VG247 rounds up some posts from developers who express a preference for
players pirating their games over purchasing them from shady key seller G2A. To
be clear, they would still rather their games to be purchased legitimately, but
if you buy from G2A they will not get anything in return, so it would be better
to steal the game instead of allowing G2A to profit from their work. Here's
word:
G2A is pushing its store once again on Google search results, and
developers are not happy.
G2A, the marketplace specialising in game keys, recently bought a bunch of
premium Google ads. What this does is that it ensures the first result you get
when you look up a game on Google is one of a G2A listing.
Although these are labelled as sponsored content, they will still show up before
even the game’s official site, or any of the more reputable stores where it’s
being sold. This was recently spotted by No More Robots’ Mike Rose, who saw an
add for extreme sports game Descenders on Google.
Rose even tried to turn off the ad, but the toggle didn’t work. “Please, if
you’re going to buy a game from G2A, just pirate it instead! Genuinely!” wrote
Rose in a tweet.
“Devs don’t see a penny either way, so we’d much rather G2A didn’t see money
either.”
Descenders developer RageSquid joined Rose’s call, asking fans to pirate instead
of buying the game on G2A.
"Please torrent our games instead of buying them on 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.
Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail likewise shared a similar stance, explaining that despite
players’ best intentions, it’s better in this case to pirate the game in
question rather than doing business with key sellers.
“These sites cost us so much potential dev time in customer service,
investigating fake key requests, figuring out credit card chargebacks, and
more,” said Ismail.