You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

G2A, the key reseller that isn't particularly liked by most game developers is having some time in the spotlight and as usual, it's not for good reasons.

They have a bit of a history with developers, something I've written about before and even the first comment on that article was about keys being revoked that were purchased from G2A. They're a very shady company and I shall continue to urge people to support developers and shop elsewhere. You would think after Gearbox pulled the plug on their deal with G2A, that lessons would have been learned but it appears not.

So why are they back in the spotlight now? G2A decided to take out sponsored adverts on Google so that they show above more legitimate sources, as noted by Mike Rose on Twitter from the publisher No More Robots. Rose urged people to just pirate the game instead of buying on G2A, as game developers see nothing from G2A. Developer RageSquid, who made Descenders (published by No More Robots) also jumped in to say the same on Twitter "Please torrent our games instead of buying them on G2A". The situation gets then even murkier when Rose goes on to explain (Twitter thread) how some games end up on G2A and it's not pretty but it boils down to this:

- Someone sells a copy of a game using dodgy links and "Steam Gifts", waits until the game is in their account and they're happy
- At that point, they have plenty of options regarding how to kill that key and not pay for it

They're not alone in this feeling. Rami Ismail of Vlambeer also mentioned on Twitter:

If you can't afford or don't want to buy our games full-price, please pirate them rather than buying them from a key reseller. These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more.

Even Fork Parker, the Chief Financial Officer at Devolver Digital chimed in on Twitter to say:

G2A is getting a lot of flak lately but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s a garbage company.

Then we have Gwennaël Arbona, the developer of Helium Rain, who also jumped in to say:

Our game has never been offered on giveaway or wholesale, but you still did not take it down, despite our multiple demands.

Further Twitter posts from Arbona also note how they reached out to G2A back in November last year but are still waiting on responses. The list of developers complaining about G2A just goes on and on.

G2A has recently put up a blog post to claim they will bring in a "reputable and independent auditing company" who will look over claims of fraud. G2A also said they will pay developers "10 times the money they lost on chargebacks after their illegally obtained keys were sold on G2A". Their team also took to Twitter themselves, to say:

Let's say that petition goes and G2A decides to stop selling any indie game. "Nature abhors a vacuum". Sellers would move to the next platforms (there is like 20 of them) and then to Ebay and other marketplaces.

They're clearly aware there's an issue, but part of their argument seems to be that if they didn't offer this "service" someone else would. Not exactly a good foundation to an argument. Remember, this is the company that charges people every month, if they don't login to their account regularly! Yes, they still do that.

What's also brilliant is that G2A seem to be asking people to publish their "unbiased" article for payment, yet not mentioning that it's sponsored which is probably against some advertising laws, as well as being incredibly immoral and only continues to show how shady they are willing to be.

So now it has resulted in Rose from No More Robots creating a petition to ask game developers to sign their name to get G2A to stop selling indie games, since they're one of the most affected by it. The petition has so far managed to reach over three thousand signatures.

If you're wondering why things like the Humble Indie Bundle are a lot rarer now, websites like G2A are part of the reason. Too many developers worried about people mass-buying keys to sell on G2A, causing their games to be devalued over a very long time.

Updated after publishing, to add in a note about how G2A are trying to pay people to publish their article.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial
22 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
46 comments
Page: «5/5
  Go to:

razing32 Jul 10, 2019
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: razing32So what makes more sense ? Sell 90$ game to a few who will buy it or sell 60-40$ game to many more people ?

I cannot really tell what a game should cost, I never saw the numbers of a game producer (and couldn't evaluate them anyway). I got the feeling of a middle ground breaking away (or beeing bought away), something between indie and AAA, but I'm not sure about that either. What I see (in the Steam forums mainly) is people complaining about the price of 20$ indie games threatening to just download them, which I find quite ugly.

I think what you are referring to is AA.
Games that have some budget and a bigger team than 3 indie devs in a debroom but nowhere near the millions of AAA with teams of a hundered+ people.

20$ for an indie game is fair. In my personal opinion it depends on the mileage you get from it.
Terraria , Minecraft etc with huge replay value would deserver 20$ easy.

As for threatening to pirate games , on the steam forum of all places seems the stupidest thing possible.
Might as well post in all caps "please ban my account"
cprn Jul 11, 2019
Quoting: Mal
Quoting: cprnIt's so unfixable card associations invented insurance in form of chargebacks. It's as simple as that.

Chargebacks just charge sellers with the responsibility of identifying the buyer. Which makes also sense in the real world. You can ask for an ID card or something to identify the card holder. It's easy, fast, cheap.

But the evil is when lawmakers use real world common sense to regulate the digital one. Clearly you can't ask sellers to do something even large multi nationals have issues to do. Common sense is that the payment circuit identifies who is taking advantage of its credit service.

That and eliminating seller commissions would create the conditions to solve the issue in few years.

Clearly, you can. Showing ID in a physical world is nothing more but using a 2nd trusted factor. In cards world it's called a 3DSecure gateway - using 3rd party API (in this case the bank or card issuer's API) to 2nd factor the authentication between two endpoints (i.e. buyer's browser and seller's website). But banks dictate the cost of each 3DS request and it's not cheap so small publishers skim on it (as well as other risk management services). This is the reality of what's going on and the true cause of the issue. Cards are flawed. Extra security to mitigate responsibility for those flaws costs money. Publishers don't like to spend money so they don't buy it. They get burned with chargebacks.

What's more, it's not enough to integrate and pay for 3DSecure. G2A has that integration but over 95% of US cards doesn't have 3DS active. At least a year ago you had to call your bank and specifically ask them to activate it! If you do, you'll be bothered with 2nd factor every time you make a payment but at least nobody else is able to use your card (in theory). Still, people don't want it because if the 2nd factor is used during transaction, your card issuer can't claim a chargeback from the seller - 3DS cedes all the responsibility onto you.

Do e-commerce platforms have an alternative way of securing card payments? Sure they do! And it's almost free! I remember G2A once made a survey about adding extra security to card payments on their website and it came out very negative. It was rumoured they'll do it anyway and that's how Kinguin came to life, BTW. All they wanted to do is what Steam does now: one time 2nd factor authentication of each new payment method (e.g. new card) by charging a small random amount they later refund, and you have to tell them what amount it was proving you have access to the card's statement (i.e. you have credentials to your online banking). According to that survey (numbers are from the top of my head, it was years ago) G2A would loose around 50% of their card payments, realistically maybe up to 20%, but they are a big platform that lets people sell licenses for many many different games - not 10, out of which 7 are outdated. While people might feel incentivised to register their account and jump through hoops to add their card to that big platform, they wouldn't feel the same about a small publisher. Small publisher would probably loose about 70-80% of sales this way.

It's better than loosing 95% but still too much. So card payments security remains unfixed.


Last edited by cprn on 13 July 2019 at 10:57 am UTC
Mal Jul 11, 2019
  • Supporter
Quoting: cprnClearly, you can. Showing ID in a physical world is nothing more but using a 2nd trusted factor. In cards world it's called a 3DSecure gateway - using 3rd party API (in this case the bank or card issuer's API) to 2nd factor the authentication between two endpoints (i.e. buyer's browser and seller's website). But banks dictate the cost of each 3DS request and it's not cheap so small publishers skim on it (as well as other risk management services). This is the reality of what's going on and the true cause of the issue. Cards are flawed. Extra security to mitigate responsibility for those flaws costs money. Publishers don't like to spend money so they don't buy it. They get burned with chargebacks.

I know that ad hoc solutions exists. But they are expensive to implement and not very practical too. My argument is that in the grand scheme of things, the system doesn't work simply because transaction costs are hidden to the card holder and passed to the seller instead. Now ofc nobody like to see the commission charged on them (I don't like them at least). Yet in this situation the card holder is the one with the power to chose one circuit over another, while the seller is the one that is only being damaged by restricting itself to accept only certain circuits or making the payment process more clunky than necessary. So for the natural mechanics of market competition to occur, you need rules that create the conditions for a mindful choice by the actor with the actual decision power: the buyer. But this today doesn't happen, and often the most convenient payment circuits from customer perspective are the less efficient. Which creates a situation where the worse actually thrives over the better.

That's why I say that removing fees from sellers and charging them to buyers is part of the solution to create the conditions for the market quickly fixing the issue. First payment circuits being responsible of absorbing the costs of fraud use would force them to find the best tech solution to limit that or get an insurance to edge the risks. All while keeping the service convenient and the costs as lowest as possible in order to remain competitive with other circuits, given that those costs are charged to the one that can actually chose between one or another, the customer.
cprn Jul 13, 2019
Quoting: Mal
Quoting: cprnClearly, you can. Showing ID in a physical world is nothing more but using a 2nd trusted factor. In cards world it's called a 3DSecure gateway - using 3rd party API (in this case the bank or card issuer's API) to 2nd factor the authentication between two endpoints (i.e. buyer's browser and seller's website). But banks dictate the cost of each 3DS request and it's not cheap so small publishers skim on it (as well as other risk management services). This is the reality of what's going on and the true cause of the issue. Cards are flawed. Extra security to mitigate responsibility for those flaws costs money. Publishers don't like to spend money so they don't buy it. They get burned with chargebacks.

I know that ad hoc solutions exists. But they are expensive to implement and not very practical too. My argument is that in the grand scheme of things, the system doesn't work simply because transaction costs are hidden to the card holder and passed to the seller instead. Now ofc nobody like to see the commission charged on them (I don't like them at least). Yet in this situation the card holder is the one with the power to chose one circuit over another, while the seller is the one that is only being damaged by restricting itself to accept only certain circuits or making the payment process more clunky than necessary. So for the natural mechanics of market competition to occur, you need rules that create the conditions for a mindful choice by the actor with the actual decision power: the buyer. But this today doesn't happen, and often the most convenient payment circuits from customer perspective are the less efficient. Which creates a situation where the worse actually thrives over the better.

That's why I say that removing fees from sellers and charging them to buyers is part of the solution to create the conditions for the market quickly fixing the issue. First payment circuits being responsible of absorbing the costs of fraud use would force them to find the best tech solution to limit that or get an insurance to edge the risks. All while keeping the service convenient and the costs as lowest as possible in order to remain competitive with other circuits, given that those costs are charged to the one that can actually chose between one or another, the customer.

Let's agree to disagree.

I say 1 factor card payments should be dropped worldwide because 1 factor means it's a flawed payment method from the very beginning (i.e. it's never ever safe to pay with a card without 2nd factor and since all the middle-parties have access to this 1 factor - a complete set of information needed to pay with your card - you can only "trust" them to either not store it longer than necessary or store it safely and not re-use it without permission and never sell it illegally) and the system can only be fixed by securing them (i.e. adding a 2nd factor). As long as it's not done and people pay with their card everywhere, there will be card frauds.

You say the system is fine on a technical standpoint even though it's unsecure, but it doesn't work because of the punishment the merchant receives for allowing the fraud payment to occur in the first place because he was greedy, allowed unsafe payments and "saved money" on other forms of fraud prevention and risk management. You say this punishment in form of chargeback fees should be not only visible but also charged to buyers to force them to buy extra insurance or use that 2nd factor (knowing that 2nd factor won't work if the merchant doesn't use a 3DS payment gateway and that small merchants don't use 3DS payment gateways because they're cheap bastards) and that it should somehow be done without increasing the inconvenience of payment with a card.

On my last comment (in this discussion as a whole) I dare to say your proposal is exactly what we had before chargebacks. Take away the right to claim a chargeback entirely and you'll have what you want. Card owners paying for the security flaws of 1 factor card payments. Chargeback clause is a bad fix to a badly designed payment method. What you propose is 2nd bad fix to revert the 1st bad fix.
Mal Jul 13, 2019
  • Supporter
Nope. It doesn't make sense to charge customers the charge backs because they don't have the ability to implement anti theft measures. The payment circuit does so it should absorb those.

I say that the buyer should be charged just and all the regular commissions because the buyer is the only one that is in a position to decide which payment service is better quality vs cost wise. In this case for instance, if service implements an authentication feature that is to clunky a buyer could decide to go with a more expensive payment circuit anyway, one that has for instance less secure payments but offsets the fraud costs with an insurance or something that leads to higher prices.
pskosinski Nov 12, 2019
I was looking for a Monster energy drink and noticed something called LevelUp with G2A logo and that's how I heard for first time about G2A. Only recently I decided to search what is that G2A thing. They make really good energy drinks, for half the price of Monster and I was buying them for last month. But now I feel a bit puzzled, supporting that company. :S: https://www.g2a.co/limited-edition-drink-level-up-with-g2a-logo-only-at-zabka/
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.