This answer boils down to what this entire platform is. Here I’ll try to provide as accurate a description as possible, basing on whatever I’ve found on the Internet, ranging from G2A’s official website to a Wikipedia entry on the company itself.
This is what I managed to learn about the company.
It seems it’s been formed in 2010 as Go2Arena, or at least this was the company that preceded G2A and later reformed into something completely different: the marketplace we have today.
I guess Go2Arena is where the current name stems from. To be honest, I have no idea what G2A actually stands for.
Here’s an interesting piece of trivia: G2A is also a very common subclade of a human Y-chromosome haplogroup that’s pretty widely spread across Europe, South and Central Asia, as well as North Africa. Georgia is a country where it’s most commonly found. Thought you might like this piece of information.
Anyway, G2A marketplace has been launched, like, four years later, in 2014, a change in the business model and such. This is what we have today. It’s not a store anymore, more like a platform in the vein of eBay and the like, a place where you have all sorts of sellers offering digital stuff, such as video games, DLCs, gift cards and so on. G2A itself doesn’t sell anything, they just run the place and make money on all sorts of fees.
A couple years back G2A also introduced physical goods on their marketplace, namely gaming hardware and gadgets. This happened in, like, July 2018. Still, digital items seem to make up the bulk of the platform’s catalog.
There are essentially two types of sellers on G2A, either retailers/wholesalers, i.e. established businesses or just some individuals who have unused keys that they can sell. Both types need to get verified by providing the details necessary for the process to be completed successfully. The amount of information required differs, so businesses will need to supply G2A with a whole lot more info on their operations than regular folks, etc.
The point is, if you want to sell on G2A, G2A needs to learn a lot about you before they let you operate on their platform. This is how they find out if you’re legit or a prospective scammer. This is how they protect buyers and other sellers on the marketplace. Tech Advisor says that basic verification on G2A looks as follows: you need to use your social media profiles and your phone number for that. The limit is just ten transactions that you can complete. Anything beyond that and you’ll be asked to complete business verification instead, which is way more thorough.
If you still think it’s a scam, consider the following: the site boasts over twenty million users and the company has been around for, like, twelve years now? The marketplace itself has been active for eight years or so. There’s been a couple of controversies, but they all date back to 2016 and its whereabouts, at least that’s the common thread I’ve found in all the accusations from video game developers.
As far as the location of the company is concerned, it seems to be an international one. A quick look at the Wikipedia entry and G2A’s official corporate site shows that the headquarters of G2A are situated in the Netherlands’s capital city, Amsterdam. Still, they have a bunch of other offices that you can find in Hong Kong and three cities in Poland: Warsaw, Cracow and Rzeszow.
Other interesting facts about the company include sponsorships of various esports teams, G2A once having an internal video game development studio that seemed to be focused on Virtual Reality-based titles, and that the entire G2A crew consists of six hundred people as of 2020 (current numbers may vary).
If you need more reliable information on the G2A website and company, I guess you should check out their official website and the Wikipedia entry on G2A. This Tech Advisor’s article is pretty good, too, although there is a small chance they might have gotten some facts wrong (hopefully not).
We’re dropping all sorts of facts in our articles here as well, so be sure to check out other pieces we’ve written on G2A and its operations that debunk all sorts of myths surrounding the marketplace.