anyone ever use G2A.com or are they grey market like cdkeys.com?
Was discussed in some detail last year over yonder —>
Think the general consensus was “shady, only as a absolute last resort”.
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Thanks for that.
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Yes, a lot of stolen keys on there. A few months ago, they fucked themselves, by finding their own fuckup, and having to pay a developer money for the stolen keys they themselves found.
Also, something that has more meaning for you. They use dark patterns, to make it extremely difficult to 1. remove your credit card, 2. de-register.
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Yeah, it is one of leading reasons why I asked here as their experience on the site just oozes dodgy, much like cdkeys but they’re marginally better.
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Thank you for this.
I use them both for Xbox games.
I will think twice now
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I’ll be honest and say I have used them in the past…but I make sure to use Paypal externally so they don’t actually have any of my CC details etc.
Haven’t used them in probably over a year tho…
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I have a problem with companies that have a moral grey area inherent in their business model. It’s been shown, they have listed and sold stolen keys. When there is a market for stolen products anywhere with anything, this becomes less grey for me, and more black and white.
I’ve used them once. They were great. I got a brand new game for a 3rd of the release price. Now I wonder if the key I bought, was actually a stolen key.
After finding out, I tried removing my CC and de-registering. Man, what a ballache. UX or user experience is the discipline of using behavioural patterns of users, to improve the experience, make processes easy, engaging and obvious. Done right, you as a user, tend to just know instinctively where to go, to do things that you may have never done in that interface before.
This fucking company seemed to know the principles and actually make it extremely hard for me to remove my CC, and de-register. From less obvious buttons, to inconsistent styling (ie. you’re looking for a styled button, but it’s a plaintext arbitrary link to get where you want to be), to hiding behind 3 or 4 unnecessary pages, to narrow timed gates in which you have to start the process, wait till then, then confirm, that were hours apart. Then there’s the optional fee that they charge, in case the sale goes wrong.
This company is a parasite on the gaming industry. All you have to do is google them, and you’ll find some horror stories involving both customers and developers.
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Great post, and thank for the feedback. Very well written.
As a UXer I agree with what you are saying. Unfortunately our “powers” and getting to know how the mind and human behaviour works, some tend to use these powers of persuasion for bad, I prefer to use them to delight and bring joy. I know persuasion is a big fundamental part of UX but I try to steer away from the need to persuade so much as to guide.
Thanks again for your feedback. I love these kind of readings.
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I’ve done this with what I thought was a totally legit platform called Big Fish Games.
Completely random story, but I found some weird deal where if I buy a game through Big Fish, I could get a licence for Media Monkey for free. I think the deal was promoted on Media Monkey’s own website.
Since it was cheaper to buy the game than to buy Media Monkey directly, I opted to buy a game. I got The Last Express, a title by one of my all-time favourite game designers, Jordan Mechner, which I had never got to play.
Fast forward a few years (yes years) and suddenly a PayPal payment for $1.99 goes off on my credit card that I don’t recognise.
I e-mailed my bank, then PayPal, then Big Fish whose name appeared on the PayPal receipt.
The banks says there is nothing they can do to reverse the payment or block future payments because its gone through PayPal. PayPal is legit and they can’t just blanket-block all PayPal payments on my account.
PayPal found in my favour and reversed the charge.
Big Fish’s support department let me know that they had just activated their “Big Fish Game Club Membership” service. Turns out people were automatically subscribed because, if memory serves, buried somewhere in the T&Cs was something that they would automatically sign you up when it launches.
This information is sent out in a mass response to everyone who lodged support tickets about money being deducted from their account because their support is overwhelmed — obviously by people contacting them to find out WTF.
They gave instructions on how to disable membership, but when I try to log in my account is disabled and I can’t do anything. It takes another back-and-forth with support to get a temporary password so that I can log back into my Big Fish account. When I finally get to log in, I disable the membership and remove my PayPal payment method for good measure.
From that day on, I just use my credit card info directly. It’s easy enough to dispute transactions with the bank and while CC fraud is a bit of a pain, my bank has been great about reversing transactions, and stopping the compromised card and issuing a replacement.
(Aside: LOL, I see Wikipedia now calls someone’s video game credits “Ludography” 
)
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Sorry, forgot to mention that my Paypal is in no way permanently linked to any credit card and is in US$. 
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That’s the way to roll.
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The dumbass in me kept reading this as bal-la-chee… Googled it and then 
I have used G2A ages ago. But I agree with @aldyr that once it became clear that there might be some devs (especially smaller indie devs) having their games stolen and sold for cheap, I ignore them completely. Are they safe with your data? Maybe. But I wont risk it anymore.
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