In 2016 small indie publisher, tinyBuild, posted an article on their blog, G2A sold $450k worth of our game keys.
Media covered the story lots of times, G2A gave its response (not available any more on their website, as far as I can see), and generally people understood from entire drama “G2A stole almost half a million“. Even tinyBuild hasn’t ever said that.
Here’s a TL;DR: tinyBuild got the numbers of all their games sold on G2A from G2A during their business talks. Then they compared the prices on their store and on G2A, and it turned out that G2A had it for almost half the retail price. The famous amount of money lost is simply the sum the dev would get if every key was bought at full price from them. That’s when the accusation came from tinyBuild that the keys originated from shady, sometimes even completely illegal sources. G2A then said that there are so many keys sold, because tinyBuild organized absurdly huge giveaways (more about it in the video below).
Both sides agree on one thing (of course with different reasons): tinyBuild didn’t inform G2A or police about stolen keys, they didn’t want to provide G2A with the list of faulty keys.
The result of the entire drama was G2A announced its program for developers, called G2A Direct. If a developer joins it, he gets a 10% cut of his games being sold. That makes these games 10% more expensive on marketplace. Luckily for users, not many developers are in this program. (I’ve never came across a game I wanted to buy from Direct developer).
By the way, G2A even created a 1-minute video, showing their side of the story: