Gearbox meddelade nyligen att företaget kommer samarbeta med spelåterförsäljaren G2A som kommer sälja samlingsversionen av Bulletstorm åt Gearbox. Spelvärlden verkar inte riktigt uppskatta detta på grund av G2A:s aningen dåliga rykte. Strax efter detta blev känt begav sig John Bain, mer känd som TotalBiscuit, ut på Twitter för att meddela att han på grund av detta inte längre kommer täcka spel från Gearbox.

Pulling coverage plans for it and future Gearbox titles. No support for crooks.

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) April 5, 2017

A message must be sent that greymarket havens for fraud and theft will not be normalized in this industry.

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) April 5, 2017

You know what I call "work with us and we can help your keys not get stolen and sold on our site"? A protection racket.

— John Bain (@Totalbiscuit) April 5, 2017

I en intervju med Kotaku berättar Bain lite mer om det hela och säger att G2A praktiskt taget kör utpressningsmetod för att få företag att samarbeta med dem.

G2A has offered its own payment system as a ‘solution’ to credit card fraud and mass-chargebacks which cost indie developers and retailers huge amounts of money and put them at risk of being blacklisted by the worlds major credit card companies. A company can decide to work with G2A directly and use their payment solution and API, from which G2A takes a fee. This has been offered to companies such as TinyBuild who claimed to have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue due to G2A as well as smaller startup retailers such as our partner chrono.gg, who also suffered significant credit card fraud and chargebacks early in its life. When they approached G2A regarding this, they offered to give them insight into who was selling stolen keys from chrono.gg but only if they switched to using their payment system and API.
G2A is providing a ‘solution’ to a problem that they created and continue to facilitate and profit from both the solution and the fraud. G2A is essentially saying, ‘That’s a nice game you have there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.’ That sounds an awful lot like a protection racket to me.