{"id":96240,"date":"2019-07-05T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-05T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/346144"},"modified":"2019-07-05T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-05T19:40:00","slug":"developers-and-g2a-clash-over-the-impact-of-grey-market-keys-on-indies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/07\/05\/developers-and-g2a-clash-over-the-impact-of-grey-market-keys-on-indies\/","title":{"rendered":"Developers and G2A clash over the impact of grey market keys on indies"},"content":{"rendered":"

What started out as a tweet<\/a> from No More Robots founder (and former Gamasutra editor) Mike Rose has since spiraled into a Change.org petition<\/a> for the key reseller G2A to remove indie games from its platform, and a lengthy back-and-forth between the company and game makers about its effect on indies altogether.<\/p>\n

This latest discussion follows in the footsteps of several before it about G2A and the ease of which key resellers are able to flip illegitimately obtained game keys for a profit, despite G2A\u2019s previous efforts<\/a> to clean up<\/a> its image.<\/p>\n

At the kickoff of this chapter, Rose tweeted about sponsored ads for the No More Robots-published game Descenders<\/em> displaying a resold key on G2A ahead of any store listings where the game\u2019s publisher and developer Rage Squid would see a portion of that purchase. He offered the suggestion that people should pirate a game rather than make purchase it from G2A, something<\/a> several<\/a> developers<\/a> have said about their own games in years past.<\/p>\n

\u201cDevs don\u2019t see a penny either way, so we\u2019d much rather G2A didn\u2019t see money either,\u201d tweeted Rose.<\/p>\n

The replies to that original set of tweets are in the hundreds by this point, and include both developers echoing Rose\u2019s concerns and G2A users speaking in support of the storefront and its typically lower prices. After some initial back-and-forth on Twitter, G2A published its own lengthy blog post <\/a>to address both Rose\u2019s concerns directly, and the common belief that the storefront benefits from illegitimately obtained keys, often at the detriment of game developers\u2019 bottom line.<\/p>\n

In short, G2A asserts that it works with developers to remove keys that devs believe shouldn\u2019t be on its marketplace, and says that it offers a program called G2A Direct that allows devs to get a cut of third-party sales made on its platform. Beyond that, it says that only 8 percent of the games sold on G2A are indie titles to begin with.<\/p>\n

A portion of the post covers the common belief that G2A facilitates the resale of keys obtained through credit card fraud. That method sees individual key resellers using stolen credit card information to purchase games, reselling the keys, and then leaving developers on the hook for refunds once the fraud is discovered and a chargeback is ordered.<\/p>\n

As an example of that, a 2016 interview with an allegedly prolific game<\/a> fraudster called out G2A as one of the \u201cgreat sites to sell fraudulent keys,\u201d though G2A notes in its more recent blog post that it has reported individuals to the authorities for describing how keys were fraudulently purchased and resold on the platform in the past.<\/p>\n

According to data from G2A\u2019s support department, only 1 percent of all transactions made on its storefront are \u201cproblematic in any way,\u201d and only 2 percent of those (.02 percent overall) are potentially chargeback situations.<\/p>\n

G2A’s post also offers “developer[s] willing to cooperate” with an audit 10 times the money they’ve lost on chargebacks due to games sold on G2A.<\/p>\n

As a rebuttal to that post, Rose tweeted a small thread about the post\u2019s specific claims and kicked off the aforementioned Change.org position since, in G2A\u2019s own words, only 8 percent of its sales are reliant on indie games to begin with.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey say I have a ‘pretty good at handling the keys they don\u2019t want available on the free market’. Yes I do! And that’s because G2A exists. I’ve had to stop giving out keys so freely to potential press [and] influencers because G2A doesn’t care about policing their site,\u201d tweeted Rose. \u201cBecause of this ‘pretty good handling’, it means that we’re far less inclined to get involved with things like, for example, a Humble Bundle, as we know all the keys will appear on G2A afterwards, and tank our Steam sales from that point onwards. *This* is the issue with G2A.”<\/p>\n

That full G2A blog post can be read here<\/a>, while more from Rose’s thread addressing it can be in full here<\/a>, in addition to the snippet just below.<\/p>\n

\n

You can see that one guy selling 102 Steam keys on February 14, 2018. At that point the game was only available on Steam, and was 10% in the launch sale. I remember seeing these keys on G2A for around $13 at the time<\/p>\n

So how did this one person get 100 keys he could sell for $13?<\/p>\n

\u2014 Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) July 5, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What started out as a tweet from No More Robots founder (and former Gamasutra editor) Mike Rose has since spiraled into a Change.org petition for the key reseller G2A to remove indie games from its platform, and a lengthy back-and-forth between the company and game makers about its effect on indies altogether. This latest discussion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}