“Torrent my game instead of supporting shady resellers, I’ll even give you the link,” says game dev

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Developer Asks You To Pirate His Game Rather Than Buy It On G2A

Lars Doucet made Defender’s Quest, a tower defense RPG that costs $15 from the developer’s website, a couple dollars on G2A, and nothing on torrenting sites. And frankly, he’d just prefer you get the game for free over purchasing it from G2A.

In the wake of the TinyBuild and G2A controversy, another developer has gone on record to speak out against “shady resellers”, saying they’d rather people pirated their game than someone else profited from it.

“I never thought the day would come where I would passionately argue that fans should pirate my game rather than pay for it, but here we are.”

Publisher Mike Rose noted that a search for his games placed G2A ads for them above the publisher’s own link. “We make zero money on our games if people buy them through ads,” he said. He recommended people considering buying a game through G2A just pirate it instead.

In the latest episode of Fuck G2A: G2A has taken out sponsored ads on Google, which mean that when you search for our games, you get G2A popping up above our own links — and we make zero money on our games if people buy through the ads. And when you try to turn their ads off… pic.twitter.com/hSiIkaOLle — Mike Rose (@RaveofRavendale) June 29, 2019

Many involved parties allege that G2A allows keys that have been fraudulently purchased to be sold on their website. Unidentified parties will purchase keys en masse with phony or stolen credit cards and sell those keys on G2A. Despite G2A’s assurance that this doesn’t happen, there is a mountain of evidence that suggests otherwise, including someone who actually did it to prove G2A wrong. Because these keys were purchased fraudulently, not only do developers lose money on the lost sale, but they also have to pay money for the charge-back fees from accepting a bogus credit card.

Doucet also notes he takes no issue with legitimate third-party resellers, since the original key was rightly bought. You can find his full article on the subject of G2A and piracy here.

“A lot of people like to say ‘Piracy is theft.’ It’s not,” he says. “It’s an infringement of my legal monopoly right to control the distribution of my work for a limited period of time. Piracy is not theft. G2A is theft.”