Gray market reseller wants to make amends, indie dev remains skeptical

Grey market game reseller G2A and indie game developer Tiny Build have been involved in a sort of public relations war over the sale of Tiny Build's games through the service. It now looks as if G2A may be willing to adjust its business practices to be a bit more developer-friendly.

The entire episode began when Tiny Build discovered $450,000 worth of its own products had been sold through G2A, our previous story stated. Later, CEO Alex Nichiporchik was able to purchase his own game codes from resellers on G2A and link them back to credit card fraud perpetrated through Tiny Build’s online store.

The situation escalated when G2A gave Tiny Build a three-day deadline to share evidence that the keys sold via the service came from fraudulent purchases, which caused Tiny Build to respond with its own three-day ultimatum to begin working with developers to give them more control over how their games on sold on the service.

Today Polygon received the following statement from G2A, which is repeated in its entirety below:

Tiny Build yesterday gave G2A several great compliments despite the current issue between our two companies. Thanks tinyBuild we appreciate these kind words!

Tiny Build said that we have a smart team at G2A who can come up with a solution to solve these issues once and for all. In this statement they are absolutely correct.

Thank you Tiny Build for the great three day challenge to G2A. Tiny Build you asked us to come up with responses to:

1. Allow publishers to set a minimum price for the distributed product.
2. Set a minimum cut for all third party sales of said keys (and these would come out of the merchants’ cut).
3. Actually verify your merchants. I just made an account and within an hour was able to sell a on of keys, no verification whatsoever. If Ebay allowed you to sell merchandise without verifying sellers’ credentials (they ask you for IDs, statements confirming address, tie it to your bank account, etc), they’d probably be under similar fire right now as they’d facilitate stolen goods trade.

We accept your offer Tiny Build CEO, Alex Nichiporchik, and others, please co-operate with us to reach a lasting resolution for our gaming industry.

Let’s collaborate and get a result that pleases all. Open doors for from G2A. We want great co-operation with all developers and publishers. We have excellent case studies of developers and publishers who work ‘hand in glove’ with us.

Polygon reached out to Tiny Build’s CEO for comment, and he appears to be cautiously optimistic.

"Like I said, we're more than willing to help fix the problem," Nichiporchik told Polygon in response to the statement. "Right now we're talking to colleagues from the industry — devs, publishers, payment providers — to come with more ideas that'd help fix the root of the problem. We'll have more soon."

We'll continue to follow the story.