Before I dive deeper, it's important to understand what G2A is and how it works. You may have seen the occasional reddit thread with their G2A Shield deactivation experience, and probably saw tons of streamers and youtubers endorsing the company due to their affiliate program.

In short, G2A is like Ebay for game keys.

The basic idea is a novel one - with the abundance of game keys spread through bundles, odds are you'd want to sell off keys for games you don't really want, and make a few bucks when doing so.

So it's pretty simple for sellers:

Meanwhile the consumers get a really good price on games.

The problem is that this business model is fundamentally flawed and facilitates a black market economy. I've spoken to a merchant on G2A about how he's making $3-4k a month, and he outlined the core business model:

I've reached out to distribution partners inquiring about the amounts of chargebacks happening, and it's killing some of them. [article on indiegamestand]. There are variations on this business model, as some "merchants" live off bots who actively scavenge keys from Twitter/Twitch/Facebook, and then use Steam's gifting feature to "sell" the key on G2A.

The financial impact is actually huge

I've been dismissing the issue for a long time. Sure, a few game keys leak here and there - nothing major. For a few months we supported our own little store on tinyBuild.com - just so we can give some discounts to our fans, and do creative giveaways that'd include scavenging for codes.

The shop collapsed when we started to get hit by chargebacks. I'd start seeing thousands of transactions, and our payment provider would shut us down within days. Moments later you'd see G2A being populated by cheap keys of games we had just sold on our shop.

Coincidentally, this is when we were having discussions about partnering up with G2A and how that'd work. I really wanted to find out what kind of financial impact this marketplace can have, and after asking for sales stats in 3 separate discussions, I finally have them.

From the e-mail:

If I do some simple calculations, it comes down to this:

With this information in hand, my obvious question was where did the keys come from, and can we get compensation for that?

Here's the reply I got.

In short, G2A claims that our distribution partners are scamming us and simply selling keys on G2A. They won't help us unless we are willing to work with them. We are not going to get compensated, and they expect us to undercut our own retail partners (and Steam!) to compete with the unauthorized resellers.

There's no real way to know which keys leaked or not, and deactivating full batches of game keys would make a ton of fans angry, be it keys bought from official sellers or not.

Make your own conclusions.