Forgive me for speaking about the PC marketplace again so soon, but I've had another topic come to mind in this department. I want to talk about a spot of bother that has alighted within the discourse surrounding the 'grey market' online retailer: G2A. Now, full disclosure, I'm actually a bit of a square when it comes to online PC marketplaces. Although I have about 4 launchers installed, I've only ever purchased games from Steam. As such, I've never taken any risks with some of these less-than-kosher transaction sites like the one I'm speaking of today. However, G2A seems to be the poster children for shady retail business practises so I feel I'd be remiss not to write at least blog on them.
Recently, you may have heard about that tweet from Mike Rose wherein he urges consumers to consider pirating games over buying them off of G2A. It's a very alarming statement, indeed. It makes one wonder 'what does a service have to do to someone that would make them send out a damning message like that'. And then you look into it and you begin to understand. See, I referred to G2A as a 'Grey Marketplace' earlier and I did so intentionally. You see G2A are not, themselves, a launcher. They can provide games but not support access to those games in the way the Epic, Steam, Uplay and Origin does. As such, G2A operates by selling activation keys for those other retailers through their storefront for heavy discounts. This sort of second-hand marketplace may seem like a inevitable growth from a capitalist economy from the surface, but as with anything in life, it ain't all that simple.
G2A accepts Steam Keys sourced from the public and wantonly distributes them for a slice of profits. The problem is that they often find themselves being enablers of some particularly shady sales scams. Most prominently mentioned is the scam with stolen credit cards. Steam keys are bought with stolen credentials then quickly turned over through G2A; once the victims discovers the charge and cancels the card, the credit card charge-back goes straight to the developer. Steam likely ends up cancelling the key too, leaving the developer and customer out of pocket. This wouldn't be so harmful if we weren't also talking about Indie companies suffering from this scam. You know, the one's who lack the backing of a big publisher and have to devote potential development time to chasing down credit card transactions and paying bank charges in their own time.
Another grift, brought to light by Mike Rose in his tweet chain is the 'steam gift' scam. This one isn't so familiar to me, but from what I can tell it involves selling a link instead of a key. When the customer clicks on the link they are promised to be gifted the game over the 'Steam gift' function. Much like you would expect from trusting strangers over the Internet, nothing comes of the promise. The seller makes their money, the retailer makes their commission and the customer gets diddly squat. At least that's how I had it described to me.
G2A doesn't engage in this unknowingly, either. G2A has more than enough information at their disposal to be able to flag any suspicious activity immediately. The fact that they don't is indicative of either gross incompetence or willful negligence. Neither of which paints G2A is a particularly flattering light. They even made a point to, in an official statement, label this controversy as 'attention grabbing', which is stereotypical bad-guy talk. I don't mean to invoke an irreverent spirit in this matter or anything but you really just can't make up how bad the G2A team is at PR. Genuinely awe-inspiringly terrible.
That isn't even the only way the G2A has actively worked against the best interests of developers, either. When Mike Rose was starting to bring all this to light; G2A, in their infinite wisdom, decided to take out a google preferred Ad on his game 'Decenders'. This means that when you search for his game on google, their listing comes up first, eclipsing his own. You seriously couldn't make up a more perfect pantomime villain at this point.
In all seriousness the effect that 'flea market' sites like G2A have on the games industry is worrying. When they make a mistake it has a very serious impact on the indie community. Their bad practises have the potential to cripple small developers in ways that those developers cannot fight against. Unless we begin holding these people to higher standards we may see some of these studios get killed off through no wrongdoing of their own. Companies like G2A will, and have, argue that if they disappear than someone else will pop up and do exactly what they do within a week. I hope that you see how stupid of a statement that is too, dear reader.
So what is the solution? Well nothing cut and dry, I'm afraid. As asinine as their statement was, G2A are correct. Scammers will always scam, there's no changing that. But there has to be a better way to police the online marketplace from these kinds of practises. Mike Rose, as previously mentioned, advocates for pirating games over buying them from G2A; but that's more a spiteful gesture then a plausible solution. In time, some organising body will undoubtedly take over and slap down regulations, but this will likely end up in blow back for legitimate traders too. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, for some of these legitimate retailers (Such as Steam and Epic) to utilise some of their profits to work towards fixing the problem before someone comes along and fixes it for them. Until then, we can simply wait and see how this all plays out. It's out of our hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment