Digital Game Marketplace First Impressions

It should come as a surprise to know one that I buy and own a lot of games:). Have bought a great deal of games directly on Steam and through various bundles. Nevertheless, wanted to try something different when Steam made the call to stop all gifts of Counterstrike: Global Offensive for the foreseeable future. It was first announced to be for the Summer sale, but this continues now even without a sale. I confirmed this by emailing their support.

Thus, been wanting to learn more about G2A.COM – Global Digital Gaming Marketplace for a while now and I finally did this weekend. To start things off, I bought a couple of random packages and a couple of games. One premium key for $1 got me Two Worlds Two which is far from what I would call premium. However, the 10 random keys for like $2 were mostly Russian knockoffs and junk. The first games were SpinTires (Regular $30) for about $8 and Gauntlet (Regular $20) for like $3. I got these both for a good price with the G2A shields. Spintires is an excellent game that I seemed to have missed on Bundles. Took me a while of searching through all the games to come across it though. That said, I learned quite a bit about how G2A works in those first few hours. Here are my observations:

1. Every item needs a shield to be guaranteed. This is $1.11 and is multiplied by the number of items you buy.

2. Every item also has a transaction fee.

3. Always choose the lowest price available because the shield you buy guarantees it.4. There is no copy and pasting so you have to write down each code to activate it. Not fun with 10 trash codes.

5. Only buy the Steam versions of games.

6. Cards will cost more there no matter what.

7. They also have antivirus software and a lot of CS:GO items.

8. It pays off the most with expensive games like GTA 5. Black Ops III etc if you get the shield and activate it immediately.

Keep in mind that this was a first visit. Every code I got worked and, thankfully, every game worked as well. I tried a few lower priced games (one just 67 cents) without the shield and those worked fine as well. I can see the use of the shield with the expensive games. The lower priced games not so much. Thus, it was a good overall buying experience meant to mainly try out the site. Going forward, I will likely just check out the site if I can’t find something somewhere else like possibly the elusive Paysafe card that I can’t seem to find in Texas. Some prices were actually higher than what I have got the games for in Bundles or in Steam sale. I had to search for quite some time to find what I found.