G2A Announces Game Developer Support System Worldwide.

Trading is in theory also forbidden, but what you see here in the Trades section is maybe a hundred keys at most. On G2A, just one group sells them by the thousands, sometimes even more. So this is the case where letting the sometimes small fish go is better PR, but letting the big groups breaking the rules and profiting from their service should go punished. But as long as G2A actively tries everything to not step up (since said groups are their main source of income), they remain in the semi-legal territory, and they know it. This is why they don't even attempt to officially open their business in the EU or NA.

It comes down to a matter of scale. Gifting/trading is done on a fairly limited basis, and with gifting/giveaways in particular the winner of a giveaway often would never have actually wanted to spend real money on the game anyways. For example, GOG actually officially allows game trading and giveaways on their forums, but they do not allow resale because of the higher potential for mass abuse and lost sales.

G2A presents itself and markets very broadly to the mass consumer market as some sort of fully sanctioned, legitimate site and so people who would have bought a game through an official channel that gives a developer a fair cut in their region (70% of a sale is pretty standard) end up buying the game through G2A in which the developer receives a much smaller piece of the sale (like between 0-30% of what they would have actually gotten through an official channel). Many people who use G2A are unaware of this, and think that buying from G2A is not different than buying from an officially licensed store. It is actually very different and the developer earns maybe on average 40-70% less on each sale then they would have normally gotten -- and of course there are the 0% sales in which keys were obtained through criminal fraudulent means (and in which G2A still profits) or the 0-10% sales due to hoarding abuse of the goodwill of bundle sites and special promotions.

Piracy is one thing, and yeah, pirates gonna pirate. But the bigger problem here is that legitimate buyers with actual money who want to support the developers and the gaming industry are being tricked or cajoled into giving the bulk of their money to middlemen instead of the actual people who created the game. This is a generally bad thing for the industry because there is less financial incentive for developers to actually make new games. It's also horrible for people who enjoy bundles because developers will think very hard before allowing so many of their keys into the wild when there are so many people simply looking to profit off them instead of actually enjoying the games and spreading their enjoyment via word of mouth marketing.

People who love video games need to realize that G2A is bad for the future of the video gaming industry, and for people who love bundles, G2A is a huge contributor to why bundle sites are struggling to get developers on board anymore. Most developers and officially sanctioned stores tend not to mind so much about smaller-scale giveaways/gifting/trading because these tend to have a more positive effect on word of mouth without hurting their sales margins too drastically. However, when you lose 50% or more of your sales margin to middlemen who are advertising in a huge way to the mass consumer market and who don't care that what they are doing is hurting both developers and the video games industry in general... well, it becomes a little more understandable why people have a problem with what G2A is doing.