Guess what? When you call out one of the world's biggest third-party resellers of keys for digital games, there's a good chance they might not be happy about it.
After the maker of Punch Club and SpeedRunners, tinyBuild, accused the site of profiting at their expense yesterday, G2A hit back. The third-party marketplace has publicly given the devs three days to provide a list of CD keys they believe were fraudulently obtained.
One of the largest differences in today's world of gaming is the way digital marketplaces have flourished and made the market more accessible for developers and gamers over the last ten years.
But it's also opened up a whole lot of grey areas, opportunities that third-party vendors have used to flourish. Some of those opportunities, however, can come at the developers' expense.
On a popular torrent site, Fallout 4 has been downloaded nearly 140,000 times. Nearly 200 people are downloading right now, as I write this. AAA or indie, Fallout 4 or Super Meat Boy, it doesn't matter. Piracy is inevitable. But a torrent doesn't appear out of thin air.
Boxing management tycoon Punch Club hit the top Steam charts at launch, marking it as a game that did well on the digital storefront. Even so, the number of people who pirated the game vastly overshadows the number of people who actually bought it.
If you spent some time earlier this year playing through Punch Club, chances are you might have wondered what became of poor Fluffy.
Out of everything that's released in 2016, two titles have stuck out in my mind. The first one is the subversive platformer-puzzler hybrid Pony Island, which certainly stands out for being one of the more meta titles in recent times.
The second is Punch Club, the boxing management simulator whose marketing campaign was run through the quirky medium of Twitch Plays. It's apparently worked, with the game grossing more than US$1 million in sales in 10 days.
Punch Club first got everyone's attention with an extremely transparent Twitch-based marketing scheme. Ever since its release, however, it's been one of the top games on Steam. Is it actually any good? With some reservations, I'm gonna say yes.
I've seen some quarters of the internet complain about how more and more games are being seemingly made for streamers or YouTube personalities, but Punch Club might be taking things to a new level.
It's a boxing tycoon simulation where you train fighters to beat up crocodiles, in what sounds like a more interesting twist on the Kairosoft mobile games. It's coming out on January 25 -- unless Twitch Plays beats it first.
