New chapter in TinyBuild / G2A spat

G2A employee accosts TinyBuild CEO during GDC Q&A

A G2A employee took stepped up during a Q&A session during the Games Developers Conference accusing TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik of making untrue statements about the game key marketplace. This follows last year’s very public spat between Nichiporchik and G2A, wherein TinyBuild’s CEO accused G2A of fostering criminal activity after finding out that the key marketplace had sold $450,000 of TinyBuild games without his knowledge, revealing that several of these keys were bought from his website with stolen credit cards.

It’s a claim that G2A totally denies, and eventually it faded from public view.

This most recent chapter in the saga happened at San Francisco’s GDC event, with Nichiporchik sitting on a GDC panel entitled Fraud and Your Game Economy, with Polygon capturing the entire event: “There’s more and more ways for the smaller fraudsters,” said Nichiporchik, “people who are 15 years old sitting in their bedrooms to hack a bunch of credit cards. Now there’s more ways for them to wash or launder that money. There’s platforms like Kinguin and G2A facilitating these guys to get and to sell the keys that they have stolen.”

He was agreed with by other panel members at the time, but then during the after panel Q&A session Marius Mirek, an outbound sales specialist for G2A came to the microphone to "dispel a few things":

"Ladies and gentlemen … I am actually from G2A.com,” said Mirek, via Polygon. “I was directly involved with Alex’s case and I would like to dispel a few things, first of all. G2A.com does work with developers directly and any one of you can email me. And let’s address your codes, because I was handling your emails. You have provided not a single [game] code [for us to validate the alleged fraud].”

Nichiporchik only managed to respond "You’re really going to do this at GDC?” before Mirek was shut down by the panel moderator Scott Davis.

Outside, Polygon asked Mirek for further comment:

“You can easily look at eBay or Amazon or another marketplace,” Mirek said. “Fraud is a part of any other marketplace. But we do not contribute to it. In fact, we monitor the marketplace very closely. And you know what, you don’t have to ask my opinion. You can ask the 100 developers that work with us.”

“The only way you can find out about it is to talk to a particular developer and compare their fraud numbers against ours,” Mirek said, “and I can guarantee you nothing is going to be there.”

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