The founder of Descenders publisher No More Robots, Mike Rose, has let loose an assault on G2A. This comes after the key reseller’s latest unethical practices have been exposed.
G2A is sponsoring adverts on Descenders to improve their search engine optimization on Google. This means those looking to buy Descenders will likely encounter G2A’s marketplace first. This, whilst unsporting, isn’t necessarily the issue. The problem lies at how developers often don’t make any money off games sold through key resellers.
Rose also outlined how it’s impossible to remove these ads. Attempting to do so simply shows a bar that’s permanently set to “Show ads from G2A.com.” Judging from his following tweets it’s fair to say Mike Rose was far from impressed by this.
“Please, if you’re going to buy a game from G2A, just pirate it instead! Genuinely! Devs don’t see a penny either way, so we’d much rather G2A didn’t see money either.”
G2A also allegedly paid streamers to read out pre-written statements reassuring people that G2A’s action was justified. These latest developments are hardly the first time G2A has come under fire for controversial business practices.
Just last year they were found to be charging users who didn’t log in for 180 days. Failure to log in would result in an account being charged €1 every month. Whilst later found to be found in G2A’s terms and conditions, it was obviously a shock to those who saw this. The Reddit post highlighting this has received just short of 43,000 upvotes.
Perhaps their biggest controversy to date came when John “Totalbiscuit” Bain confronted Gearbox over a partnership made with G2A. He brought to light the key seller’s history of selling keys received via credit card fraud. Gearbox proposed a list of changes G2A would have to perform for the partnership to go ahead.
Among these changes included removing the paid fee behind G2A Shield, their customer fraud protection. Other changes looked to address the site’s credit card fraud problem by opening an API to search for fraudulent keys. They replied by claiming every solution proposed in Gearbox’s ultimatum was already present and thus canceled the partnership.