Digital game marketplace G2A today outlined two key changes its making to its game key reselling business: starting next month, users who want to sell a game key on G2A will have to provide “detailed information” to buyers (including a name and address) and buyers will be automatically geolocated.
Both are potentially significant because they could improve third-party accountability on G2A and lead to a drop in the rate of stolen game keys being resold via the marketplace, which has reportedly been happening for years.
The former is especially notable because one of G2A’s key marketing points since its inception has been that sellers can choose to remain anonymous. This is presumably a significant selling point for scammers who use stolen credit cards to buy digital copies of games, then quickly sell the keys to those games on G2A for a profit.
“G2A [is one of the] great sites to sell fraudulent keys,” an anonymous, experienced game scammer famously told Kotaku last year. “The keys of commerce [are] quick and easy, and there is [not] much bureaucracy.”
This kind of fraud doubly hurts developers, since they typically lose a sale and get hit with a chargeback fee.
Last year the company began reaching out to devs to get them to participate in its marketplace (and, by extension, get access to game key querying tools) by selling game keys directly; some devs who took the plunge have since told Polygon it mostly worked out fine, but that they weren’t selling much directly on G2A since they were invariably undercut by key resellers.
G2A closed out its announcement today by promising to make further improvements to its marketplace down the line.