G2A agrees to pay Factorio dev $40,000 for selling stolen game keys

[Andrew]

In context: To say G2A is a controversial figure in the PC gaming industry would be a dramatic understatement. The "gray" marketplace has made headlines time and time again for general misbehavior and accusations of shady business practices, such as knowingly facilitating the sale of game keys purchased with stolen credit cards.

...

G2A, for its part, tried to combat this criticism by boldly (and, some would say, arrogantly) offering to pay developers 10x the original cost of an illegitimate key as compensation -- but only if fraud could be proven by a third-party auditing firm. Naturally, many developers scoffed at this concept, but it seems one studio (and only one) chose to take G2A up on its offer.

 

Source

[ENTERPRISE]

G2A is a very grey market but I will not sit here and pretend I have never used it. I have used it before to get some great deals. Some would say that is enabling bad practises but from a consumer standpoint, we cannot tell if keys G2A obtained are illegal or legal. Consumers are always going to go for the deal, whether it be possibly a grey area or not. This is why they have done so well up to date.

 

What makes me laugh is G2A are probably wishing they had now made the policy of paying a dev 10x the cost of illigitmate keys. I should imagine they assumed (and mostly correctly) that Devs will not bother with chasing this due to the cost of doing so may outweigh the benefits, but of course there will always be the one that will stick it to them and it looks like that time has come.

[Andrew]

The thing with G2A is, I don't think they actually sell any keys themselves. They're basically just eBay for game keys. The only difference of course being eBay immediately removes the listing of illegitimate items when the rightful owners complain about it. G2A were just being arrogant about it saying they'd pay out 10x the lost amount if you use a third party auditing firm that meets their standards. Funnily enough, basically no auditing firm met their standards until Wube Software found a firm that did meet their standards.

[ENTERPRISE]

The thing with G2A is, I don't think they actually sell any keys themselves. They're basically just eBay for game keys. The only difference of course being eBay immediately removes the listing of illegitimate items when the rightful owners complain about it. G2A were just being arrogant about it saying they'd pay out 10x the lost amount if you use a third party auditing firm that meets their standards. Funnily enough, basically no auditing firm met their standards until Wube Software found a firm that did meet their standards.

 

Yeah that is true, they are more of an Ebay for game keys which inherently is the issue as none of the sources I bet are truly vetted to check the legitimacy of the keys, not that I can confirm that as I have never joined as a seller BUT I cannot see how G2A could verify to make sure the keys were sourced in a legitimate way.