G2A have extended the deadline for their proposed key-blocking tool, as more developers are unhappy with them

Recently, after G2A appeared in the spotlight once again for being terrible, they offered to make a key-blocking tool for developers. This was offered after our recent article highlighting a bunch of problems, an article that's worth a read as a little background on what's going on.

According to G2A, such a key-blocking tool would be "time-consuming and expensive", which is completely ridiculous because it's a pretty damn simple feature to make, with it comparing lists of keys against what users try to sell. Not just that, they also required at least 100 developers to sign up to it before they would do it which is also outrageous. They even gave a deadline of August 15th for developers to sign up.

That deadline has now been extended until the end of August as only 19 developers signed up, how generous of them.

Wube Software, developer of Factorio, actually took up G2A on their offer of paying developers back "10x the money proven to be lost on chargebacks", as noted by Wube in one of their blog posts. That was posted on July 12th, noting that they last heard from G2A a few days before posting and G2A had their list of keys. As an update on that, it seems they're still waiting. Surprised? Nope.

Another developer is also now showing how unhappy they are with it, after gamesindustry.biz posted an article about the deadline extension, Charlie Cleveland the Game Director/Founder at Unknown Worlds (Subnautica, Natural Selection 2) posted an interesting comment and shared it on Twitter:

It's a load of crap that this tool would be "expensive" to develop. It's also suspect how they are pushing the names of developers who don't want their games to be sold on their service - it's almost like they want blowback from players who don't understand the shadiness of their service and be encouraged to review bomb those developers. It's also terrible to put the impetus on developers to have to take action with G2A to get this proposal moving in the first place, while G2A profits off gray-market sales and credit card fraud.

We paid $30,000 to deal with credit card chargebacks because of G2A […] So, G2A, if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, you will now pay us (Unknown Worlds) $300,000.

Note: Unknown Worlds wrote about the issue they were dealing with, back in 2013 for Natural Selection 2.

G2A did try to pay journalists to write an "unbiased" article about them while not mentioning in any way that it was sponsored, so what can we expect here? I fully expect G2A to end up doing nothing about it and carry on profiting from stolen keys.

Hat tip to dpanter.