Tag: Games

Some of you may remember my recent article Some Devs Say to Pirate Games Instead of Buying From G2A in which I talked about certain game devs saying they would rather you pirate their games as opposed to buying them from G2A. Over the course of the last few days, G2A has reached out to me (Seriously, I think they may have been googling themselves. No clue why they know who I am) and asked me to share their statement on things. It would be truly dishonest if I didn’t share their side of things, so I will include a link to their full statement as well as some of the highlights that were more interesting to me.

First here is the link to their Statement. It is pretty long and broken up into three parts.

1. The offer for developers
2. A short summary in the form of TL;DR
3. The article presenting in detail what G2A is, how it works, and how it responds to developers’ needs.

They are offering 10 times the money back on chargebacks they lost money on, provided they can prove such a thing happened. The following is copy and pasted directly from their statement.

 

“To assure honesty and transparency, we will ask a reputable and independent auditing company to make an unbiased examination of both sides – the developer’s store and G2A Marketplace. The cost of the first three audits is on us, every next one will be split 50/50. 

The auditing company will check if any game keys sold on G2A were obtained using stolen credit cards on a developer’s store compliant with card scheme rules from Visa and Master Card/payment provider rules. If so, G2A guarantees it’ll pay all the money the developer lost on chargebacks… multiplied by 10.  

We want this process to be transparent, so we will publicly report every step of the procedure. Meaning, you will get information such as who came forward, and what the verdict was, all of which will be published for everyone to see.”

This all seems pretty nice, but it also seems like a lot of work on the part of everyone involved, but the 10 times the money back seems fair if it works out that way. They also say in their statement that they do have a way for devs to report suspected illegal keys that can be used to get them off the market and that they are happy to have an honest discussion, as long as it is an open and honest discussion, not just catchy slogans and accusations which also seems fair enough to me.

They also go quite in-depth with how their company works, and I encourage you all to go and read that. It is quite interesting and since I have never used their service I really had no idea how it worked. They also explain how their fraud department works video included, which I will also include.

 

They also end by explaining a lot of this started due to an unskippable as on google. They say that had to be an error on the client’s side because there is no way to do this with the default options for Google, and having used Google ads myself I can confirm, at least in my experience, this is true. I have never had any option that said hey make this unskippable. If bigger companies get different options I clearly have no way of knowing, I, however, did not. I will leave you with their closing statement copy and pasted from their statement, best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

“Although this is already a huge wall of text, we know we didn’t address everything, and we can expect comments such as “yeah, but they didn’t say anything about…they’re surely hiding something!” That’s why we’ll keep answering any questions by expanding this article.

PS: The first tweet was about an allegedly un-skippable automated G2A ad on Google. This was obviously an error on the client’s side, but we have already informed our friends at Google about it. There is no way that it was caused by G2A simply because that is impossible. Nobody can impact the way that Google Ads work on default and there is no setting to make ads un-skippable.”

Normally gaming developers would refer you don’t steal from them and buy their games. It is this weird thing they like called making money. PCGamer however reports that many game devs, such as Rami Ismail and Ragesquid are outright telling people that if they can’t buy the game at full price, instead of buying from a key reseller just pirate the game.

See the issue is they spend a lot of time and money to investigate fake keys and other such issues, and it cost them more than you stealing the game would in the first place. Obviously you should always buy your games so these people make the money they deserve, but I understand where they are coming from. If they aren’t going to make money anyway, why should they lose more money when they have to investigate these things. So best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.