G2A is offering to make a key blocking tool to ease dev concerns

Digital marketplace G2A has been in a spot of bother this month after an ad campaign prompted the ire of indie developers who say that the key re-seller is basically a marketplace for stolen games. The whole debacle started with a number of prominent indie devs telling gamers to steal their games rather than buy them from G2A, to which the retailer countered with an offer to reimburse devs ten times what they'd lost in chargebacks (under certain circumstances, of course).

Indie devs then launched a petition to have their titles removed from G2A altogether, and the company annoyed even more people by allegedly asking a number of media outlets to cover the story via undisclosed advertorial articles about how credit card fraud on the platform is "pretty much impossible". It's murky stuff (and there's more on that here), although the company has since stated that the employee in question had gone rogue and his attempts were not official policy.

Now, however, the company thinks that it finally has the answer; this time G2A has offered to create a key-blocking tool that would allow devs to highlight codes that they don't want to be sold on the website - but only if 100 developers sign up (and of course, those devs then have to be willing to upload their codes to the site and essentially help the retailer police its own marketplace).

It's certainly a solution of sorts, but it's not clear whether review keys and those obtained via giveaways are at the root of the problem, and it's possible that many devs will consider them to be merely the tip of the iceberg. At least it's a step in the right direction, although whether it'll be enough to fix the recent bad publicity the company is having to endure, remains to be seen. Watch this space.