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Third-party gray market key reseller, G2A, has been under increased fire the past week. Sure, it's had its fair share of accusations and criticisms slung its way over the years, but nothing quite like what we've seen in the past week. Today, an email sent from G2A to a handful of website owners, attempted to manipulate the public image of the company in an incredibly scummy way.

The email included a "transparent" and "unbiased" pre-written article about G2A that presented a warped spin on the truth about stolen game keys. The "truth" here just being a bunch of lies, depending on how you want to look at it. The email requested that these sites publish the article "without being marked as sponsored or marked as associated with G2A." G2A claims that this was something that a rogue employee did "without authorization," continuing on to say that it was "unacceptable" behavior.

One of these media members was Thomas Faust from IndieGamesPlus.com. Faust shared screenshots of the email on Twitter earlier today. The email wanted members of the gaming media to "improve (their) brand awareness and public image," namely with Indie and smaller development studios.

This email comes about a week after a number of independent developers said that they would rather see people pirate their games than buy them on G2A. Their reasoning is that if they aren't going to see a single cent either way, they would rather not see anything go to G2A either. In response, G2A said that they would work with an independent auditor to go over their own store and those of other developers. They said that depending on the outcome G2A would "pay developers 10 times the money they lost on chargebacks after their illegally obtained keys were sold on G2A," but only if the devs can "prove such a thing actually happened."

A sample of the full article was included with the email. In the small snippet, the article very much reads as though it was written by someone, or multiple someones at G2A. The article notes that "with some luck (you can) sell one or two, even ten keys without triggering any other security measures." The author of the article makes a small effort to not read as if it's 100% from a G2A employee by adding that users have to provide bank account information in order to be paid, a move that may "make you an easy target for the police."

This is the line provided within the article to try to argue why selling stolen keys on G2A is impossible.

As a direct counter to that, a Kotaku article from 2016 focuses on how at least one G2A scammer was able to profit off of stolen Indie game keys.

The email concludes by asking the person or media outlet about "pricing and details about Your options for such content publication." G2A says that the emails were sent by an employee without authorization. They continue on to say, "he will face strict consequences."

Thanks to Kotaku for additional information on this.