First, let’s separate it into two parts: user side and developer side. Is it better for you, a regular gamer, to pirate game instead of buying it on G2A?
Regular gamer perspective
Simply: no. By buying on G2A you get an original game with all its features. You redeem code on Steam and it works in the same way as if you bought it in regular store in the box. You get access to multiplayer, achievements, mods, patches, basically: everything, because that’s the legit game.
Some people may think: “ok, but what if my key will be revoked? Will I lose my game, savegames etc.?”. I bought bunch of codes, and never had problems with revokes, but if you are this extremely unlucky person, you risk only money, savegames will stay on your account.
At that point I can almost hear you say “Hold up, money’s something I do care about! I don’t want to risk it!” and that’s totally understandable. G2A gets it, too, and they offer a special buyer protection program – for free – that lets you get your money back in case of a revoke. There’s one catch – in order to use this program, you’ll need to report the case to the police and get a document from them. Once you send that paper to G2A, they’ll send you the money back.
If you don’t want to go to the police, because you think it’s not worth these 10-20 euro you spent, well – sure, I wouldn’t bother either. Especially if you know revokes happen very rarely. Let’s say you’re extremely unlucky, and out of 5 games 1 gets revoked.
Simple math: on average games are around half the price on G2A. If an average price for the game is 20 euro, you buy it for 10 euro on G2A. So: you spent 50 euro instead of 100 euro. One game got revoked, so you need to buy it again for 10 euro. At the end of the day you spent 60 euros for games, so 40 stayed in your pocket.
Of course, this is a very unlikely situation (games don’t get revoked that often, prices are much more different, etc.), but the general rule stays the same.
Everything above was about regular gamer perspective. Now let’s get to the hottest topic of last months: game developers saying “you’d better pirate our game, if you want to buy it on G2A!“. If you don’t care about it, you can leave this article here. But if you’re more aware customer who gives a shit about his impact on the industry, read on.
Guy-who-cares-for-developers perspective
There’s an interesting piece written about this topic – Four currencies. It’s really well-written, with nice and clear infographics, etc. I wrote different entry dedicated only to that.
But there’s a catch. Entire article revolves around the myth keys on G2A are acquired with stolen credit cards. There is one “small problem” with this idea, though.
Buying keys from developers using credit cards is not possible, as basically they don’t sell keys that way. There are some shops that sell keys, such us Humble Bundle, but I’ve never heard they had issues with stolen cards. Even if they had, that would affect them, not developers selling keys to HB in bulks, paid by money transfers, etc.
Another significant voice backing up the “pirating better than G2A” claim came from indie publisher TinyBuild. They gathered a lot of media attention by publishing one, updated many times blog post. TL;DR – they accused G2A of selling thousands of keys that were stolen from their shop. You can find a bit more about this topic in the separate entry.
Whether that was true or not (tinyBuild has never provided any proof they really got that many chargebacks; G2A claimed most of keys that came to marketplace were from giveaways), the problem for tinyBuild and other developers is gone, as they don’t have their own shops. And if there’s no shop, there’s no place to steal codes from.
Summary
From regular gamer perspective, it’s a no brainer. Of course it’s better to have legit game on Steam, and not some malware-infested stuff from torrents.
From someone who cares a lot about industry and indie developers: I wouldn’t buy games on G2A that come from the guys who claim it hurts them. But I also wouldn’t hesitate to use G2A when it comes to all other games, especially AAA, new titles that are usually around 40% cheaper, etc.