Update: In light of its live Q&A at the Reboot: Develop conference in Croatia earlier today, G2A has sent Eurogamer a statement. Within, the game key reseller addresses a number of the comments tied to the original story below.
Here's the statement in full as provided to EG by G2A's head of PR, Maciej Kuc:
"Grey market, despite the Wiki definition, works as a negative label and people who throw this name against us just want to damage our business—we cannot agree to that. Resale of keys is perfectly legal, it brings a lot of benefits to the gamers community as it introduces competition and prevents raising prices to unreasonable levels.
"Those who want to stop it act against free market and property rights that are essential to modern economy. If something is to be called grey or shady, these are the practices of making 'suggestions' aimed at hurting legally operating marketplace. If you call G2A gray, try doing the same with respect to eBay, Amazon and basically all the marketplaces—it is obvious that today we are simply a part of normal, legal market.
"Fees. We want to quickly explain our fees regarding developers and sellers, since there seems to have been a misunderstanding during the Q&A. There are two separate revenue streams for developers on our marketplace. The first revenue stream is from regular sales made directly by the developers. G2A only takes a General commission of 10.8 per cent from these sales—the remaining 89.2 per cent of the sale goes directly into the developer's pocket (which is way above the industry standard of 70 per cent).
"However, thanks to G2A Direct, developers are given a second revenue stream—they can make an additional up to 10 per cent on all third-party sales. This is an extremely attractive offer as no other marketplace gives developers a chance to make any money on third-party re-sales. Imagine that someone purchased a LG TV, and then went to re-sell it on eBay—eBay does not offer LG, or any other company, any percentage of this sale. We are the only marketplace in the world that offers this to developers.
"Neither our number of employees, nor what gender these employees are, are any reason to treat our company any differently. We are proud of our employees—especially since we work as one team despite that we come from over 30 different countries and have vastly different areas of expertise—but again, this is not a reason to treat our company any better or any worse."
Original story:
Between run-ins with Gearbox, claims that it sold $450,000-worth of tinyBuild's games without reimbursement, subsequently butting heads with the Punch Club developer at GDC—G2A has rubbed more than a few people the wrong way over the last several months. Today, the game key reseller's tumultuous reception continued as a representative faced a live Q&A at the Reboot: Develop conference in Croatia.
Chaired by Gamesindustry.biz's Dan Pearson, G2A's Mario Mirek was on the back foot almost immediately when he suggested his company was not a grey market operator and that "people don't understand [their] business model". This was not well received by the audience—a number of whom were game developers themselves.
Vlambeer's Rami Ismail was particularly vocal on Twitter as the live Q&A unfolded.
G2A basically saying that if we don't want grey market resale, developers and publishers should just region lock every key ever.April 20, 2017
Mirek later described the ten percent share that developers can receive from G2A as "very attractive", despite the lengths they have to go to prevent fraud, and informed the audience that 40 percent of the company is comprised of women in a seemingly unrelated response to why it takes the reseller quite so long to address its perceived shortcomings.
When the floor was turned over to the audience, Eurogamer managed to capture Thomas Was Alone and Volume developer Mike Bithell saying this:
The livestream below worth watching in its entirety for the sake of balance, however the repeated heckles and blunt replies from the crowd certainly suggest G2A has much to do if it ever hopes to find common ground with the game development community.
