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Eurogamer: G2A rep roasted by developers during live Q&A
- Thread starter LordOfLore
- Start date
sixteen-bit
Member
heard about this on twitter earlier. roast indeed.
Hubris is a powerful drug.
They actually believe their own PR that they are not doing anything wrong.
TeamLeftMatch
Member
Man that delusion G2A has. "Come one devs you get 10% of sales isn't that good" "We're sorry for any problems but our workforce is 40% so it's slow"
wish that was fake but I guess that's how a company prides itself for having 40% of their employees female. "It's their fault"
LordOfLore
Banned
UPDATE:
If you don't want your keys sold on G2A, don't generate tens of thousands of them for bundle sites. It's really that simple. As a developer, you have to ask Valve to give you keys, and then you send them off to whoever. Resellers owes you nothing if you screwed up.
I don't understand why people are mad at G2A when IndieGala, BundleStars, and whatever else site actually sold the keys you gave them to G2A. You gave them to a reseller, and then that reseller sold them in bulk to G2A.
Don't participate in bundles.
I don't understand why people are mad at G2A when IndieGala, BundleStars, and whatever else site actually sold the keys you gave them to G2A. You gave them to a reseller, and then that reseller sold them in bulk to G2A.
Don't participate in bundles.
I love how they try to compare themselves to eBay and the like over and over, yet continue to ignore not a single one of those services run a protection racket where you fucking have to subscribe to monthly fees to get some actual fucking costumer service if things go south when they are fucking required to provide it for free by law.
Bullshit. G2A fuckery is much more than bundle keys.
Also eBay constantly pulls down stolen goods and blacklists sellers.
Snowybreak
Member
Nothing at all really. It's a deflection tactic.
Deflection? But Bithell said it...
Bithell was mentioning it because Mirek had just tried to deflect by throwing it out there.
InquisitorAles
Member
Sorry, but this is one of the most dumb reasoning i've ever seen. What kind of logic is that, bundles are bad because some small portion of buyers are reselling keys? Yeah, let's punish everyone, including legit buyers, just because some people reselling keys on G2A! Bundles sites already have protection from keys hoarders, i can say for sure that BundleStars have 2 bundles per payment method limit, so you can't just buy a lot bundles from them and then resell them. Main problem are not bundles, but keys that were stolen or fraudulently received and then revoked by devs and publishers from G2A buyers.
Also, saying "bundles are bad" means that you also think that bundles from Humble Bundle are bad too and devs are dumb because they generating keys for charity purposes. Again, it's not bundles fault that some people are trying to make profits from their keys.
They are completely out of their fucking minds.
NeoRaider
Member
All this is starting to look like a witch hunt to me.
As long as they are selling cheap keys, ppl won't stop buying there. And developers can't do much about it.
Just look at their 2 bundles, ppl that were criticizing them for years were among the first to buy these bundles. I am not sure why is G2A doing these imo. random Q&As, what are they trying to prove? Ppl won't change their opinion just like that.
As long as they are selling cheap keys, ppl won't stop buying there. And developers can't do much about it.
Just look at their 2 bundles, ppl that were criticizing them for years were among the first to buy these bundles. I am not sure why is G2A doing these imo. random Q&As, what are they trying to prove? Ppl won't change their opinion just like that.
If memory serves me well, many of the keys that are sold through G2A are gotten by using fraudulent cards. That is why some developers said they would prefer people to pirate their games rather than "buy" them using G2A.
3rdamention
Member
Had some Sean Spicer vibes from that Q & A and the response later. Seems to be ignoring the facts at the expense of spin.
bonesmccoy
Banned
Many?
HandsomeCharles
Member
I don't think you understand the situation. It's not bundle keys that are the issue. The main issue comes from fraudulently acquired keys. These tend to be keys bought with stolen credit cards, which then issue chargebacks against the purchase (and rightly so.) When a chargeback is issued, the seller is actually given a fine, and in a lot of cases the seller is the developer. This means by only does the developer not see any money from that sale, but they actually lose money due to the fines associated with chargebacks.
However, by the time this has all gone through, the key can already have been resold on G2A, meaning the thief has made a profit. G2A is unwilling to prevent this kind of activity on their platform, hence why a lot of developers really don't like them.
Perhaps someone else can go into further detail as I'm afraid I don't have time right now
WaterAstro
Member
Putting aside how the keys are acquired for a moment, is my understanding correct that G2A gives devs a 10% cut on the resell of a key that the devs themselves have already sold once before to a distributor? (Again, putting aside the acquisition method; I'm aware of how chargebacks can result in negative revenue for a dev).
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt some of them are legal.
Actually no. They are all illegal.
Not of the key, of the fraud protection service. But it requires a lot of effort on the part of the dev to track and source inquiries about keys. That's why they're pissed.
Edit: It's ambiguously worded, but if it's on the entire sale then Bithell made a misleading argument (the 90% doesn't go to G2A, some portion goes to the reseller?!), but I'd assume it's 10% on whatever G2A keeps. So I guess that's theoretically double dipping, sure.
MrCompletely
Member
That douchy hat he's always wearing is not helping them appear as a legit business.
If G2A had been around when I was a teenager and didn't have/get money to spend on games, I would have been all about it. For young people who don't have the same ability as adults to engage with their hobby on it's economic realities, G2A seems wonderful. The fact that crime enables it is secondary to getting the games, especially if the crime is so far removed from their experience (they're paying for the games, it's obviously more ethical than pirating, right?)
Cus they get their games for cheap, they don't care who it hurts. Same with clothes and electronics.
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
People like cheap stuff.
The guy's responses are laughable. I mean, yes, you operate in a grey market. Own it. It's not illegal to do so. You won't suffer any reputation hits you don't already have.
The only thing is interesting to me. We live in a world where we expect hardware to be region free right? You want a switch cheaper than say, it costs in Australia? Import one. Etc.
Yet, if a game is purchase in say, france during a sale or something, and then resold in the United States - I don't really see the correlation to the negative impact on developers/publishers. They already received the money from the sale of that game. Isn't this akin to someone buying a game and reselling it at their leisure? (at least, that's the idea). It's a secondary market, no?
I mean, the final question was literally about region locking games - why is this deemed okay but region locking hardware isn't?
Seems all counter productive. Who cares what a customer does with the game after buying it. They want to resell it, oh well? I understand dealing with real fraud (people stealing credit cards, etc)
But I dunno. G2A's base system of customers reselling digital keys they purchased doesn't seem that shady to me?
The only thing is interesting to me. We live in a world where we expect hardware to be region free right? You want a switch cheaper than say, it costs in Australia? Import one. Etc.
Yet, if a game is purchase in say, france during a sale or something, and then resold in the United States - I don't really see the correlation to the negative impact on developers/publishers. They already received the money from the sale of that game. Isn't this akin to someone buying a game and reselling it at their leisure? (at least, that's the idea). It's a secondary market, no?
I mean, the final question was literally about region locking games - why is this deemed okay but region locking hardware isn't?
Seems all counter productive. Who cares what a customer does with the game after buying it. They want to resell it, oh well? I understand dealing with real fraud (people stealing credit cards, etc)
But I dunno. G2A's base system of customers reselling digital keys they purchased doesn't seem that shady to me?
Silly question perhaps, but if devs know a key was bought fraudulently and resold on G2A - or wherever - can they not revoke the key? Or is it a matter of the overhead involved in chasing that up, tracking and revoking?
The root problem seems to be the fraudulent transactions. I guess devs might view G2A as offering incentive to fraudsters by providing a easy resell outlet for them, but I'm guessing if G2A wasn't, someone else would, now that the genie is out of the bottle. It might be a bit naive to think that if G2A changes, fraudulent activity aimed at profiting from resale outlets will go away.
The root problem seems to be the fraudulent transactions. I guess devs might view G2A as offering incentive to fraudsters by providing a easy resell outlet for them, but I'm guessing if G2A wasn't, someone else would, now that the genie is out of the bottle. It might be a bit naive to think that if G2A changes, fraudulent activity aimed at profiting from resale outlets will go away.
The costs involved when you get a chargeback are huge. Like, you can put people out of business with that.
They can, but it's​ painful. Consumers often end up blaming the developer instead of the seller.
What I don't understand is... if not fraud or hacking, where do all these keys come from?
My core gripe with G2A is that they're frequently dishonest right from the start. It's not like an average gamer can easily buy a CD key.
They try to spin this pro-consumer brand, but I don't think selling CD keys is a normal consumer activity.