Earlier today, we published an article about how Charlie Cleveland, founder and game director at Unknown Worlds, wants G2A to live up to their “we’ll pay developers 10 times the money they lost on chargebacks” promise.

G2A has now responded, saying that Cleveland’s comments are “just slander.”

The company also claims that the losses that Unknown Worlds experienced thanks to a credit card scam involving their game Natural Selection 2 happened ‘before G2A even existed’:

Launched in 2014, G2A Marketplace was celebrating its 5th birthday this year. The said keys were allegedly stolen and sold before March 8, 2013 – 6 years ago. Charlie wrote: “We paid $30,000 to deal with credit card chargebacks because of G2A.”

However, the company does also mention that prior to G2A Marketplace’s opening, there was another retailer known as go2arena. G2A claims that go2arena had a “totally different” business model and did not sell Natural Selection 2 in any way, shape, or form.

You can read all of G2A’s response here.

Original article continues below:

Back in July, we reported on how G2A were promising to “pay developers 10 times the money they lose on chargebacks” as long as the devs could prove that such a thing actually happened.

Now, as GamesIndustry.biz report, the founder and game director at Unknown Worlds, Charlie Cleveland, wants G2A to live up to their promise.

Hey @G2A_com – thank you for offering to pay 10x the revenue lost due to our @NS2 game keys sold on your shady platform. CC @RaveofRavendale You now owe us $300,000. Thanks. https://t.co/J5qof6wBZD pic.twitter.com/Oq97ofLoLD — Charlie Cleveland (@Flayra) August 12, 2019

Cleveland linked back to an Engadget article which talks about how a Natural Selection 2 credit card scam that caused Unknown Worlds to be $30,000 out of pocket.

Now, Cleveland wants G2A to live up to its promise of compensating devs 10 times the amount lost on investigating chargebacks by giving Unknown Worlds $300,000.

At the time of writing, G2A has yet to respond to Cleveland’s request.

In related news, G2A have extended the deadline for their key blocker tool, as only 19 developers out of their required 100 have signed up to the scheme.

Original article continues below:

A few days ago, we reported on how several indie game developers banded together to oppose the resale site G2A, saying that they’d rather that players pirated their games instead of purchasing them through the site.

The situation arose after Mike Rose tweeted about how G2A had taken out premium sponsored ads on Google. The ads appear before the devs’ own links and can’t be turned off.

Other game devs echoed Mike’s sentiment, with Rami Ismail pointing out how much time and effort it takes to do things such as investigate fake key requests and figure out credit card chargebacks.

However, G2A have now issued a statement that says that they’ll “pay developers 10 times the money they lose on chargebacks” as long as game devs can prove that such a thing actually happened.

You can find the first part of the official statement below:

Let’s lay all cards on the table. We will pay developers 10 times the money they lost on chargebacks after their illegally obtained keys were sold on G2A. The idea is simple: developers just need to prove such a thing actually happened on their stores. To assure honesty and transparency, we will ask a reputable and independent auditing company to make an unbiased examination of both sides – the developer’s store and G2A Marketplace. The cost of the first three audits is on us, every next one will be split 50/50. The auditing company will check if any game keys sold on G2A were obtained using stolen credit cards on a developer’s store compliant with card scheme rules from Visa and Master Card/payment provider rules. If so, G2A guarantees it’ll pay all the money the developer lost on chargebacks… multiplied by 10. We want this process to be transparent, so we will publicly report every step of the procedure. Meaning, you will get information such as who came forward, and what the verdict was, all of which will be published for everyone to see. If you’re a developer willing to cooperate, contact the G2A Direct team

G2A also say that they ‘are and always were open for discussion, but a real one, not empty accusations and catchy slogans’.

They also say that the Google ads were an error on the client’s side, as ‘nobody can impact the way that Google Ads work on default and there is no setting to make ads un-skippable’.

You can read the statement in full (including what G2A have called the ‘Wall of Text Edition™’) here.