G2A a game key seller, reportedly saw an employee reach out to 10 different journalists in an attempt to get published a pre-written "unbiased" and "transparent" article, that shone a positive light on their game key reselling practice. The G2A employee also suggested financially incentivising the deal, providing the journalist did not tell anyone about the financial transaction.

You probably aren't surprised to hear that most countries have a legal requirement for journalists to disclose any compensation received for publishing content. Otherwise its just advertising. So had any journalist gone through with this arrangement then I suppose the G2A employee could have theoretically gone on to blackmail any journalist. Threatening to show everyone that they took a payment for publishing content and didnt disclose it. I mean that sounds a bit extreme, but just take another look at the title of this article.

These laws of disclosure are there to prevent the types of dodgy missinformation that could even get the wrong types of people elected into office, as well as allsorts of other crazy dark stuff. Keep advertising separate. Basically, even outside of gaming, people dont like pay-to-win systems.

During a follow up back and forth between journo and G2A, highlighted below, we could see that G2A went on to say the employee responsible would be reprimanded for these actions. Polygon reported that when they pushed for a person responsible, the response was that no identitiy could be provided, due to the Disclosure and Employment law within the EU.

Here is some of the exchange that happened over on Twitter

We have covered this topic a few times in the past and just last week there was a developer that said they would rather you pirated their games than buy something from these key code sellers. Because using the latter would could mean that the developer was getting caught with refund bills, when illegally obtained bank cards were being used to purchase key codes that they would then resell in marketplaces like G2A.

We carried out an Up For Debate feature on this shadowy marketplace practice just a few days ago.

Whats your thoughts then guys?