Controversial games retailer G2A found itself under fire during an on-stage Q&A at Reboot Develop today.

In a discussion hosted by our very own Dan Pearson, G2A senior account manager Mario Mirek found himself fending off questions about grey market sales, harmful industry practices and a convoluted protection system.

Mirek had arrived at the event to talk about G2A’s new Direct service, which is the retailer’s effort to open itself up to the games industry and become an ‘open door’ for developers to speak with them. And speak they did.

The G2A exec began by talking about the company’s user base of 13m customers, who are engaged in “2.5m transactions a month”. Pearson then challenged the firm on how the retailer effectively enables grey market selling.

“Absolutely not,” countered Mirek. “I know we’re called a grey marketplace, but the way we see it – and the way our team sees it – is that there’s nothing really grey about it. People just don’t understand our business model. This is a place where people can buy and sell unactivated digital codes, 95% games and 5% other various software.”

“I know we’re called a grey marketplace, but the way we see it – and the way our team sees it – is that there’s nothing really grey about it”

Mario Mirek, G2A

Of course, grey market is simply a term used to describe the legal sale of products through distribution channels not intended by the manufacturer. G2A has a reputation for enabling people to buy keys in bulk from other countries (where the price is cheaper) and sell them for a profit in more expensive territories. That’s pretty much the definition of ‘grey market’. Mirek defended this, however.

“We’ve noticed really quickly that the gamers want to access your games. They don’t have $60 or $70 to acquire the game day one. The codes on G2A come from various places, from sales or bundles or people who have acquired keys at some point and changed their mind. Customers have the right to sell their products at the price they want to sell at, just like on eBay or any other marketplace. We have developers, we have publishers – the list is available on G2A of who is participating – so developers and publishers see that this is a marketplace that can no longer be ignored. We have customers ranging from 16 to 20 years-old. They don’t necessarily have the money to spend on their favourite games. They can do one of two things: they can go on their favourite marketplace and add a game to their wishlist to pick up when it is in a sale, or they can go on G2A and find someone who bought the game earlier, but for whatever reason doesn’t want it anymore, and buy it off of them.”

Dan Pearson (right) takes on Mario Mirek (left)

Mirek was then challenged on how many keys are bought in one territory, then sold into another. He said he was glad we’re addressing this, before adding: “The digital key, in itself, contains no information. It doesn’t tell you if it’s a promo key or a retail key or a region key… it doesn’t tell you anything. So the only way we can monitor the marketplace, and look at those keys, is to verify those sources. So that’s why we launched G2A Direct, which is why I’m here. Now G2A Direct is very young. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. But there is a team of people that wants to help them and give them access to the marketplace, to the data. Developers can contact us, we have an open door policy, and we can look at those keys and tell them what is going on.

“But we ourselves… everyone is telling us that keys from this region are appearing on G2A at a lower price, but everyone is ignoring the fact that the key itself doesn’t contain that information. If a developer or publisher…wish to contact us and find out what is going on, we are happy to share that information with them.”

G2A Direct allows developers to generate some revenue from sales from third-party sellers, and also allows companies to directly monitor what keys are being sold. But studios don’t have to be part of the Direct programme to speak with the retailer.

“If you’re not a Direct developer, you don’t need to be in the programme to find out about your keys,” Mirek said. “We have an open door policy, any developer here can email us at developers@G2A.com, and one of our team members will be happy to help. There is nothing we want to hide.”

G2A launched Direct to better work with developers

However, he stopped short of saying G2A would block the sale of codes that originate from other markets.

“We give customers the right to acquire the keys wherever they want and sell them where they want,” he said. “What we monitor very closely is if the key has been purchased in a legitimate way. Listen, 13m people from all over the world are coming in to purchase your game, they want to play your game. Obviously, they will be looking at the value. The way we see it is that we have given those customers that freedom to purchase. And developers and publishers who participate, they can see what is going on. Really, it is about your user acquisition. Why are you putting your games on sale? Why are you doing bundles? Why are you doing giveaways? For that very reason – because you want to acquire a customer who might otherwise not buy your game. To remind you, we are the largest marketplace in the world, but we are not the only player out there. If a customer comes to us and purchases your game, then you already have that customer and that key has been paid for – one way or another.”

He was later challenged by a developer in the audience who asked if G2A really doesn’t see this being damaging to the industry. Mirek replied: “You have to ask yourself how those keys got their in the first place.” This was followed by the developer saying: “Probably just from Steam. If that happens, can you region lock the code?” Mirek said: “We have that ability.”

Then came the topic of stolen keys being sold on the platform. Mirek said it remains a problem, although he claimed G2A is proactive in preventing it. “Our job is to make sure we are the safest marketplace out there,” he commented. “We want our customers to be sure that when they acquire a key, it is going to work. That obviously requires an enormous amount of resource. We have people working in anti-money laundering, we have people working in risk and finances. We have people working in transactions. It is in our best interest to make sure that the codes that appear on G2A have been acquired legitimately. Things like theft and charge backs… it’s not just our problem, it’s the problem of any major marketplace.”

Mirek said the firm doesn’t just remove the stolen keys from the site: “We are also finding out where those keys are coming from, who is selling and we can take action against those sellers. Removing the keys… you’re just taking a painkiller, you’re not removing the cause. By finding out who is doing it… it is easy to get in, but people forget that once they sell those keys, they have to withdraw that money. They have to go through a very rigorous AML (anti-money laundering) process and provide their banking information. We have that. We can block those funds. We are removing fraudulent keys that they are selling and we are blocking and removing the seller so that it can protect other developers, too.”

Mirek reiterated that a lot of the problem stems from G2A’s bad performance in communicating itself to developers, and suggested that a lot of the criticism is mostly ‘factoids being perpetuated’. Pearson brought up previously spikey conversations between the retailer and developers on Reddit.

“Reddit has called me a dodgy drug dealer, so I don’t think it can get any worse than that”

“Reddit has called me a dodgy drug dealer, so I don’t think it can get any worse than that,” remarked Mirek. “But the company listens, the company monitors pretty much all channels. We know what is going on, we know there is room for improvement. But you guys need to realise, this is a 750-person operation. I am happy to announce that 40% of those are women and most of them are gamers. So any change will take a while. But we are being proactive, making sure that our marketplace is safe and secure for customers and content creators.”

It was suggested that the studio only ever changes when it is ‘backed into a corner’, an accusation that Mirek didn’t address directly. Instead he said he is hearing what people are saying and working on it. He acknowledged that getting developers to check keys themselves is a big resource, but said if studios email his team with a large batch of keys, they will look into it for them. He said turnaround for this sort of investigation can be two to three days, although longer during busy periods.

“Then you have that information so you can take whatever steps you need from your end.”

Naturally, the recent controversy surrounding Gearbox’s support for G2A and sudden cancellation of that deal came to light. Gearbox Publishing had partnered with G2A on the collector’s edition of Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition. A swift backlash followed and Gearbox reacted by issuing a series of demands to G2A (demands compiled with help from YouTuber Total Biscuit). The demands were apparently not met and Gearbox ended the deal.

“We had been in touch with Gearbox for a few months,” Mirek said. “We worked closely with Gearbox Publishing and sharing the information that they have requested. We were very surprised to learn that, instead of contacting us, they decided to publicly end the relationship because of comments made by a YouTuber. We were disappointed, but we wish Gearbox the best, we wish People Can Fly the best. We have always had our doors open. So if they decide to reach out again, we will be welcoming to that. But you need to realise that Gearbox Publishing is not the only major company we are talking to. We were very sad, very surprised and it was disappointing the way it happened.”

Another developer in the audience then asked if they planned to change their business practices following the incident.

“We were very surprised to learn that, instead of contacting us, Gearbox decided to publicly end the relationship because of comments made by a YouTuber”

“If anyone thinks that their business doesn’t deserve a change, then they’re wrong,” continued Mirek. “Obviously we are going to focus on improving ourselves. But I must stress, Gearbox Publishing had been in touch with us for months in advance and could ask anything they want. We had met with People Can Fly, we had given them everything they wanted. We issued a joint press release with Gearbox, and nothing we said went out without permission from Gearbox.

“Obviously, we want to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future.”

Pearson brought up the fact Total Biscuit has vowed not to cover companies that work with G2A, and challenged Mirek on how he can turn around this perception.

“We know there are factoids being perpetuated,” Mirek answered. “Nobody has looked at the real numbers or the data. We are disappointed our deal fell through because of a YouTuber, but the reason I am here, and you are here, is that you can contact us, speak to us, and find out what is really going on. Then you can base your business decisions on real information, and not false speculation.”

Additional criticism was made of G2A Shield, which is effectively a membership scheme designed to protect customers from fraudulent keys. Questions were raised about how difficult the system is to deactivate and the value it really offers customers.

“When I came to this room, I had the getaway car ready in case something would happen,” joked Mirek. “We know that the service is not perfect. We have heard the people saying how difficult it is to deactivate. We have seen the posts and the photos. That will change. With a website of this scale, it can take a while.”

Indie developer Mike Bithell then posed a question: “You charge the customers who want to avoid fraudulent stuff with the Shield system. You ask us to contribute our time and energy to detect fraud on your system in exchange for 10 per cent. I’m interested what the 750 people – 40 per cent of whom are women – are doing to earn the 90 per cent of the transaction?”

“There are people working in marketing and risk,” responded Mirek.

Bithell laughed. “Is it mainly marketing?”

“No. IT and security.”

“Good job.”

Come the end of the discussion, Mirek thanked the audience for “not killing me”.

Single-player games no longer pay the bills, according to Starbreeze Studios’ Almir Listo, who told the audience at Reboot Develop that the Swedish company is now more likely to publish than make games with no co-op or multiplayer elements.

Listo is global brand director at Starbreeze, a company that has changed dramatically since the days when games like Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness established it as an industry leader in single-player development. Over the last few years the vast majority of its revenue has come from Payday, a multiplayer franchise created by Overkill Software, an independent studio Starbreeze acquired in 2012.

At Overkill, Listo said, the focus is always on playability and, more pertinently, replayability. “The people that got the most respect and were the most important people on the development team, were the QA testers,” he said. “They have the highest status in our company. Because we work in such a flat structure, they are the gatekeepers.

“One of the problems that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had for sure was that it’s not replayable. It’s a beautiful story, but it ends”

“They are the people that make sure we don’t release shit… A game developer with a focus on QA is a game developer that makes sure the game is fun.”

According to Listo, the fact that Payday’s community can be so critical of the game is a positive. Those players have often invested “6000 hours” of time into the experience, so that hate emanates from a deep-rooted sense of devotion and love. The capacity to build that kind of relationship with its audience is something that the widely acclaimed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons lacked, Listo said.

Despite that acclaim, the Brothers IP was sold in 2015 shortly after one its principal creators, Josef Fares, left the company. In light of the growing importance of Overkill to Starbreeze in economic terms, and the recent success of Dead by Daylight, another multiplayer IP, the sale of Brothers now seems like a watershed moment. Listo’s comments at Reboot only reinforced that notion.

“You need to find the thing that makes it replayable,” Listo said. “One of the problems that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had for sure was that it’s not replayable. It’s a beautiful story, but it ends. And as many lovely emails as we’ve received about that game, it doesn’t pay salaries.

“Payday, however, because the game is replayable like few other games… it allowed us to continue pushing out content for the game, which allowed us to keep monetising the players who were interested in the game.”

“We’re great at doing co-op games and multiplayer games. That’s why The Walking Dead game we’re making is a co-op game, that’s why the Crossfire game we’re making is a co-op game. We want to focus on that, and leave the single-player games to people like you.”

“We’re great at doing co-op games and multiplayer games… We want to focus on that, and leave the single-player games to people like you”

When asked if there was still room for a game like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a first-party product, Listo wouldn’t rule out the possibility. Overkill’s game based on The Walking Dead IP will have a more developed narrative than Payday, he offered, though that is still a very different prospect to a game like Brothers, or even a game like The Darkness. “Talking about single player adventures in particular, there’s opportunities. Absolutely,” he added. “As long as we have the people to work on it, why not?

“The question of whether Starbreeze would ever do another single-player game? Yeah, but we’d rather have another studio approach us with a beautiful idea. We want to focus on what we’re good at now, which is co-op games…but feel free to approach us. We’re interested in all kinds of deals.”

This position is backed up by Starbreeze’s activities as a publisher over the last few months, a period in which it has signed and committed to significant investments in Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 and Otherside Entertainment’s System Shock 3. At the outset of his talk, Listo emphasised that Starbreeze’s history of single-player development, and the understanding it therefore has of what it takes to ship a great game, is a big part of why those studios trust it as a publisher.

“The most important thing you can learn in your industry career is that it’s a people business. You are no better than the partner you work with,” he said. “It’s simply trust. If you and I do a publishing deal together, we believe in you.

“Because we understand what video game development is about”

No matter how much attention you’ve paid to Nintendo, or how much insight you can glean from within the company itself, there are times when the industry’s most secretive and opaque company still manages to be baffling. In this specific instance I refer, of course, to the discontinuation of the NES Classic Mini – a diminutive reworking of its groundbreaking NES/Famicom console with many of its best-loved games built in, which sold north of 1.5 million units despite chronic stock shortages. Now, despite continuing strong demand for the system, Nintendo has decided not to bother making any more of them.

There has been no official explanation offered for this, and in the absence of such, several unofficial explanations are doing the rounds. One which has even been picked up and repeated by staff within Nintendo (though I can find no evidence of it actually being communicated internally from Japan) is that the production lines for the NES Classic are needed for manufacturing Switch consoles, positing that the device was only ever intended as a stopgap to keep factories busy in between the shutdown of Wii U production and the ramp-up of Switch.

That makes a kind of sense on the face of things, but rather ignores the reality of how manufacturing works. The NES Classic was composed entirely of off-the-shelf components – it didn’t actually have the innards of a NES, being based instead on an absolutely bog-standard ARM system-on-chip. The only custom part of the system was the plastic casing, which could easily be made by any one of thousands of factories who build devices like this. While it’s certainly plausible that the exact factories which built NES Classics have seen their production lines repurposed to fulfill higher demand of Switch, anyone with the slightest passing familiarity with hardware manufacture knows that Nintendo could have had new production lines for NES Classic systems up and running at less complex and advanced factories within weeks if not days.

“Unless there’s some bizarre quirk in the figures and there’s actually a huge NES software market out there that NES Classic was undercutting, Nintendo is absolutely leaving money on the table with this decision”

In other words, while bringing Switch online could absolutely have created a blip in availability of the NES Classic, the reality is that the system could be shipping healthy volumes to fulfill market demand again, if Nintendo actually wanted to. Supply chain reasoning doesn’t explain this decision; at best it’s an excuse, at worst a fabrication being peddled to retailers annoyed at persistent stock shortages of a popular item. Somewhere within Nintendo, a decision has been made that flies in the face of basic commercial logic; the company has chosen to stop supplying a product for which there remains significant demand.

Why? One explanation might be that the NES Classic simply wasn’t very profitable. Sold at around $60, there’s no question that margins on the hardware alone would have been fine; bought in bulk, the components inside the device would have summed up to a small fraction of that price. Now, where things get a little questionable is when you consider the value of the NES software included with the device; if you value that software according to its price on the Virtual Console online store, then yes, NES Classic was a bit of a bargain. However, that makes the dodgy assumption that consumers would have bought more than a couple of those software titles when sold individually. We don’t know what the actual sales of NES software on Virtual Console are like, of course, but I’m struggling to imagine that the number of consumers willing to drop $30 or more on NES software titles on Virtual Console comes anywhere close to the number willing to buy the NES Classic. Unless there’s some bizarre quirk in the figures and there’s actually a huge NES software market out there that NES Classic was undercutting, Nintendo is absolutely leaving money on the table with this decision.

Similarly, it’s hard to believe that NES Classic has been removed from the market because of fears that it would take the wind out of the sails of the (eventual) launch of the Virtual Console service on Switch. Moreover, any of these theories which essentially boils down to “Nintendo wants to focus on Virtual Console” is challenged by the pretty well substantiated rumours of a SNES Classic launching this Christmas. SNES software, representing something of a golden age for Nintendo, is arguably much more desirable than NES titles for a much wider range of consumers, and far more likely to act as an incentive to spend money on Virtual Console’s digital store.

One possibility, of course, is that NES Classic was just testing the water – checking to see if there really was demand for this kind of retro gaming product by launching the absolute bare minimum and watching what happened. The minimum viable product approach isn’t common in hardware for obvious reasons, but perhaps this was an example of it in action? Having watched third parties flood the market with retro consoles designed to work with software for NES, SNES and others, Nintendo may have decided to dip its toe in the water, cautiously checking market conditions before committing to a much more fully-featured and impressive retro gaming device.

“Nintendo’s response was seemingly, ‘Well, that’s nice, but we don’t want to make any more money on that’; you can almost hear the slight popping noise of industry executives’ eyes all simultaneously bulging with incredulity”

If so, we might expect the SNES Classic to be a lot of things the NES Classic was not; a networked device, at least, with its own connection to the Virtual Console store so that consumers can buy new games or packs of games. As long as the initial offering of pre-installed games remains generous, that could be an enormously successful prospect and a really effective way of generating income from Nintendo’s prodigious back catalogue. However, none of the rumours around SNES Classic suggest that will be the case; it would certainly make sense, but as of right now, the implication is that SNES Classic will be a fairly straightforward repeat of its older sibling. Whether that comes all the way down to repeating the stock shortages and rapid discontinuation remains to be seen, of course.

One thing to bear in mind through all of this is that Nintendo’s self-image remains at a tangent to that of every other company in the games business. Nintendo intrinsically sees itself as a toy company – or at least, doesn’t see there being quite as big a gap between “toy company” and “game company” that other firms in the industry would insist upon. That’s informed Nintendo’s decision making in many regards over the years, and this may simply be one of the most glaring examples of “toy company thinking” in action; creating something cool for the Christmas market, shipping a certain amount of it, making your money and then repurposing the production lines for next Christmas’ cool thing. If so, at least there’s hope that stock of SNES Classic will be in greater supply (since a toy company would use sales of the last product in a range to guide its expectations for subsequent products), but from Nintendo’s perspective the NES Classic is over and done with; last Christmas’ phenomenon can’t be expected to continue selling next year, after all.

Even to a market used to dealing with stock shortages (there hasn’t been hair nor hide of PS4 Pro, PSVR or Switch in Japanese retailers for weeks, and why yes, I am actually a little bitter about that), this is a strange and uncomfortable way of thinking. NES Classic devices were changing hands for up to five times their retail value on eBay, and Nintendo’s response was seemingly, “Well, that’s nice, but we don’t want to make any more money on that”; you can almost hear the slight popping noise of industry executives’ eyes all simultaneously bulging with incredulity. The upside is that the success of this experiment means more such toy-like experiments will be forthcoming in future years. The downside is that what could be a great new way for the industry as a whole to exploit its back catalogue probably isn’t going to come to pass if Nintendo sees this as a range of toys and not a platform play.

There’s a myth in the games business that consumers no longer buy boxed games.

Digital is certainly the growth area, with revenue from mobile, downloads and subscriptions accounting for 74% of the games market in the US (with a similar split in the UK, too).

However, the physical games market remains a lucrative proposition and worth billions of dollars every year. It’s a fact that’s gradually creeping its way into the minds of independent developers.

Last week, Stardew Valley was released in a box, as was Yooka-Laylee. In the coming weeks, Tequila Works is preparing two boxed products for Rime and The Sexy Brutale. There are several businesses that are set up to help indie studios release their games in places like GameStop and GAME, such as U&I, 505 Games, Sold Out and Badland Games. Other publishers include physical distribution as part of their key selling points, such as Bandai Namco, Koch Media, GameTrust (GameStop’s publishing arm) and a stream of others.

Yet it’s a risky area to invest in. Boxed products are costly and lack the flexibility of the digital marketplace. Going through retail also loses some of that direct contact with the customer. So why bother?

“Many gamers – us included – love to keep their physical copies and retail is still a big market,” says Tequila Works’ CEO and creative director Raúl Rubio.

Loyal fans like to buy physical games, says Tequila Works’ Raul Rubio

“We are working with partners who are physical distribution specialists, we will not be able to do it ourselves. Doing a physical release helps us to provide to our core fans collector’s editions, where they can have access to more content on the game, it does also helps us to reach an audience of more casual gamers who still prefer to buy their games in physical rather than digital. Finally, a physical release is a way to offer more visibility to our titles.”

There are other reasons, too. One of the most romantic reasons is that developers simply like seeing their work on a shelf in a shop. That was certainly the feeling for Ghost Town’s Phil Duncan when Team17 and Sold Out approached then about releasing Overcooked at Retail.

“We were surprised,” he says. “We just thought we were making a small indie game, and releasing it in the conventional way via the digital stores. It was interesting meeting the guys from Sold Out, and realising just how big that market still is. We wanted it from our point-of-view, because it would be great to see it in a box and on shelves at GAME. But I didn’t realise what the demand was like for it.

“There are lots of people out there, my parents included, that when looking to buy a game, they would go to GAME, or Argos. It also came out at Christmas time, so it’s good for giving as a gift. I got my brother a voucher from the Humble store, and I did feel kind of bad printing out this little bit of paper.”

Yet what about the commercial results? Like anything, the figures paint a mixed picture. There are some notable success stories, of course, such as Terraria, Minecraft and Rocket League. The latter has remained in the UK Top Ten since it launched last summer, and has sold well over 1m units in the physical space alone – that’s despite the digital version of the game arriving a full year prior.

Rocket League has been a massive seller at physical retail – a year after its digital release

Both Overcooked and Rocket League were ideal candidates for the boxed market. These games boast broad appeal, which includes the sort of consumers that may not even be familiar with how the digital marketplace works.

“[Rocket League’s] appeal to players of all ages is a major factor,” says Psyonix’s publishing VP Jeremy Dunham. “Despite our high skill ceiling, we believe that our game is still very friendly to kids and families because of its lack of violence and simple concept. When you’re talking about reaching out to younger gamers, though, you’re also talking about reaching people who do not yet shop with credit cards or similar payment methods usually associated with digital-only games – you need to be accessible to fans who only have cash or are only aware of games they see on the shelves as opposed to being online.

“There’s a high percentage of console gamers that still buy physical copies of games and not digital

Jeremy Dunham, Psyonix

“Even when you don’t factor that in, there are still the logistics of it all. There’s a high percentage of console gamers that still buy physical copies of games and not digital, so it just makes business sense to be available to them in as many ways as possible.”

Dunham adds that some of the gamers that are buying Rocket League are existing fans but it’s “mostly a new audience”, based on its internal data.

Nevertheless, the fact that even some of Rocket League’s players bought a boxed version of the game – despite already owning a digital copy – highlights the demand from certain players for physical goods.

What’s more, Tequila Works feels that retail doesn’t have to just be for mainstream or blockbuster games. Rubio says that High Street shoppers are interested in all forms of content. “We think that gamers have matured,” says Rubio, “and they enjoy indie and deeper experiences, and they definitely deserve a place on the shelf of a collector.”

Ultimately, says Sold Out’s Garry Williams, it’s down to how good product is: “Like any sector of the games market, quality games sell.”

The Overcooked developers had to work flat out to create DLC for a boxed SKU

However, there are some deterrents to releasing a title physically. There’s the upfront cost, for starters, plus restrictions around pricing. There is a rule that the physical version of a boxed console game must cost the same as the digital SKU. Retailers won’t be happy selling a game that’s significantly cheaper on PSN or Xbox Live. Therefore, if a developer wants to charge more for a box version (to compensate for the extra distribution costs) than its digital counterpart, then the studio is often forced to create extra content for it.

“That was why, when we released [Overcooked] in August, we were still working ridiculously long hours on the game,” explains Duncan. “The game was out, but we were trying to get this DLC done because that was going to be included as part of the disc version, so that the price matched the downloadable version.”

Indeed, Sold Out admits that the pricing difference between digital and physical can be troublesome.

“Publishers are here to remove all the complications of a boxed release

Garry Williams, Sold Out

“The fact that the digital sweet spot for sales is at $14.99, and that due to format holder royalties nothing released under $19.99 is likely to make you significant revenues, focus on what you can afford to deliver – perhaps adding DLC for a higher boxed price swiftly if digital has proved itself numbers wise,” Williams explains. “It’s all about maximising the sales so let the consumer decide how they want to buy the game, ideally boxed and digital should go hand-in-hand.”

He continues:  “Creating a boxed game might seem daunting but developers shouldn’t be put off. Publishers are here to remove all the complications of a boxed release. This frees up mindshare at the studio to prioritise delivering the best gaming experience to the consumers on any format.”

Rubio concludes: “There’s no easy answer. It requires a lot of work to find the right partners in each territory and negotiate distribution agreements. The situation for Rime and The Sexy Brutale were different. For Rime, our publisher Greybox is handling all the distribution of the game. For The Sexy Brutale, we are working with Badland Games for Europe, U&I in the US, and various partners in Asia.”

Clearly not every game can work in a box, and if you’re not careful, a physical release can end up costing a business dearly if you get the numbers wrong. However, with the likes of GameStop and GAME having to endure barren periods in terms of new game launches (such as this month, for instance), and with discoverability proving a never-ending challenge in the digital marketplace, the boxed games market may be an avenue worth exploring.

 

For the crowd at Reboot Develop this week, the industry’s ire at the working practices of G2A has been impossible to miss.

The company’s senior account manager, Mario Mirek, took the decidedly bold step of being interviewed in public, by our European Editor, Dan Pearson. It backfired, the audience – of a mix of developers, but largely indies – clearly unimpressed with G2A’s rhetoric, which ran the gamut from measured remorse to barely disguised evasion. While the talk was in progress, Reboot Develop was a trending topic on Twitter, and little of the discussion was in G2A’s favour.

Three people from that crowd gathered the following day, to participate in a panel on the life of the indie developer: Mike Bithell, the creator of Volume and Thomas Was Alone; Dan de Rocha, the creator of Q.U.B.E; and Rami Ismail, co-founder of Vlambeer and one of the industry’s more recognisable faces. All had seen the G2A interview, and participated in that discussion. Bithell did so in the room, in fact, questioning Mirek directly on the company’s fraud prevention processes, and the money it earns as a result.

“The key thing I’ve learned about shifting reputation over the years is that action matters a lot more than words”

Mike Bithell

Despite the weight of negative sentiment surrounding G2A, though, all three developers were very clear about one thing. Whatever their issues with G2A now, its marketplace is not scorched earth. “Oh, they can fix it,” Ismail said, in response to a question from GamesIndustry.biz. “Just stop being shit.

“Just look at the history of the games industry. Five years or seven years ago Microsoft was the company to work with for independent games. Then they kinda messed that up, and then it was Sony, and now we’re at the point where maybe in the near future it’s going to not be Sony. Steam was great, then it wasn’t, then it was.

“Reputations shift all the time, and really all that you need to shift your reputation is to work for it. We all have a reputation, whether positive or negative, and we all work hard to make sure that it’s considered positive.”

Bithell agreed, describing both himself and his fellow panelists as “figureheads” for a certain group of people. In that sense, they all have to take responsibility for and manage their reputations, and G2A has a great deal more control over what happens now than it might seem.

“The key thing I’ve learned about shifting reputation over the years is that action matters a lot more than words,” Bithell said. “It’s not about paying lip service, saying we’re thinking about doing a thing, we’re about to do a thing, there is the potential in the future to do a thing; it’s about just doing that thing. That’s the way we’ve all helped our reputations over time.”

Dan Da Rocha offered an example from his own career. When the Director’s Cut of Q.U.B.E. was released, he “commented” that some additional content would be released for free. Some time later, with the investment in that new content larger than initially expected, it was decided that selling it could be justified in terms of value. “There was a massive uproar,” he said. “Lots of complaints.”

“People might yell at you, but if you fix the thing that people are yelling about then very frequently 99% of people will appreciate that”

Rami Ismail

He attempted a half-measure, promising to give the content away to anyone who sent an email. “Too many emails came through,” Da Rocha continued, prompting spontaneous laughter from Bithell and Ismail. Ultimately, the strategy that worked was a full and frank apology, and a complete walkback of the decisions that had led to the problem. Not only were the game’s fans back onside, Da Rocha said, they actually expressed responded positively.

“If you make those changes, you can sometimes get a stronger reputation than if you’d just done those things in the first place,” Bithell added. “Doing something wrong and then doing what’s necessary to solve that often leaves you in a positive position.”

Throughout his interview at Reboot Develop, Mario Mirek returned to the steps G2A had already taken to protect developers whose games are sold on its marketplace. That the development community regards these measures as inadequate is, at this point, glaringly obvious. From here, G2A’s ability to shift its reputation to positive will be down to its willingness to accept, and not dictate, the terms of that process.

“People are generally forgiving,” Ismail agreed. “Sure, people might yell at you, but if you fix the thing that people are yelling about then very frequently 99% of people will appreciate that.

“I guess G2A hasn’t done that yet.”