G2A Promises 10-fold Refunds for Developers
In the statement, G2A promised developers a 10-fold refund as soon as they prove that the inactive keys they had to give players their money for were from illegal sources.
A few days ago, Twitter went bustling after developers Mike Rose of No More Robots, bitterly disillusioned by the expansive G2A advertising campaign, made an appeal to the players. He asked that instead of buying keys through a Polish company, they should download its games from illegal sources. The appeal was later joined by other devs. We wrote about it here.
G2A has just issued a two-part statement relating to the confusion. Without much foreword, this is the most important part of it:
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.
To assure honesty and transparency, we will ask a reputable and independent auditing company to make an unbiased examination of both sides – the developer’s store and G2A Marketplace. The cost of the first three audits is on us, every next one will be split 50/50. The auditing company will check if any game keys sold on G2A were obtained using stolen credit cards on a developer’s store compliant with card scheme rules from Visa and Master Card/payment provider rules. If so, G2A guarantees it’ll pay all the money the developer lost on chargebacks… multiplied by 10. We want this process to be transparent, so we will publicly report every step of the procedure. Meaning, you will get information such as who came forward, and what the verdict was, all of which will be published for everyone to see.
G2A representatives invite developers interested in the proposal to contact us and move on to the second, long part of the statement relating to Mike Rose's allegations. Note: there will be a lot of text. If you don't want to read, there's a summary at the end.
If you haven't read an earlier article about the origins of the quarrel, let's remind you: Rose wrote on Twitter about the fact that on Google's impossible to disable promotional advertising of the price of his game, Descenders, on G2A is displayed before the link to the official store, which can affect the revenue of the company. The mediator's answer is, to put it mildly, crushing:
We can assume Descenders is owned by at least 50,000 people. As an alternative, we might use SteamSpy estimation of 32,000 owners. [...] how many Descenders keys, since its release in May, came to G2A Marketplace. The number is… 5. Not 5 thousand. Not 5 hundred. Just 5.
G2A calculated its impact on No More Robots' business at less than 1%. Rose's tweets were rated as a marketing trick aimed at gaining popularity.
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? Write to G2A and solve the problem together or 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. They were incredibly successful.
The company also refers to very frequent allegations of selling keys obtained with stolen credit cards. It argues that obtaining codes in this way is not at all as easy as it might seem, because in order to steal a card you need to know how to do so, and selling the keys themselves, which could be bought with the help of the card, is not something so common that the crime becomes profitable. Which does not mean - they say - that such situations do not happen. G2A controls all the data of its resellers and allows users to evaluate them. Thus, if illegal activity takes place, the company has consequences (including legal ones). Problematic transactions are estimated at 1% of all cases. Every month it mediates in the sale of about one million games.
He also points out that he can't check the keys.
G2A cannot do is inspect every single key and check whether it will work or not. Not because we don’t want to, but because it’s technically impossible (once “checked”, the key becomes activated).
At the end of the statement we can read about the fact that G2A supports developers with its activities. Starting with selfless promotion of games in their social media, through the G2A Direct program, which provides developers with a return on sales of 89.2%, up to a percentage on sales of games by private individuals. The company also provides them with full access to a database of all their game keys sold, so they can block suspicious codes.
If you've crossed this sea of text, the last two things: G2A assumes that it is not an ideal store and reminds us that it has removed the widely criticised shield (G2A Shield) by replacing it with a Money-Back Guarantee. It also refers to ads that Rose could not disable - according to them, this was a simple technical error, which they have already reported to Google.
Whoa, that's it!
And now the summary, in the words of the company:
G2A is a marketplace that’s all about making the prices for gamers as low as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are and always were open for discussion, but a real one, not empty accusations and catchy slogans.
Now we know the prospects of both sides of the conflict. But it's not, I'm sure, the end of the story.
