees who did it without any authorization, and also mentioning that Thomas was only one of the 10 media outlets he had contacted:
We can’t say if this is true or just a cover-up but it certainly didn’t help G2A from all the heat they’ve been getting lately. With all the press, YouTubers covering this act, it has turned out to be much worse to them than they ever would’ve expected it to prove good.
This is something that won’t be forgotten soon and will supposedly drive people away from G2A.