Murky world of PC game key reselling exposed by indie developer

One indie developer claims a popular PC key-reselling website sold nearly half a million dollars' worth of its games - and didn't receive a penny in return.

In an email sent to Eurogamer Alex Nichiporchik, boss of Punch Club and SpeedRunners publisher tinyBuild, accused G2A.com of selling $450,000 worth of its games.

G2A, which acts as a retailer and an online marketplace for video game key selling, sort of like an eBay for PC games, is perhaps the most well-known website of its kind, and even sponsors streamers and game events.

G2A is popular because it offers an easy way for people to sell off keys for games they don't want, and in the process customers get a cheap price.

Nichiporchik, however, described G2A's business model as "fundamentally flawed" and said it "facilitates a black market economy". He accused G2A users of using a database of stolen credit cards to buy game keys in bulk from a bundle or third-party key reseller, then putting them up on G2A to sell them at half the retail price.

In tinyBuild's case, it attempted to sell its games from its own online shop, but it was crippled by chargebacks associated with fraudulent credit card purchases.

"I'd start seeing thousands of transactions, and our payment provider would shut us down within days," Nichiporchik said. "Moments later you'd see G2A being populated by cheap keys of games we had just sold on our shop."

Nichiporchik spoke with G2A and believes he has worked out the financial impact the marketplace has had on his business. The total value of the transactions on G2A was around $200k, he said. Meanwhile, if these transactions happened at retail price, it's closer to $450k. Here's the breakdown:

Nichiporchik asked G2A for compensation and was told, flatly, no. Here's the response:

It sounds like Nichiporchik has hit a brick wall with G2A - the website suggests tinyBuild's distribution partners are scamming the developer, and it should take up the matter elsewhere. Perhaps that's why he's taken the step of contacting press to complain and pen a blog post.

"There's no real way to know which keys leaked or not, and deactivating full batches of game keys would make a ton of fans angry, be it keys bought from official sellers or not," he says.

"Make your own conclusions."

(TinyBuild's website is currently slow to load, the result of a DDOS attack launched shortly after the blog post went live, according to Nichiporchik.)