There are several mantras that people often repeat: “g2a hurts developers,” “it’s better to pirate games than buy them on g2a,” “g2a is full of scammers” and so on (if you’re interested, we’ve debunked some of these, just click the links).
I think that there are 2 groups of people who hate g2a. The first one is those who repeat the said slogans, but probably don’t really know what marketplaces are all about and how g2a actually operates. Bad opinions unfortunately tend to become really contagious, even though sometimes it’s just worth seeing for yourself how things really are.
The other group consists of people who had a bad customer experience on g2a. It’s understandable that they share what happened to them with other people, and poor customer service is a big no-no in my book. Still, I don’t think it’s g2a that should be blamed here. If a seller messed up, it’s their responsibility to fix that. But they seem to be helpful and things go smoothly for the most part. Besides, if g2a was a platform full of scammers, it would’ve already been taken down years ago.
Let’s go back to the first group, shall we? Such accusations first started a couple years back when some devs (like tinyBuild and Wube) accused g2a of being the cause of massive chargebacks that hit these companies. What caused them? As the devs suggested, lots of bad keys for their games were sold on g2a. These keys were soon revoked, and users responded with chargebacks.
The thing is that tinyBuild has never really proven that such a thing happened, and g2a claimed the keys came from giveaways and not some shady source, anyway. Wube were reimbursed by g2a for any chargebacks related to Factorio keys, and received 10x more than the original charge was.
Again, these were super rare cases, certainly nothing that would justify piracy being better for game devs, which is a very dangerous thing to suggest.