After numerous indie developers accused the controversial keyseller G2A of making it possible to sell illegally acquired keys on its online marketplace, G2A responded in July 2019: The online marketplace offered all affected studios the losses from illegal sales tenfold Want to reimburse the amount.
Now this reaction has produced a first result: Wube Software, the makers of the indie hit hit Factorio, almost get 40,000 euros from G2A paid.
Indie developer compensation
What is G2A anyway? The Polish website operates a marketplace where sellers can sell their game keys – the website itself sees its service as a kind of “Amazon Marketplace for Steam Keys”.
However, according to various game developers, many of these keys are purchased with stolen credit card data and then resold on the G2A gray market. According to their own statements, developers lose a lot of money through chargebacks in connection with keys sold illegally there.
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Game keys from abroad – is this allowed? – Stephan Mathé on keystores and keyselling
Only the factorio makers responded to the offer to replace the damage by ten times – other developers have probably refused to cooperate with the gray market operator and even said that players should pirate their titles rather than add them Buy keysellers.
Like G2A now in one Blog post Wube Software first submitted a list of 321 keys that were alleged to have been sold unlawfully. Of these, 198 could ultimately be attributed to G2A, for which they are now a little more than 36,000 euros in compensation paid.
You can read a summary of the complete discussion between G2A and various developers, where the keys actually come from and how G2A tried to improve its image with surreptitious advertising in our detailed article:
more on the subject
How the G2A dispute escalates
G2A sees itself as a winner
“The results confirmed what we were sure of – that we were only 198 out of over 10 million transactions a year [illegal erhaltene] Have sold keys through our website. “
However, 198 out of 321 illegal keys correspond to a dominant market share of 61 percent. Trying to equate sales for a game title with every transaction in the store also works at least doubtful.
No comment function?
As experience has shown that the discussion on the subject of keysellers is very emotional, we are moving the comments to our forum thread in order to be able to moderate the topic better. There you can comment as usual.
Gathering thread: G2A pays compensation to Factorio developers
