Charlie Cleveland, Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s founder, demands a lot of cash from G2A: G2A is under fire once again.

The situation around G2A has been developing since July (No More Robots, an indie publisher asked everyone to pirate their games instead of buying them from G2A, a „grey market” website, which got a response from them, culminating in a rebuttal from Mike Rose, the founder of No More Robots, launching a petition to block G2A from selling indie games; it has over 6200 signees), and G2A got to a point where they promised a (Steam) key blocker where developers could pick which codes could not be sold as they are for giveaways or review copies. G2A wanted 100 developers to join the initiative by August 15, as they say, it is an expensive thing to develop.

G2A published a list of participants, but only nineteen names are on it: Beer Money Games, Bossa Studios, CCP Games, Crimson Leaf, Deep Silver, Dirty Beast Games, Dynart, Electrocosmos, Farom Studio, Fox Byte Games, Hound Picked Games, MetalBear, Modoka Studios Entertainment, Moonlight Mouse, Nyaargh, SimaGames, Squidpunch Studios, Tate Multimedia, Troglobytes Games. Thus, G2A expanded the deadline to the end of August, and they will be at Gamescom to discuss the situation with the developers.

On Gamesindustry, Cleveland wrote a comment about the situation: „G2A is such a gross company. It’s a load of cr_p that this tool would be “expensive” to develop. It’s also suspect how they are pushing the names of developers who don’t want their games to be sold on their service – it’s almost like they want blowback from players who don’t understand the shadiness of their service and be encouraged to review bomb those developers. It’s also terrible to put the impetus on developers to have to take action with G2A to get this proposal moving in the first place, while G2A profits off grey-market sales and credit card fraud.

Mike Rose is right – it IS better for players to pirate than buying a key off G2A. We paid $30,000 to deal with credit card chargebacks because of G2A (written about here). So, G2A, if you want to put your money where your mouth is, you will now pay us (Unknown Worlds) $300,000.”

That 30K case was in 2013 with Natural Selection, which was an FPS/RTS hybrid – it got more than 1300 of its keys deactivated, as they were acquired with stolen credit cards and then sold on third-party key websites like G2A. The 300K amount was because G2A promised ten times the amount the devs had to spend on chargebacks. Wube Software (who made Factorio) went with this promise, but on August 7, they said that G2A is still looking through the list of keys they sent them, so they have received nothing of the 66 thousand dollars (they spent 6600 bucks on chargebacks).

So G2A is still in a tight situation.

Source: Gamesindustry, PCGamer