G2A has been on the hotseat of criticism for many years. A lot of indie and mid-sized developers aren’t entirely fond of them due to the fact that they work as a gray-market reseller, offering global key holders to sell their keys to anyone at the lowest prices possible (how those keys are acquired are sometimes a mystery). Well, after their latest spat with developer and publisher tinyBuild, they decided to take the developer up on their challenge by implementing a royalty program for developers, allowing them to finally get a cut of the games sold through the marketplace.
G2A’s account director Chip Scarinzi sent out a press e-mail indicating that the royalty program would be implemented no later than July 29th, 2016, with preliminary testing to take place within the next two weeks.
They announced that developers and users would not incur additional charges, but developer royalties would be implemented, giving developers up to 10% of a third-party sale.
Developers will also be able to sell directly through G2A and their auctions will rank higher than third-party (re)sellers.
They will also be implementing developer funding options for gamers, enabling gamers to pay developers directly for a product, or to contribute additional funds to the developer if they please to do so.
This new feature will be available globally and will offer multi-language support.
According to G2A’s global public relations manager Jacqueline Purcell, she states…
“We want to reassure the development community that we monitor our marketplace extensively for any possible fraudulent activity. In the small fraction of cases where fraud may be detected, we investigate and ban offending parties from further participation. We work with law enforcement globally to track fraud and we are committed to ensuring that the marketplace remains safe. Dozens of payment providers work with us globally because they have total confidence in our security process.”
This is all in response to tinyBuild insinuating that many of the keys that were fraudulently lifted from their store seemed to appear on G2A. The gray market reseller made public statements claiming that they did not have anything to do with the stolen keys and that the keys being sold on their marketplace were all clean.
This back and forth spat lasted a while but eventually came to a head with G2A announcing that they would be addressing the problem on June 28th, this past Monday. Well, they did.
Perhaps now we’ll see if indie, mid-sized and larger developers and publishers will be more accommodating of G2A now that the popular marketplace is offering developer royalties. They’re not necessarily obliged to do so, but they have mentioned before that they want to help grow and sustain the gaming community, so we’ll see if this all works out in everyone’s favor come July 29th.
