TinyBuild Games Definitely Not Happy with Impact of G2A's Selling Tactics

Oh boy, seems like G2A.com, the sellers of some damn cheap keys, and other shady sellers are receiving flak from developers. Despite being commonly used by gamers due to the cheap prices of games, these selling platforms have been known to rip off developers. TinyBuild Games, the team behind Punch Club and Party Hard, have spoken out against G2A. CEO Alex Nichiporchik apparently investigated the impact of G2A's selling tactics, and found out that the site sold more than 26,000 keys for Punch Club, Party Harder, and SpeedRunners, at a total value of $450,000, for about half the amount. He then located the origins of the keys. Apparently, the keys came from the resale partners, and because of that, "no compensation will be given." Not only that, but for the dev/publisher to find out the source of the "stolen" keys and revoke the keys, they had to partner with G2A. But G2A warned, "I think you will be surprised in that it is not fraud, but your resale partners doing what they do best, selling keys. They just happen to be selling them on G2A."

According to Nichiporchik:

"In short, G2A claims that our distribution partners are scamming us and simply selling keys on G2A. They won't help us unless we are willing to work with them. We are not going to get compensated, and they expect us to undercut our own retail partners (and Steam!) to compete with unauthorized resellers. There's no real way to know which keys leaked or not, and deactivating full batches of game keys would make a ton of fans angry, be it keys bought from official sellers or not."

In an e-mail with PC Gamer, Nichiporchik said that the happenstance could be avoided if publishers had control over what could or couldn't be sold on marketplaces like G2A. That said:

"However we can't do anything about that--even if we were to sell keys there ourselves, we'd have to undercut official retailers (like Steam) in order to be competitive."

The only option at that point is to cut giveaways and contests, and just work with only Steam, which would in turn hurt the business:

"That would hurt our business too much. We love doing bundles and giveaways and honestly don't care about the potentially lost revenue there--as long as fans are happy. That's the most important thing to me. Instead, we are in a situation where giveaways no longer work, and consumers gravitate towards cheaper marketplaces like G2A without understanding how it may damage us as a game developer/publisher."

Unfortunately it seems as if G2A is "facilitating a fraud-fueled economy where key resellers are being hit with tons of stolen credit card transactions."

In my opinion, stolen credit card transactions would be the main issue here, but what about the reselling issue? I feel as long as if the keys aren't stolen, then it should be okay. Then again, the reselling of keys, from what I know, is supposedly illegal, but if this is about money, then I feel that the devs already have received their share from the initial sales with the partners.

I feel like this is such a gray area of a topic.