After years of controversy, gray-market game key marketplace G2A has admitted to what it has long been accused of by angry game developers: profiting from the sale of illegitimate download keys—at least in one specific instance.
In a blog post yesterday, G2A confirmed that 198 copies of Factorio sold on G2A in early 2016 were indeed obtained illegitimately. G2A says it will pay Factorio developer Wube 10 times the 'bank-initiated refund costs' it incurred for those fraudulent purchases, or roughly $40,000.
But the discovery and confirmation of the fraudulent keys in this one specific case come only after years of controversy and argument over the role of the marketplace.
A long history of alleged fraud
Yes, G2A is a Legit site to buy cheap game keys. G2A and other Gray Market sites offer sellers to sell game keys at a very affordable price and moreover legally. Users can choose whether they wanted to buy games from the platform itself or from third-party resellers. It’s totally legal unless the seller obtains those keys from frauds.
- Game key reseller G2A has been in the news quite a bit lately, and not for good reasons. Publisher tinyBuild accused it of selling $450,000 worth of its games without paying it anything, leading.
- CJS CD Keys specialises in offering digital download keys for the latest games with instant delivery. Since our launch in 2009, we have always strived to offer only the best possible prices, with an outstanding level of service.
G2A allows its users to take game keys obtained from outside sources—such as bundles or third-party online stores—and resell them for a price they set themselves. But developers have long said that many of those games' keys come from purchases made on other platforms with stolen credit cards.
These users then allegedly use G2A to sell those keys for cash (usually at well below the going rate), effectively laundering the purchases before the illicit charges are discovered. While G2A pockets a portion of these illegitimate sales, the original developer is stuck paying for the credit card 'chargeback' fees associated with them.
The issue of stolen-key reselling started gaining prominence in the industry in 2016, when indie game developer TinyBuild said it had lost $450,000 in sales to fraudsters abetted by G2A. 'Websites like G2A are facilitating a fraud-fueled economy where key resellers are being hit with tons of stolen credit card transactions and these websites are now growing rapidly due to low pricing of game keys,' TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik wrote at the time.
AdvertisementG2A responded strongly, asking Tiny Build to provide 'the list of the keys they deemed without any verification as stolen.' But TinyBuild said it would take 'a ton of time on micromanaging this' to separate out all the illicit keys from legitimate keys purchased through bundles and giveaways. And Nichiporchik said he didn't trust G2A enough to work with them on the case anyway.
'Everybody knows their reputation,' he told Polygon in 2016. 'Why would anyone even consider giving them a list of keys to ‘verify’? I believe they'd just resell those keys and make more money off of it.' That reputation was a big part of the reason Gearbox ended its partnership with G2A in 2017.
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. https://t.co/25NWxrj8f8
— Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) June 30, 2019
Vlambeer founder Rami Ismail summed up the general industry consensus around G2A in a 2019 tweet: '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,' he wrote. 'These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service, investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and more.'
Wube “satisfied with the results”
In the years since TinyBuild's accusation, G2A has offered a few potential solutions for developers to deal with alleged fraud problems. These include G2A Direct—a program that gives developers additional monitoring capabilities and a 10% cut of each sale—and G2A Pay—a retailer-controlled payment processor that offers 'chargeback protection.' But these solutions have gotten little traction with developers who still don't trust the site and are wary to work with it more closely (and offer it credibility) just to be protected from fraud.
So we come to last year, when G2A made a limited time offer that it said was '[putting] 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.'
AdvertisementFactorio developer Wube was the only company to take G2A up on that offer, the retailer said. And though G2A initially offered to pay the full costs for a 'reputable and independent auditing company' to conduct that investigation, it eventually decided to conduct the investigation itself after none of the auditors it approached 'would meet our agreed requirements.'
'Major auditors, as a matter of general policy, are unwilling to communicate the findings of their private audits in public,' G2A said in a statement to Kotaku. 'Clearly, it was imperative for both G2A and Wube to make the results of this investigation public. Therefore, in the interests of reaching a resolution as quickly as possible, we offered to conduct the investigation ourselves.'
Wube, for its part, told GamesIndustry.biz that it was happy with the process. 'They produced quite a detailed report of the keys, who sold them, what dates and times they were sold,' Wube PR, Community and Support Manager Scott Klonan told the site. 'I thought they probably wouldn't fake it, especially since it's still over half of the keys we sent. We are satisfied with the results.'
That said, Klonan said going through such a cumbersome audit process was only worth it because of the temporary ten-times multiplier G2A offered for such confirmed fraud last year. 'The amount of time it takes and administrative dealings to get this refund, it's probably not worth the monetary compensation if it was not 10x,' he said.
Wube also owned up to its own role in the fraudulent sales to GI.biz, saying that direct sales through its site in 2016 were less secure than those on other platforms. Since Wube switched to using the Humble Store widget for its direct sales and started restricting its once-prolific key giveaways, Klonan said fraudulent sales on G2A 'stopped completely.'
'In the end, contacting G2A is treating a symptom of people stealing keys,' he says. 'The best way to combat that is to cut it at the source.'
[UPDATE: A G2A spokesperson has provided additional effort on the company's efforts to stop the selling of stolen keys. It is at the bottom of this post.]
Over the years that the company has operated its key-selling website, G2A has gradually become one of the most controversial marketplaces in the entire video game industry, with countless accusations thrown its way surrounding fraudulent acts, morally devoid advertisement schemes, and even several attempts to bribe journalists. The company has, however, consistently claimed that its services aren't as morally corrupt as many have accused them of being, to the extent of often making grand promises that it can prove its innocence.
As it turns out, G2A was actually taken up on that offer by a developer, with the marketplace launching a private investigation following the studio accusing the site of selling stolen keys that originally belonged to them. Unsurprisingly, the investigation discovered that G2A had in fact been selling the developer's stolen keys, catching the site red-handed.
RELATED: Armed Robber Who Stole Over $130,000 From GameStop Receives Prison Sentence
The developer in question was a small studio called Wube Software, who contacted G2A following the site's offer that it would pay any developer who could prove keys for its games being sold on the site were originally stolen 10x the value of the missing codes. While G2A was clearly confident that its investigation would turn up very few results, almost amusingly, it turned out that out of the 326 codes Wube Software had reported stolen, the marketplace had distributed 196 of them to customers. Following the discovery, G2A paid Wube Software a whopping $39,600, alongside issuing an apology and swearing that, in the future, it will try to be better at catching stolen codes.
G2a Keys Revoked
In a statement, G2A claimed 'When we launched this offer, we wanted to send a clear message to the gaming community that fraud hurts all parties. As we spell out in this blog, fraud directly hurts individuals who buy illegitimate keys, it hurts gaming developers and it ultimately hurts G2A because we are forced – as the transaction facilitator – to cover costs related to the sale. we want to continue building bridges... we will compensate developers the full value of any chargeback fees they incurred for any keys sold via G2A's marketplace, if they are able to prove they were illegitimate.'
While the idea of compensating developers for illegitimate keys is undeniably a strong first step, many have rightly pointed out that G2A is still trying to steer clear of accepting the blame for the incident, claiming that they too are a significant victim of fraudulent sellers because they have to compensate developers. The fact sellers can still put illegal keys easily on G2A shows that the site has significant issues that it needs to sort out, perhaps by implementing new security measures that better vet which codes can be sold on the marketplace. Until then, G2A has no place playing the victim card.
A G2A spokesperson has provided the following info on security:
“Over the last few years we have taken extensive steps to beef up our seller verification process, leveraging proprietary AI technology, and human expertise, to ensure we are protecting our users.”
“As a result of these efforts, less than 0.02% of codes sold across our site are thought to have been obtained illegitimately. For a major online marketplace of digital products, this represents an industry-leading fraud detection rate, but for us it’s still not good enough. We are fully determined to eradicate the sale of any stolen keys from our market, that is why we are continuing to invest significant sums of money towards developing new anti-fraud technology. As we continue with these efforts, we are asking the developer community to tell us about any keys that they know have been obtained illegitimately, so that we can check our site records and have them taken down immediately.”
“We would be the first to admit that, in our formative years as a company, we took too long to recognize that a small number of individuals were abusing our Marketplace. However, the criticism we received was the wake-up call we needed, and over the last years we have been totally committed to tackling any incidents of fraud on our site. Today we some of the most sophisticated proprietary anti-fraud AI technology of any online marketplace for digital products.”
MORE: GameStop Online Sales Spike By 1,500 Percent
Source: G2A.com
Are G2a Keys Legit
G2a Steam Keys
About The Author