[Updated] GMG in hot water over Witcher 3 Keys

Green Man Gaming is accused of selling faulty game keys for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt


Published: May 19, 2015 8:29 PM /

By:


Wild Hunt Key Art Witcher 3

Update: CD Projekt Red replied saying that they are not commenting on the situation.

If you've been anywhere near the internet in the last 24 hours or so, you know that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the current big thing in gaming. The game is one of the most anticipated titles of the year and managed to create a level of anticipation so high that hype will be from now on measured in Geralts. Needless to say, many gamers decided to pre-order the games by numerous means and distributors.

Among these, one of the most well known is Green Man Gaming. As many of its competitors, GMG sold a considerable amount of keys for The Witcher 3 in the weeks that led to the release. When the release day finally came, GMG encountered many problems in delivering the product to their customers. Said problems have been addressed in this blog post.

We apologise that due to unprecedented demand for The Witcher 3 from Green Man Gaming, the launch and dispatch of keys to you today hasn't been as smooth as we had hoped. We experienced a glitch in our automatic key delivery system that wasn't attaching keys to emails. Our engineering team are working quickly to rectify this. We're sorry if some of you may have received blank emails from us during this process.

Many users pre-ordered the game in the time frame GMG had the title listed at only 39$. A sound deal that convinced many to purchase the title. A sale like that caused many eyebrows to rise. Gamespot, among others, questioned the legitimacy of Green Man Gaming's supplier. That skepticism found some basis when CD Projekt Red itself told to Gamespot that they didn't sell GMG the keys and they have no idea where they came from. This lead GMG's CEO to release a statement reassuring its customers that the keys came from resellers approved by CDPR.

It looks like that GMG had some technical difficulties and some emails have been sent without a key attached. Since the problem arose, they updated the blog post and now looks like the system has been fixed. There have been GMG users that lamented that exact problem in the playfire (GMG owned gaming service and community platform).

Users from the playfire forum, though, report other issues with the aforementioned keys that are not clearly addressed in the blog post. For one, some users lament the fact that they received an invalid GOG.com key in their email. Others protested the fact that the keys has not been sent in a timely fashion. According to these users, the GMG store page said that the keys would have been sent before the release, so that users could pre-load the software. This apparently didn't happen, going as far as accusing the store of false advertising (We are unable to verify this since the store page does not have that line anymore since the game launched).

These issues led many disappointed customers to request refunds from the online store. From what is reported, GMG gave to all the people who requested it a full refund on their purchase in less than 20 minutes, no questions asked. Kudos to them on that.

We've reached out to GMG and CD Projekt Red for further comment and will update this article as soon as new information are available.

What you think of this issue? Do you regularly shop from other resellers than the official ones? What are your experiences? Let us know in the comments.

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


Luigi Savinelli profile picture
| Former Staff Writer

Gamer since I can remember and now writer for your enjoyment. Can't say more. Those games will not play themselves

More Info About This Game
Learn more about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Developer
CD Projekt Red
Publisher
CD Projekt
Release Date
May 18, 2015 (Calendar)
Genre
Open World, RPG
Purchase (Some links may be affiliated)