G2A responds to petition for removal of indie titles, stating: "nature abhors a vacuum"

[AnotherGills 25]

Mike Rose, director of independent publishing studio No More Robots, recently received a boom of supporters after expressing discontent with G2A (a grey market key re-seller). With the recent attention being given to independent game productions being negatively impacted by G2A, Rose directed his Twitter followers to a petition he created.

The petition, titled “G2A: Stop selling indie titles on your platform”, has a link to a G2A-published article, claiming that “just 8% of games sold on their platform come from "indie" titles.”

With this statistic in mind, Rose’s petition feels the solution to independent productions being hurt by G2A would be removing the selling of indie title keys.

G2A responded to the petition on Twitter:

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"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 also tweeted about a solution to the problem:

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"Here are 2 solutions to the problem: 1. Every single reseller in the world + Ebay and most of the other marketplaces would have to somehow distinguish those keys. (impossible) 2. Devs could use platforms like http://Woovit.com  to regulate them easily. (actually doable)"

Finally, G2A published another article on their blog, titled “G2A vows to pay devs 10x the money proven to be lost on chargebacks”, and as the namesake implies, G2A states:

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“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.”

The blog post also discloses information regarding sales data for Descenders (a No More Robots published title that was the center of the initial backlash), as well as criticizing Mike Rose's initial anti-G2A effort:

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"We want to believe in the developers’ clean motives. But we also know that if there was a real problem, the most obvious reaction to that would be trying to fix it. If you had a reason to believe your keys were illegally obtained and ended up on G2A – what would you do to solve the issue?

1. Write to G2A and solve the problem together
2. Go to Twitter and write “F**K G2A!”

Obviously: point A, right? Well, not exactly – the developers who posted tweets over this past week haven’t tried to solve the problem together with G2A. That’s why we can assume the reason they wrote those posts was to gain media attention. Unfortunately for G2A, they were incredibly successful: their tweets caused an avalanche of articles."

This policy change is a big difference from the last time G2A received fire from developers and publishers. In 2017, Gearbox Publishing had entered a publishing deal with G2A for a special collector's version of Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition. After receiving backlash for this deal, Gearbox Publishing provided G2A with an ultimatum, pertaining to pro-consumer policy changes. G2A did not comply, leading to Gearbox Publishing pulling out of the deal, and G2A releasing a statement defending their stance.

Seeing G2A claim to pay developers and publishers back in cases of fraud appears to be a noble step in the right direction. Only time will tell whether or not they hold true to this policy.

 

[Guest]

I'd recommend anyone interested in this story read this tell-all piece from GamesIndustry.biz: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-07-05-g2a-we-want-to-finally-stop-the-accusations-weve-been-getting

This is nothing more than G2A's latest, lies-and-half-truths attempt to misdirect people from the genuine problems of their platform - at least, the ones they're willing to admit.

[rusticlout 1]

On 7/7/2019 at 10:49 PM, Expack3 said:

I'd recommend anyone interested in this story read this tell-all piece from GamesIndustry.biz: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-07-05-g2a-we-want-to-finally-stop-the-accusations-weve-been-getting

This is nothing more than G2A's latest, lies-and-half-truths attempt to misdirect people from the genuine problems of their platform - at least, the ones they're willing to admit.

If indie developers cared about their keys being sold on the grey market, maybe they should learn to cut back on generating keys to hand out like candy for favors. You'll notice the availability of indie game keys come down to who the developer is, and I roll my eyes at the people screaming about it the loudest since it's always those devs who constantly do giveaways or hand out their game for free 'for review purposes'.

Plus, G2A do not force control over the flow of legitimate keys, and really only have a responsibility to crack down on fraudulent purchases which they have done tenfold over the last few years... The problem isn't the grey market... it's indie devs who can't or refuse to use common sense.