Home » News » TinyBuild CEO: eBay-like game key reseller G2A has just cost us $450,000 USD
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TinyBuild CEO: eBay-like game key reseller G2A has just cost us $450,000 USD

TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik has taken to his company’s blog — and later, a press release — to detail what he says is a massive loss of sales thanks to eBay-like game key reseller G2A.

If you’re unfamiliar with G2A, its concept is relatively simple. Anyone with a spare game key — be it one or one thousand — can head to the service and sell the key to make a quick buck. The problem faced by TinyBuild, according to Nichiporchik, is that resellers illegally obtained $450,000 USD worth of keys for Punch Club, Party Hard and SpeedRunners and then sold them on for just under $200,000 USD of pure profit.

“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,” Nichiporchik said. “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.”

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Nichiporchik said he’s attempted to rectify to the situation with G2A with little results.

“In short, G2A claims that our distribution partners are scamming us and simply selling keys on G2A,” he said. “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.”

We’ve gone to G2A seeking comment.


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Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.