Last Updated on September 1, 2020 by Jake

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G2A recently bought some ad spaced on Google that displayed on top of indie games. if you searched for an indie game, you would see the ad from G2A rather than the official store or developer. Multiple indie devs came forward and mentioned that they do not make any money when people buy their games from G2A.

On the contrary, devs had to play money in the form of chargebacks. In order to avoid this hassle, the developers asked the fans to pirate their games rather than buy them from G2A. G2A has now responded to these devs with a massive post on their official website and the company claims that the indie devs will be given 10 times the money if the chargebacks are proven.

That is a very bold statement indeed. Here is what G2A had to say in this regard:

Let’s lay all cards on the table. We will pay developers 10 times the money they lost on chargebacks after their illegally obtained keys were sold on G2A. The idea is simple: developers just need to prove such a thing actually happened on their stores.

G2A mentioned that an external auditing company will be hired to check whether the key was illegal or not. G2A will pay for the first 3 cases but after that, the cost of the audit will be split equally between the indie dev and G2A. That seems fair enough.

G2A Responds To Indie Devs

G2A also mentioned that it is aware of the Twitter incident and provided a response. There is a short version which is as follows:

  1. G2A is a marketplace that’s all about making the prices for gamers as low as possible.
  2. G2A’s business model is the same as any other big, global marketplaces’ like Amazon or eBay, with all its ups and downs. And just like them, we always try to maximize the ups and minimize the downs. Not only because of the law, but also because the customers require certain standards, and because the competition would beat us if we stayed behind.
  3. Out of all marketplaces, G2A offers the best benefits for copyright owners – G2A Direct. Nobody else gives developers a percentage cut of all sales on their games sold by someone else.
  4. G2A, like most online businesses, uses automated marketing, so every product available on the marketplace can be shown based on what the user is interested in.
  5. If any developer suspects there are keys on the marketplace that shouldn’t be there, there’s a quick and easy way to report it. All it takes is to contact us. If any key was illegally obtained, we’ll remove it, block the seller and provide their personal data to the proper authorities.
  6. We are and always were open for discussion, but a real one, not empty accusations and catchy slogans.

The Descenders Issue

You can read the whole thing at the official blog. G2A mentioned that only 8% of the games that are sold on the platform are games by indie devs. The blog post points out that Mike Rose’s claims were flawed as only 5 copies of his game Descenders was sold on G2A.

The post concludes that No More Robots is pretty good at handling the keys they don’t want available on the free market and that G2A has no significant impact on No More Robots’ business. If indeed the number of keys sold were 5 then that is not much of an issue.

G2A also posted a video about where the seller get their keys from and you can check that out below:

Mike has since then Tweeted the following:

Why on earth would any developer want their game sold officially alongside a grey market? G2A do not care about the people who make games, no matter what spin they keep frothing out. Do not fall for it. Plenty of devs have tried to reason with them, but they are not to be reasoned with.

He has also started a petition to stop G2A from selling games from indie devs in a response to the claim that only 8% of the games are sold on the platform are from indie developers. At the time of writing, the petition has around 800 supporters.

We are not here to take sides but from what the numbers tell us G2A does not have much of an impact on No More Robots’ business. It could be a different case for some other indie developers. At this point, we can only tell you what we already know. I encourage indie developers to reach out to us so that we can learn more about the case at hand.