Meet Bartosz Skwarczek, Founder of G2A Capital Group and G2A

G2A.COM is the world’s largest marketplace for digital entertainment, where users can buy vouchers for digital products such as games, gift cards, subscriptions or software. They are a user-friendly platform that creates a secure ecosystem connecting sellers and buyers, trusted by over 30 million users from 180 countries who have purchased over 100 million items so far.

G2A.COM gathers in one place 75,000 digital items offered by sellers from around the world. In 2023 the platform recorded over 250 million visits. G2A.COM currently employs over 400 specialists from 12 countries, with women comprising 40% of the workforce. The Holding is located in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), with regional offices in Hong Kong, Rzeszów (R&D centre), Warsaw, and Krakow.

Being the top online entertainment marketplace is not the end of the road. G2A.COM leads in online security, awarded with the prestigious American CNP award for the best anti-fraud team in the world, alongside companies such as Microsoft, Barclay’s Bank and First Data.

As a two-sided marketplace, they offer a platform for customers and sellers. G2A’s most important task is to take care of the security of both parties, not only the buyer but also the seller. The company cooperates with leading players in the field of cybersecurity such as Microsoft, Akamai and Justt.

G2A.COM has been honoured with many prestigious awards in the USA and Europe, including the Newsweek award for innovation and distinctions in two categories: the Best Games Website of the Year and the Best B2C Website of the Year of the Global E-commerce Awards competition. They are also involved in numerous charity activities, including Save the Children Foundation for whim they have raised over $5 million.

 

Why Did You Start G2A?

 

Being an entrepreneur has been my dream and aim since high school. I wanted to prove that there are no limits and that everything is possible. Growing up in a non-wealthy family, in a post-communist country in the 1990s, and having no money in my pocket, I was hungry for success, for growth, for a successful life. Back in 2009, I received an email from an 18-year-old that said: “Hi Bartosz, can you please be my business mentor? Dawid”.

I ignored it, but he emailed me again the next day. I liked his perseverance from the get-go. After receiving a second longer message, I agreed to be his mentor for six months.. I started giving him advice on the psychology of achievements and business insights that I had. I already had extensive business experience, having set up and managed several companies.

After mentoring him for six months, Dawid asked if I wanted to start a business venture together, a gaming business. My initial reaction was, “Why gaming? Gaming is for kids!” Only after looking into this area more and catching up on the business side did I realise how my initial reaction was rooted in stereotypes about gaming and that gaming can be a good, futuristic idea.

I had a strike of intuition; something told me, “Do it, try!” Thanks to listening to it and connecting business experience with my partner’s youthful motivation, the result was the creation of G2A.COM.

When we founded G2A.COM in a small office in Poland almost 14 years ago, we were just a handful of people with big dreams and even bigger ambitions. We wanted to become the best source for gamers to get their games, first as an online store, and then as a marketplace. We saw very early on that there was a trend to move from boxed distribution of video games into the world of digital.

Even though much attention of the rest of the industry was focused on boxes themselves, we discovered there was an opportunity in this trend. In 2010, when I started the company, almost 70% of the market was made up of physical games and offerings.

In 2014, when we decided to move to the marketplace format, it was 39%, and by 2023 it was only 5%. At the same time, regardless of physical or digital distribution,  our goal was to show the world that gaming as entertainment is for everyone.

G2A.COM is a big contributor to the gaming community because we aim to democratise and facilitate access to digital entertainment. Big publishers work to continue increasing game prices, even after moving from physical to digital distribution.

Platforms like Steam, Uplay, and the Epic Games Store have their own closed-off stores, and we wanted to create one place where someone looking for digital entertainment could find everything they need, regardless of the platform, for a reasonable price. We want to show that gaming and digital entertainment can be for everyone, no matter their age, sex, gender, culture, country, or wealth.

 

What Does It Mean To Be A Digital Entertainment Marketplace?

 

For me, digital entertainment right now is an all-encompassing term, which can include pretty much all aspects of entertainment you can enjoy in your home: movies, music, games, books, but also education. G2A.COM is here to open the Gate 2 Adventure in digital entertainment; games, gift cards, subscriptions, software and e-learning.

We act as both an Explorer and Caregiver at the same time, as the Explorer, we aim to help you look for new and exciting opportunities for entertainment, and as the Caregiver, G2A.COM wants to create a safe environment for you to look for and purchase digital vouchers.

We want to make sure the best digital adventures are at your fingertips. User value is our guiding principle. We help everyone expand their potential by giving them access to an all-digital offering of unparalleled quality.

Jeff Bezos once said, “Marketplaces are eating the world”, which can be seen clearly right now. According to recent studies,  63% of global online sales is made through marketplaces, and this number continues to grow.

My observation is that the post-pandemic world has brought a lot of new Internet users who often do not know the basics of how to operate safely online. G2A.COM is a very good example of what people are looking for at the beginning of their digital journey in an online marketplace, they want a clear offer, available all over the world, with top notch security and familiar payment methods, offering competitive prices and giving you a choice of who to buy from.

Firstly, we have a very diverse and complex offer of digital entertainment. No matter if you are a hard gamer looking for sophisticated in-game items, a casual person looking for a VOD or Netflix subscription, a parent searching for a birthday present for a kid, or a silver generation seeking for e-learning course at G2A.COM you have the best digital adventures at your fingertips.

Of equal importance is that you purchase from a safe and secure platform, which is why cybersecurity is one of our priorities. Our comprehensive approach to security allowed us to keep the anti-fraud rate at the level significantly lower than the industry average. G2A.COM often appears at industry events where we share our knowledge, we also share our observations online and on thematic portals. G2A.COM has strategically positioned education as a cornerstone of its cyber defence architecture.

Our educational initiative is a multifaceted campaign designed to empower these new users with the knowledge and tools they need to safely navigate the online marketplace. The campaign includes user-friendly guides and tutorials that cover the basics of safe online behaviour, such as recognising phishing attempts, understanding secure payment methods, and learning the importance of strong passwords.

Last but not least, being an online marketplace gives you access to many new forms of marketing and promotion as well. This includes, among others, esports and online influencer community. We have been involved in the support and development of e-sport almost from the very beginning. In the past years we have sponsored over 70 e-sport teams and co-organised over 100 industry events. On a daily basis, G2A.COM works with top brands of new media and technologies such as Google, Facebook and TikTok.

In our portfolio, we have over 1,800 current and past partnerships with influencers from around the world (including popular, large-scale youtubers like PewDiePie) who promote the democratisation of access to digital entertainment. G2A.COM also works directly with around 300 video game developers and publishers as part of its proprietary G2A Direct programme. At the same time, the company cooperates with many entities from the gaming industry, such as Wargaming, Gigabyte, Logitech, MSI, Razer, Gameforge and IGN.

 

How Has The Digital Entertainment Industry Changed Over The Last Decade?

The gaming industry,, has recently surpassed the music and films industries combined in both size and revenue, and this trend is only going up.. The newest reports from Newzoo forecast the global gaming revenue to reach $189.3 billion in 2024, a growth from $184 billion in 2023. Comparing this to $33 billion from the music market and $77.2 billion from films in 2023, the difference is huge.

The future looks to bring growth to not only AAA and AA gaming, but also for independent developers, who have recently immensely increased in quality.

In terms of the form of digital entertainment, we could see a big change, in not only games, but music and movies as well, towards service models.

We can see it in the trends for the latter categories (in music, for example, streaming services amounted for over 84% of all music revenue in 2023, and grew by over 10% since 2022, and in film, 99% of all US households are subscribed to at least one streaming service), but in gaming it took a more complex approach.

Right now, almost every new game includes some form of monetisation, through either a pay-once with cosmetics shop model, or by developing a F2AP model, where you can play for free and support the game with in-game microtransactions.

This doesn’t threaten marketplaces like G2A.COM, however it did hasten our move towards an all-digital marketplace instead of just a gaming one. Our focus had to shift from only providing video game codes more towards in-game items, currency and subscriptions, and later to an all-digital marketplace we are today, offering also non-gaming subscriptions, software and e-learning modules.

 

With More People Online Than Ever Before, Are More People Looking For More Entertainment Online?

 

Consumers are looking more towards buying games digitally, most people have moved away from shopping at retailers. Gaming is a very good example of that, where in just 15 years since G2A.COM appeared on the scene, we witnessed a growth of digital in this category to a dominating amount of 95% of all sales.

The recent pandemic also rushed this trend very much. Since Covid-19, more people have become interested in the digital world, not only gamers, but casuals looking for various offers online. We decided to expand and diversify our offer to give them what they are looking for; from games also to subscriptions, gift cards, software and e-learning.

You can also find this shift on social media and in the trends of online influencers. The audiences of the past were following the lives of movie and music stars, and while this trend can also be seen now, much more attention and focus of the public is put on online influencers.

Instagram, YouTube, and more recently TikTok, these are the places where the communities form and follow content creators. That’s why it’s important to work with them closely. We were pioneers in the gaming industry working with PewDiePie in 2015. The creator economy is a big business opportunity, as evidenced in 2021, when The New York Times moved its creator economy coverage from the Style to the Business section. 52% of social personalities identify as a “creator,” and over 32% prefer “influencer.”

According to a strategist Zoe Scaman, the difference is that an influencer has a big audience, stylised content and brand deals, but a creator is passionate about their content and has a loyal community willing to pay for access. In our view the world of digital contains the majority of Key Opinion Leaders right now, experts, who we can draw our knowledge from.

Right now, everyone can be an influencer, even on a micro scale, as it’s not only about the size of the audience, but its engagement, even the largest audience, if it’s not committed enough, can lose to a small group of really dedicated fans. It’s especially true in the world of digital, which is aimed at the most interactions, same as gaming, especially if you do it together with your audience.

 

Where Do You See The World Of Digital Entertainment Going In The Next Few Years?

 

The Covid19 pandemic pushed the move towards online forwards immensely; we can observe an increase of digital business in general.  The Global Interconnection Index 2024 predicts that 90% of all Fortune 500 companies will become digital providers by 2025, and according to the 2023 Digital Business study by IDG.com, 93% of all companies have already adopted a digital-first business strategy or are planning to do so.

A rise of a new group of audience casuals. That leads to enhancing focus on non-gaming categories: e-learning, gift cards, software. In the future this focus will only grow, and the diversity of offers will rise as well.

Since G2A.COM is also a leader in ecommerce security, we are looking closely at the changes in the security industry.. In cybersecurity trends, we will primarily see emphasis put on selected key areas: heightened attention to data privacy and compliance, the integration of AI and machine learning for advanced threat detection. Here at G2A.COM, we have highly trained and committed internal teams for Tech, Cybersecurity and Fraud prevention.

They have started implementing plans to address potential threats up until the end of 2024.

In terms of gaming specifically, we can now see a fight of sorts between regular game releases and game pass subscriptions. While the latter offer much for the end user, last year showed that there is little incentive for developers, especially big ones, to release their flagship games on game passes from day one, as it often cannibalises their sales numbers.

My opinion about this has been clear: gamers want games to still be products which they own after purchase, and in the digital age this means buying via activation keys. This doesn’t mean of course, that they won’t be using subscriptions, rather that they will be used as a trial run or a demo version of sorts, and if a game is to their liking, they will still buy a copy.

Sticking to the world of gaming, there will most likely be a move of the mobile section towards the PC. The rising cost of user acquisition is causing the mobile market developers to start looking more on the PC market in order to increase gamers’ retention and engagement, with the goal of being available everywhere the gamers are.

This trend started some time ago with the most-known mobile titles like Genshin Impact and Raid: Shadow Legends releasing both on PC and mobile at the same time.Other studios will adopt similar strategies.

Online marketplaces like G2A.COM are closely looking at this trend. For us, it may mean much more potential offers from markets previously closed off from this form of distribution.

And of course, AI is and will continue to be the topic of the day, year, perhaps even a decade. I don’t think anybody can predict precisely what is going to happen within the next 3-5 years, but I expect significant and fast-paced changes. Companies are already looking for ways to implement AI solutions in various departments, and G2A.COM is no different.

We are already making active use of AI-assisted tools in several departments, including Cyber Defence and Creative teams, and we are planning to research the topic much deeper and make as much use of this developing technology as it grows.  Let’s hope that the hype around AI doesn’t become an investor bubble like last year’s NFT’s. I think we should learn from this and be both actively curious and cautious towards this market.

 

How Can We Find You?

 

Website: www.g2a.com