Last week, prominent YouTuber TotalBiscuit was contacted by Gearbox Software after he said he would no longer be covering their games after they announced a partnership with G2A, an online marketplace where anyone can sell game keys. From there, Gearbox learned a lot about how G2A operates, leading them to publicly publish a list of demands they required G2A to comply with if the partnership were to continue. The deadline came and went, and Gearbox withdrew from the partnership. Today, G2A sent out a written statement in response to those demands.
The first demand from Gearbox said they wanted the features of G2A Shield free to everyone, stating: "All customers who spend money deserve fraud protection from a storefront. To that end, all existing G2A Shield customers are notified by April 14th that fraud protection services are now free and they will no longer be charged for this."
In response to this, G2A said that fraud protection is something all buyers at G2A always have. G2A Shield is just a premium service with benefits like cashback on purchases and faster customer service responses. So, to them, the demand from Gearbox does not make sense.
The second demand wanted some sort of service developers and publishers could use to search through keys and flag the stolen ones. No payment was to be required for this service, either.
This was the demand G2A's response spends the most time discussing. The majority of it is about what they believe to be a misconception of stolen or fraudulent game keys being sold on their platform. That the developers out there that spread this do so just because they are against anyone reselling keys anywhere. That all these developers want is to control the market and keep prices high on games.
Besides, G2A says that the currently cooperate with anyone that comes to them with a list of fraudulent keys anyway. That if they are presented with evidence, they'll go through and block or delete those keys free of charge.
The third demand was about having some sort of throttling service for non-certified developers and publishers so large quantities of their keys are not stolen and then sold on G2A before they can be caught.
G2A doesn't address this demand directly in their statement, but it gets wrapped up in the argument they gave to the previous demand: G2A does not have large quantities of stolen or fraudulent keys stolen on their service. Therefore, in G2A's eyes, this demand also does not make sense as they claim this does not happen on their service.
The fourth and final demand from Gearbox stated that they wanted G2A to restructure its payment system so that it does not try to hide or make more difficult to understand, certain fees that may be applied to a purchase.
G2A says they do not have hidden fees that are difficult to find. If they did, they said, they would not be as successful as they are. While there are fees, all are displayed clearly to the buyer. Interestingly, this reply is followed by this statement:
This, of course, does not mean that we pat ourselves on the back for a job well done and call it day. We are constantly working on bettering the marketplace and regularly make improvements.While they refute there being any problems immediately before this statement, what they say here seems to recognize that there are indeed problems. They do not go into detail on what it is they themselves see as problems that need fixing, however. They could be referring to G2A Shield itself, where they said in a reddit AMA a couple of months ago they recognized it had problems and were not happy with it—changes would be coming soon. The biggest complaint is in canceling it, which is a long process that you may not be able to do until the last few days of the month.
We will soon be publishing an analysis of the response from G2A in full.
What do you think of G2A's response? What of the whole situation? Let us know in the comments below.
