Just the other day Charlie Cleveland from Unknown Worlds asked G2A to put their money where their mouth is and pay up $300,000 for the credit card chargebacks the company endured back in 2013 for fraudulent sales of its game, Natural Selection 2. In response to an ongoing debate with indie game makers, G2A had offered to reimburse affected studios ten times the money they had lost, prompting Cleveland to ask for the $30,000 lost in 2013 to be turned into $300,000 in 2019.
It's hardly a surprise to hear that G2A has investigated the claim, and in response to that, the developer has backed down from its position. In a blog post shared last night, the retailer accused Cleveland of slander and pointed out that the company didn't exist as it does today, which makes it pretty much impossible that they were at fault for the chargebacks that Unknown Worlds had to endure all those years ago.
"That's just slander, and we expect him [Cleveland] to at least edit his posts, if not straight up apologize," the G2A statement explained. "However, if Charlie Cleveland would like us to hire a professional auditing company to check if the keys from before 2014 appeared on a non-existing marketplace, we encourage him to contact the G2A Direct team, as per the initial offer."
That response from G2A seems fairly unequivocal, but that hasn't stopped Cleveland from firing back a parting shot. Speaking to Kotaku, the developer said:
"It does appear that G2A is right. They weren't the source of these original $30k keys. It doesn't LOOK like they were selling gray-market keys at the time we had all those chargebacks. But they've been doing it ever since."
Cleveland also told the site how the studio had tried to have their games removed from G2A. "They've never done it," he said. "They just change the conversations to us selling our keys formally through them."
It looks like this one will run and run, but for now, at least, it doesn't look like Unknown Worlds will a part to play in the discussion. In the meantime, other studios such as Wube (Factorio) are currently going through the process of having their claim verified by an impartial auditor. You can find out more about that right here.