TinyBuild says G2A’s ‘fraud economy’ has cost it $450k

Indie developer TinyBuild has revealed that it lost nearly half a million dollars in sales for its games to key selling website G2A.

Detailing the Punch Club, SpeedRunners and Party Hard creator’s dealings with the grey code marketplace on itsblog, TinyBuild’s Alex Nichiporchik posted figures based on numbers released by G2A itself. Worse still, Nichiporchik believes that the majority, if not all, of the codes offered for sale on G2A were acquired fraudulently using chargebacks on stolen credit cards – meaning the dev saw no return at all on those sales.

"The shop collapsed when we started to get hit by chargebacks," he recalled. "I’d start seeing thousands of transactions, and our payment provider would shut us down within days. Moments later you’d see G2A being populated by cheap keys of games we had just sold on our shop."

Summarising the whole situation, Nichiporchik lambasted websites like G2A [for] facilitating a fraud-fueled economy where key resellers are being hit with tons of stolen credit card transactions”.

Develop has a lot more details.