Marketplace That Changed How We Buy Games
During my visit to Cologne this year for Gamescom and Devcom, I had an exclusive interview with G2A, one of the world’s largest digital marketplaces for game keys (and not only). Among dozens of developer meetings, this one offered a different kind of insight: a look at a company that influences gaming from the commercial side rather than the creative one.
Is G2A legal? Are keys from G2A legit? Can you trust G2A? Read on — I asked them all, tested the site, and poked the systems myself.
And If you’ve ever wondered what G2A actually stands for, the company’s official answer is “Gate 2 Adventure.” That’s shown on their corporate pages — and on the business card I received during our meeting.
Note: This interview wasn’t sponsored or paid for by anyone. I joined purely out of interest — to understand how G2A works today, and to share what I saw and heard firsthand. Consider this my independent deep dive into one of gaming’s most debated marketplaces.
Table of Contents
Setting the Goals
When the invitation email arrived, it felt like a good chance to understand their business from the inside. G2A has been active since 2010, surviving rough early years and a fair share of controversy. Browsing their site before the meeting, I noticed new services that hinted at change — enough to make me curious about how the marketplace has evolved.
I spent half an hour with Joanna Dronka, Head of Commercial Partnerships; Bartłomiej Czarnota, Gaming Category Manager; and Piotr Radzięda, who leads PR and community. G2A has always been an easy company to label, yet a difficult one to define. For many players, it became synonymous with cheap keys; for some publishers, a target of frustration. Opinions remain polarized: from accusations of fueling grey markets to claims that the platform helps reduce piracy and supports global access to games.
Fifteen years on, G2A is introducing verified sellers, AI-assisted systems, and a closer connection with developers through the G2A Direct program. Yet the core questions remain: where do the keys originate, how does the marketplace model sustain itself, and what does transparency mean when operating across more than 180 countries?
This conversation wasn’t about excuses or marketing. It was a look at what G2A has become in 2025 — a marketplace still shaped by controversy, transparency, and ambition. Let’s explore.
How G2A’s Catalog is Shifting
A few years ago, describing G2A was easy — game keys, bundles, and the occasional software license. Now that definition barely holds. Alongside new releases, the marketplace lists software, e-learning courses, subs, and even tutorial bundles — the kind of content that sits halfway between gaming and productivity.
According to Bartłomiej Czarnota, this expansion isn’t a top-down idea but something sparked by the users themselves. As he put it, customers buying keys for software “also want to learn how to use them,” which led to tutorials for both AI tools and games. “When people buy games, they sometimes pick up tutorials that help them improve their skills,” he said. “It lowers the entry barrier.”
That crossover when players picking up learning material next to their games — gives the store a new shape. It’s slowly turning from a simple marketplace into a kind of digital utility platform, where content and commerce sit in the same cart. Czarnota admitted it’s still early, describing the trend as “not that big a pie, but it’s rising fast,” and noting that “trends can shift day to day.”
He also recalled how easily a new category can take off. “When we started with mobile top-ups, trends grew by 200 percent month after month,” he said. “If customers see products available in a niche, we have a chance to catch their interest.”
The strategy is straightforward — diversify without losing focus. Tutorials and utility software are still small pieces of the pie, but they hint at where marketplaces like G2A may be heading: into a space where entertainment, tools, and learning quietly overlap. After all, many of us (myself included) game, socialize, work, and learn behind the same screen. It’s all happening through the same interface, so maybe it’s only natural that stores start reflecting that too. This is the way how players actually live online — one tab for gaming, one for getting better at it, and maybe another for tinkering with the tools behind it.
Revolution: AI in G2A’s Daily Operations
AI was the hot topic at Devcom this year. Everywhere I turned, someone was pitching tools that would “redefine workflows” or “transform creative pipelines.” So I made it a mini-mission to ask how companies were actually using AI — not the slide-deck version, but the real, behind-the-scenes stuff.
For G2A, it’s already part of the machinery. Bartłomiej Czarnota explained that automation runs through support and security: “Our standard chat is an automated AI tool,” he said. “It helps customers find answers, and we’re using AI in our KYC verification process to check if photos are genuine.” (Editor’s note: KYC is a Know-Your-Customer — identity checks where platforms ask for IDs and selfies)
That’s the sort of use case that doesn’t make flashy headlines, but it does keep the engine running smoother. And honestly, I get it. In my early career I worked both KYC/KYB and support for a game platform, and those queues were a warzone of frustration. (Editor’s note: Know-Your-Business, bundle of documents that prove a company’s existence and ownership- registry extract, tax number, bank statement). Every ticket meant someone angry that something broke — and it took patience, and nerves of steel to defuse it before you could even start fixing the issue. Plenty of my colleagues burned out on that work.
From that angle, automating the first contact doesn’t sound cold; it sounds humane. If a bot can handle the routine cases and guide people through simple fixes, that’s one less human getting screamed at over a missing key or a failed transaction. Personally, I don’t care if I’m talking to a person or a well-trained AI, as long as it actually solves the problem. Saving someone’s mental health while keeping customers serviced? That feels like a win for everyone.
After the interview, I jumped onto G2A.com and poked around their customer support section to see how that bot actually behaves. It’s still more like a wiki than a true assistant — it doesn’t access account data or perform any real actions. If I were its prompt engineer, I already have a few ideas on how it could be way handier. But honestly, the fact that I no longer need to dig through endless support articles or sit in a queue just to find basic answers is already a plus in my book.
The Power of the Small Creators
Before the interview, while digging through G2A’s news section, I found a headline about their new partnership with inStreamly — a platform built around micro-influencers. It stood out, because instead of chasing mega-streamers with million-dollar deals, G2A was doing the opposite: spreading support across hundreds of smaller creators. So I decided to ask more about it in Cologne.
The result is a campaign called “Watch and Save,” and it’s simple. Twitch viewers can earn discount codes just by watching participating streamers — 5%, 10%, or 15% off digital games and software depending on total watch time. The more you hang out, the more you save. Those codes can then be redeemed on G2A.COM for everything on their site.
The idea behind it isn’t revolutionary, but it’s smart. Each streamer brings a small, tight-knit audience, and every watch session helps both sides — viewers get discounts, and streamers get traffic, visibility, and some well-earned spotlight time. Bartłomiej Czarnota said the data proves it works: “The smaller influencers convert better. Long-term partnerships with huge creators weren’t that successful for us.”
So far, G2A has run two editions of the campaign, with around 150–200 micro-streamers involved each time. Most activity comes from the U.S., the company’s biggest market, but there are plans to expand across Europe later this year. Roughly 500 streamers are expected to join by the end of 2025, with coordination running through the inStreamly Discord community.
In practice, the system works like a loyalty card for watch time. Instead of throwing money at billboard names, they’re fueling a distributed network of smaller voices — the kind of people who actually talk to their chat, remember usernames, and meme back when someone drops a joke.
And honestly, they could’ve just dumped those discount codes on generic coupon sites or blended them into another SMM promo. Instead, they’re using them to help small Twitchers grow their channels — giving those creators an extra reason to stream, and viewers an extra reason to stick around. Nice move, honestly. It’s simple, but it feels good-natured in a way you don’t often see from big marketplaces.
After talking about micro-influencers and campaigns, it felt like the right moment to lift the hood a bit; time to put away the veil and peek at the internals.
The Hidden Machinery: Compliance and Regulation
From the outside, G2A looks deceptively simple — a clean interface, regional prices, a search bar that always seems to know what you’re typing. But underneath that front-end polish is a small city of systems, checks, and regulations quietly grinding away. “Even if our interface looks simple, it’s very complex inside,” said Joanna Dronka. “We have a dedicated team that monitors and checks all the applicable laws and regulations for our business.”
That might sound like a standard line until you realize how often the rules change. New frameworks land every few months — PCI DSS latest update (Industry standard for securing card data), regional payment laws, DORA, you name it. “Whenever a new law or regulation comes in, we quickly adapt,” Dronka said. “That was the case with regionalization — we cover games globally, and every country has its own regulation. We have to be compliant with everything.” Bartłomiej Czarnota added that the goal is to “keep security at the highest possible level on the market.” This scale explains why cybersecurity and compliance aren’t side jobs here.
Now, let me put on my fintech hat for a second. I’ve been working in payment systems for over ten years, and I still do. This side of the business is brutal — especially when you deal with high-risk merchants and global transactions. Modern PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2. EU law that tightens online payment rules and mandates Strong Customer Authentication) and AML directives (EU rules designed to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing) make life very hard for carders and shady resellers. Every transaction is under the microscope: card verification, device fingerprinting, geo-IP checks, behavioral scoring — all of it happens automatically, and suspicious payments get flagged for manual review before they ever clear.
And here’s where things get even more interesting. G2A’s payment backbone is tied to ZEN.COM, an EU-licensed Electronic Money Institution (there is also UK’s and Singapore EMI as well). That means both companies operate under strict EU financial law — PSD2 + AMLD5/6 directives — and under the supervision of the Lithuanian regulator and Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF).
In practice, that means:
- Every payment passes automated and manual risk checks (card, device, geo, behavioral data).
- Suspicious or mismatched transactions are delayed, blocked, or reviewed manually.
- Refunds and chargebacks are tracked religiously — go above roughly ~0.9% chargeback ratio and the fines start knocking.
Fraudulent payments don’t just hurt profit; they could literally jeopardize ZEN’s EMI licenses. Of course I had to poke the beast. I ran a few harmless tests (nothing sketchy) just to see what would happen, and sure enough — I got rejected and hit with a verification prompt 😀
So when Dronka says they’re “very strict,” that’s not a slogan. It’s the reality of running a global marketplace tied to an EU financial entity — every key sold sits inside a web of compliance that has to be airtight.
The Origin Question: Where the Keys Come From
Few topics follow G2A longer than this one: where do the keys actually come from? It’s the story that refuses to die — that somewhere in the shadows, stolen cards or laundered codes still slip through. The company’s payment systems and KYC checks have changed beyond recognition, but the old myths are etched into the web like blockchain entries — impossible to delete.
Joanna Dronka didn’t dodge the question. “The answer isn’t as exciting as people think,” she said. “Products come from publishers, then go through regional distributors. Those distributors have wholesalers, and the wholesalers sell to retailers on our platform.” Bartłomiej Czarnota put it even plainer: “It’s like a grocery shop — the producer grows the apples, sells them to wholesale, and the wholesale sells to grocery shops.” The comparison sticks because it maps the logistics: volume, speed, and a short shelf life after launch.
Two practical consequences follow. First, publishers push stock into channels to move volume fast — hype after release tends to last only a few weeks. Second, keys aren’t eternal, anonymous strings: they travel in batches, carry metadata, and leave activation footprints. Piotr Radzięda summed up the storytelling problem: “People want the exciting answer, not the true one. It’s hard to convince them that the boring explanation — just a normal distribution chain — is the real one.”
Here’s the part that matters today: those simple-sounding chains now sit inside a brutal control architecture. Publishers and platform holders can trace batches, track activation telemetry (IPs, times, device signals), and blacklist suspicious blocks. Keys tied to fraudulent purchases can be invalidated. Marketplaces sweat over KYC, device fingerprints, and payment risk because too many problems don’t just burn margins — they threaten relationships with payment providers and licensed EMIs. In short: what used to be a low-bar hustle for casual resellers has become a high-friction operation that needs infrastructure, compliance, and real contract behind it.
So is grey reselling gone? For casual flippers, the old model is effectively dead in many markets, thanks to tighter payments, batch tracking, and merchant controls. Determined fraud networks still exist, sure, but they require serious, criminal-grade tooling — not weekend hustles.
That’s the awkward truth for the rumor mill: the ordinary distribution chain is true, but it lives under a newer, tighter system. The scandalous story is louder. The boring, regulated reality is quieter — and much less fun to share.
G2A Direct: A Marketplace That Shares Back
Toward the end of the conversation we got to G2A Direct, the program built to give developers a direct channel into the marketplace and a cut from later third-party resales. It’s the piece the company points to when it wants to show it has moved past its resale-bazaar reputation.
Joanna Dronka laid out the basics in plain numbers: there are two ways to earn. If you sell your game directly on the platform, the marketplace fee runs at roughly 10%, so you keep about 90% of the sale. Second, and more interesting is the resale cut. As G2A describes it, developers receive a 10% share from any third-party sales — meaning the original studio still sees royalties even when someone else trading their game.
Read the fine print before signing anything, of course, but on the face of it that setup looks attractive: claim your IP, list a little stock (or none), and collect a cut from the platform’s wider marketplace flow. Compared with Steam (developers get ~70%) or Epic (developers get ~88%), keeping ~90% on direct sales and collecting 10% on resales on a marketplace with 30 million users (on 2024, according to wiki) is a tempting proposition for many indies.
“So far the program has around 300 developers signed up” – Said Joanna Dronka. I’ve put this in my backlog, with intend to talk to studios actually running G2A Direct and get the real numbers and feedback in a follow-up piece, so stay tuned.
What this initiative tries to do is straightforward: make a messy resale ecosystem more accountable and developer-friendly. That means clearer royalties, better reporting, and a formal channel where studios can push legitimate stock into the marketplace while still capturing value when third parties resell their titles.
So — does the math fix reputation?
G2A Direct is probably the clearest signal the company can offer that it wants a normalized relationship with developers. It converts an ad-hoc distribution chain into contractual revenue flows and reporting. But trust is cultural as much as it is contractual — a line in a contract doesn’t erase a decade of forum threads and Twitter lore overnight.
It’s still a tough debate: harm reduction versus outright prohibition. From a platform perspective, moving volume into regulated, traceable channels reduces the real harms buyers face (invalid keys, no support). Ban these platforms and trade moves peer-to-peer over Discord DMs, which is where scams and financial phish thrive. After all, illegal demand isn’t produced by resellers alone — it’s fuelled by regional pricing, sales windows, and player budgets. Sometimes people simply can’t afford titles at local prices, or they miss a sale and look for an alternative. That context matters when you judge who’s responsible and what a “solution” should look like.
Anyways, to wrap up the interview on a lighter note, I shifted into some myth-busting!
Clearing the Air: Myths & Misconceptions
Old narratives have long memories. Even after compliance upgrades, verified partners, and a formal Direct program, G2A still smells faintly of its messy early years — the kind of story that spreads faster than any patch note. Piotr Radzięda shrugged at that stubbornness the way you shrug at a decades-old meme: “The biggest question people still ask is where the keys come from,” he said. “The answer that isn’t true is more exciting, so it stays in people’s minds. It’s very difficult to convince them otherwise.”
That’s the problem with internet folklore: scandal is sticky, the ordinary is forgettable. Joanna Dronka put it bluntly — the moment someone tries to sell on the platform, the story usually falls apart. “The myth is gone the minute they start the KYB,” she told me. “It’s not easy to start selling on G2A.”
Not that I don’t trust Joanna — my job as journalist is to verify. So I decided to register as a seller with the vague plan of buying a key and trying to resell it. After creating a fresh account I hit a four-step verification flow: explain the origin of stock, upload official bank documents, company and personal IDs, and a certificate from the government tax authority. And even that doesn’t guarantee approval.
Early campaigns that nudged players to resell unused keys probably read like a PR misstep in hindsight, and those headlines left marks that are hard to scrub. Radzięda’s point lands: everyone remembers flash and scandal far longer than they remember audits and spreadsheets. “People want things that are exciting and memorable,” he said. “If it’s just a normal distribution chain, they forget it.”
So where does that leave G2A in 2025? Functionally, the marketplace runs as a business with compliance baked in. Narratively, the internet prefers the juicy version. The paradox is almost cute: the quieter the company gets about its inner mechanics, the louder the rumor mill gets in response.
I closed the topic the way I approach most internet arguments — with a little patience and a cup of sarcasm. Myth-busting is fun, but it won’t replace data and developer case studies. If you want to know whether the platform actually behaves differently now, the receipts are in reporting, audits, and real-world pilots — not in hot takes.
Final Thoughts
G2A’s story sits somewhere between reinvention and persistence. The company now speaks in modern language, but it still carries the smell of an unregulated marketplace from another era. Listening to Dronka, Czarnota, and Radzięda made one thing clear: most of the work happens under the surface — in compliance forms, code, and policies players rarely see.
Everyone has their stance on key markets, but I’ve seen a pattern: most of you have a friend (or have heard the story) about someone who used to pirate games until cheaper, legitimate options showed up. Services like G2A and Humble Bundle let people snag a wanted title for $15 instead of $40. When I asked those ex-pirates, the response was the same: once a game drops to that level, the risk isn’t worth it. Developers win too — a pirated copy nets them nothing, but a discounted sale can turn a player into a repeat buyer who might grab the sequel at full price.
Will that shift change how the gaming community sees G2A? Maybe. The mechanics are different and the safeguards tighter, but reputation moves slower than regulation. For a marketplace built on digital goods, trust remains the hardest currency to trade.
What’s your take? Gamers — would you buy from key marketplaces like G2A? Devs & publishers — do platforms like G2A help or hurt your business? Drop a comment below, or use the contact form if you want a deeper, private convo — I read every message.
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