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[InquisitorAles]

Does this junk really sell that much?

Well, let's take one those sites for example - http://lastkey.ru/ As you can see, they have around 30k keys in stock for first 3 games listed, for 0.03$ per 1 key price. And this is just one site, there is literally dozens other sites like this who's selling those games to card farms.

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have those, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only purpose: card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam level and will buy any badge to increase their level. People like those will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

That's exactly what i was going to write to explain how things works, thank you.

 

[UrbanRats]

NVM dont want to get into that.

 

[coopolon]

Pretty much which why this specific policy hasn't been in place for all this year's. It benefits everyone a great deal.

It sounds like it has been in place though(see jasec posts). Maybe it just never got attention before because there weren't systems like cards that made it profitable to abuse.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

Let's hope it won't backfire on them. But the alternatives are Origin/uPlay or DRM-Free services, which... Well, publishers don't like for obvious reasons.

It's not obvious to me at all, since Steam games without extra protection (ie Denuvo) get cracked within a few hours anyway.

 

[JaseC]

Pretty much which why this specific policy hasn't been in place for all this year's. It benefits everyone a great deal.

Again, Valve has always reviewed large key requests out of concern that they may be used to shepherd people away from the store:

NOTE: Steam Keys are intended to help partners run their other physical and digital businesses by matching offers that exist on Steam. It's important that Steam customers are treated fairly and that offers using keys are materially consistent with offers on Steam. It is not okay to sell keys for products that aren't also available for sale on Steam at the same time. Make sure Steam customers are getting a fair offer relative to any other stores where you distribute Steam keys, especially at launch.

NOTE: Requests for large amounts of keys will need to be manually reviewed by Valve before processing.

Nothing has changed aside from smaller requests now having the same level of scrutiny as larger ones. Developers can still sell their games elsewhere:

Other Retail Stores.
You are welcome to generate keys for resale with other retailers, including your own website. However, your product must also be available for sale on Steam. If you are hoping to receive exposure to Steam customers, the price on Steam will have to match prices elsewhere.

And they can still partake in indie bundles:

Bundles off Steam.
You are free to use keys to distribute your product via bundle offers off Steam. We've learned from developers that pay-what-you-want bundles are a great revenue opportunity when your product is very far along its life cycle.

What they can't do is use keys to frequently undercut the store. That's the key word here -- "frequently". Sales on other stores are fine. Indie bundles are fine. Just not to the extent that the Steam Store is left in a comparatively bad position for a prolonged period of time.

 

[CecilRousso]

Feels reasonable based on the example in OP. I myself am not interested in exploitative developers and resellers, shovelware and price dumping.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

If they didn't want to do that, they shouldn't have done that.

Valve assumed people would buy through Steam because it's Steam. They probably didn't see the rise of legitimate bundle sites people trust in numbers, or developers getting better at marketing and selling their games on their own sites.

If they want to force developers to only sell on Steam, that's their choice. Isn't that completely counter to what PC platform has always been though? Open market, freedom of choice, no walled gardens, etc...

Wait, hold on. Valve is forcing developers to pull their games from GOG, Origin, etc? Games have to be exclusive to Steam now? As opposed to just clamping down on companies that hope to use Valve's bandwidth and such for free?

I'm surprised you haven't made a thread on it, given that you absolutely aren't spouting off about stuff you don't understand.

 

[Cleve]

This seems pretty reasonable given the listed circumstances. Did people read the same post I did?

 

[Armaros]

Wait, hold on. Valve is forcing developers to pull their games from GOG, Origin, etc? Games have to be exclusive to Steam now? As opposed to just clamping down on companies that hope to use Valve's bandwidth and such for free?

I'm surprised you haven't made a thread on it, given that you absolutely aren't spouting off about stuff you don't understand.

Or the laughable idea of Valve regulating Key abuse is infringing on a hallmark of the platform, when they are the only one that allow for free key distribution.

Where are all my GOG keys?

 

[OmegaX]

So are you going to discuss the topic or use the thread as your soapbox? Did you even read the link in the OP?

Especially considering none of your named stores even allow for keys like Steam?

Origin and uPlay do. You can only buy the Steam version of Ubisoft games from Steam. Everywhere else you get an uPlay key. Same for Origin but they no longer sell on Steam. Both have been featured on Humble Bundles too.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have those, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only purpose: card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam level and will buy any badge to increase their level. People like those will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do it anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that if you wish.

.

 

[MUnited83]

Origin and uPlay do. You can only buy the Steam version of Ubisoft games from Steam. Everywhere else you get an uPlay key. Same for Origin but they no longer sell on Steam. Both have been featured on Humble Bundles too.

No, they don't. You're confusing yourself here. No shit UBISOFT and EA can generate keys FOR THEIR OWN GAMES ON THEIR OWN SERVICE. That has literally jackshit to do with anything people are talking about here.

 

[Armaros]

Origin and uPlay do. You can only buy the Steam version of Ubisoft games from Steam. Everywhere else you get an uPlay key. Same for Origin but they no longer sell on Steam. Both have been featured on Humble Bundles too.

They provide at no cost, extra keys to third party devs to sell their products on other stores that will activate on Uplay or Origin as if they bought it straight from the client?

The key is THIRD PARTY.

 

[OmegaX]

No, they don't.

What's the difference? a uPlay/Origin key can be activated on their own client, and Ubisoft/EA have no problem selling through GamersGate, GMG, Humble Store, etc.

Edit: Ok, I just saw the reply above. Most of their games are self published so I guess it doesn't matter to them.

 

[MUnited83]

What's the difference? a uPlay/Origin key can be activated on their own client, and Ubisoft/EA have no problem selling through GamersGate, GMG, Humble Store, etc.

Read my edit. What you're talking about has literally nothing to do with what we're talking about.

 

[Armaros]

What's the difference? a uPlay/Origin key can be activated on their own client, and Ubisoft/EA have no problem selling through GamersGate, GMG, Humble Store, etc.

... Are they giving out free keys to third party developers To sell elsewhere?

EA givng out EA keys for a EA client to humble bundle is not what is being discussed. EA still controls everything along the way. EA chooses still

Valve gives keys out and the devs can put them in any store without any Valve input. Valve is NOT choosing anything here.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

I am uncomfortable with this. Obviously steam can do whatever the hell they want with their platform.

Edit: I guess this isn't new reding jasec posts? Steam decides who it's worth losing money to gain customers (like Atari) and who they're not willing to support in a similar way (small indie devs) and it has been this way all along. I apparently misunderstood steamworks. I thought it was free and available to anyone.

Yes, this is exactly what JaseC said. Your reading comprehension is unmatched.

 

[Nzyme32]

rip cheap games.

That isn't what this is doing - they won't honour generating massive numbers of keys for products that clearly do not have the need for it - ie spam and other so called "fake games". I massively doubt they will prevent anything similar to Humble Bundle and established games - something that is a consistent boon for the Steam ecosystem

 

[inpHilltr8r]

Surprised they haven't looked at collecting a fee (which is some % of the MSRP) from publishers/developers for every key activation to be honest.

Indeed, they should sell the keys to developers at a price that reflects their margin on keys they sell directly. That they don't is a gift to developers. Apparently they're getting a little fed up with some developers abusing their generosity.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have those...

Wow, that's not just abusing the system, that's gaming it for profit.

 

[Nzyme32]

They have no choice valve is in way too much of a dominant position. That was my point about people who wished for every game to be on steam and (an important and) for all the of it's competition to fail.

These exact scenarios were what I as warning against.


No but they can control the price based on how many they allow to be released. Very easily in fact.

Valve doesn't make or demand the prices for anything sold on Steam - the control is entirely in the developer or publishers hands

 

[Armaros]

Indeed, they should sell the keys to developers at a price that reflects their margin on keys they sell directly. That they don't is a gift to developers. Apparently they're getting a little fed up with some developers abusing their generosity.

Apparently to some of valve critics, they need to get rid of the pure shovelware card flipping scam artists but arent allow to regulate the mechanisms the card flippers abuse

 

[Grief.exe]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that if you wish.

Should put this on the OP.

 

[KHarvey16]

It seems like anyone actually concerned about consumer and developer rights and well-being should direct their anger at shovelware developers gaming the system at our expense.

 

[Diedac]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

But you can not add cards to a game unless it pass some sort of criteria (units sold one of them)

 

[baconcow]

I am for this. There are a lot of crappy games flooding bundles.

 

[Serious Sam]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

Amazing post. Quoting to raise awareness.

 

[Tertullian]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

There’s a problem with explaining this shit away with an idle “Oh, it’ll only affect asset flippers and card farmers.” The problem is that’s not what Sean J said. Let’s take a look at what he actually wrote:

If we are denying keys for normal size batches

So we are talking about Valve denying keys for normal size batches. Not ridiculous batches. Not huge batches. Normal size batches.

It’s likely because your Steam sales don’t reflect a need for as many keys as you’re distributing, and you’re probably asking for more keys because you’re offering cheaper options off Steam and yet we are bearing the costs.

He said it right there: if Valve thinks “you’re offering cheaper options off Steam,” they don’t like that. They want to shut that down. They don’t want developers to have control of where and how their games are sold. Not if it means Valve isn’t nabbing as much revenue as they could be.

So at some point we start deciding that the value you’re bringing to Steam isn’t worth the cost to us.

“”You want to sell copies of your game? Well, what have you done for me lately?” is a scary attitude for developers. Steam is a gatekeeper for developers of PC games. Unless you’re as big as EA or your only ambition is to sell 50 copies on itch.io, you have to sell your game on Steam, and Steam keys are where the vast majority of your sales are gonna come from. “Prove that you’re still valuable to me” is an ominous thing to hear from the guy who already happens to have a guillotine over your neck.

For example, say you’ve sold a few thousand copies on Steam but have requested / activated 500K keys, then we are going to take a deeper look at your games, your sales, your costs, etc.

Sean’s example is “500K” keys, but he already said explicitly that Valve is perfectly willing to deny keys for normal size batches as well. But notice what else Sean said here: if Valve doesn’t like how and where you choose to sell your game, they’re going to take a deeper look at your “games.” Not “game.” “Games,” plural. The threat extends to your entire portfolio of PC games. And they’re going to take a deeper look at your “costs.” What business is it of Valve’s what a developer’s costs are? Why would Valve need to know a developer’s costs? Well, the more you know about a developer’s income statement, you more you know about how reliant they are on off-Steam sales of their game, and the more you know about how much they could afford to be herded back onto your storefront...

Sean J could easily have said “We’re only ever going to deny keys to developers who are exploiting trading cards and who have requested a thousand times more keys than copies they’ve sold.” If that were what he wanted to say, that’s what he would’ve said. He very specifically didn’t say that.

And besides, isn’t Valve supposed to be fixing these trading card exploits anyway? Why not just fix that problem directly and make it impossible for these exploits to happen? Why tackle the problem indirectly through case-by-case decisions about free key batches? Because this isn’t really about trading card exploiters, which is why Sean J didn’t even claim it was about trading card exploiters.

Here’s the thing: Valve is not your friend. They are not your friend if you’re a consumer. They are not your friend if you’re a developer. They are business men whose job is to make money, just as surely as the CEO of EA, or the CEO of Walmart for that matter. They are not your laid-back video game-loving bros. They are bloodless bureaucrats who care about what customers and developers want exactly to the degree that it helps them make money, and no further.

We’ve already seen Valve pursue what is basically a quasi-monopolistic strategy. They used incredibly deep discounts to make huge gains in popularity and force everyone on PC to invest heavily in their storefront. Then when their position was secure, they eliminated their two-tier discounts (regular sale price vs. dailies and flash sales), and voila: sales are garbage now, and Valve makes more money.

But developers can still sell their games off-Steam. So now Valve is eying those off-Steam sales. They don’t like Humble. They don’t like other key resellers. They want their 30% of those sales. So the next logical step is to start tightening the screws on developers who like the freedom to sell their games wherever they want.

Obviously it won’t happen all at once. They’re not gonna shut Humble down tomorrow. But slowly, starting with borderline-illegitimate developers and moving to unpopular and unknown developers, they could very well start turning up the pressure. You want to deeply discount your game off Steam? Sorry, can’t give you those keys. You want to put your game in the $1 tier of a Humble Bundle because you really want as many people to play it as possible? Ooh, sorry, you’ve only sold 5,000 copies on Steam; we can’t give you 25,000 keys.

Maybe they won’t do this, or they won’t do it soon. But one thing’s for sure: if they want to do it, their conscience certainly isn’t going to stop them. They don’t care about what’s good for customers or developers any more than any corporation does. The second they think they can get away with something like this, or that the gains will outweigh the negative PR, they won’t hesitate a moment to pull the trigger, and they’ll sleep like babies that night.

And people on here will still be insisting that these super-rich business moguls just love video games, and love developers, and are just the cuddliest most transparent most consumer-friendly bros a gamer could have. And everything is the fault of those bad evil asset flippers and card exploiters, even though they’re mostly random kids or poor dudes overseas trying to make a quick buck who have no actual power or influence, and Valve controls the entire system and holds all the cards. But Valve would never do anything anti-consumer! Poor beleaguered Valve just can’t seem to get rid of those card exploiter vermin! Valve has to start carefully controlling when and where developers get to sell their own games! Because of those wicked asset flipper! Praise Gaben!

 

[Platy]

I wonder how much this will affect youtube personalities, considering how much of those ask for keys instead of buying them

 

[Sulik2]

This seems like a pretty reasonable business decision on Valve's part.

 

[Eila]

Don't understand why valve keeps making these changes when Steam is doing so well. It's like they have to put their employees to do some work but don't want to develop videogames anymore.

 

[LaFr]

I didn't expect to see Valve take this kind of action before Youtube. Valve isn't bleeding revenue the way Youtube is.

 

[Team Filler]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

...

We’ve already seen Valve pursue what is basically a quasi-monopolistic strategy. They used incredibly deep discounts to make huge gains in popularity and force everyone on PC to invest heavily in their storefront. Then when their position was secure, they eliminated their two-tier discounts (regular sale price vs. dailies and flash sales), and voila: sales are garbage now, and Valve makes more money.

But developers can still sell their games off-Steam. So now Valve is eying those off-Steam sales. They don’t like Humble. They don’t like other key resellers. They want their 30% of those sales. So the next logical step is to start tightening the screws on developers who like the freedom to sell their games wherever they want.

Obviously it won’t happen all at once. They’re not gonna shut Humble down tomorrow. But slowly, starting with borderline-illegitimate developers and moving to unpopular and unknown developers, they could very well start turning up the pressure. You want to deeply discount your game off Steam? Sorry, can’t give you those keys. You want to put your game in the $1 tier of a Humble Bundle because you really want as many people to play it as possible? Ooh, sorry, you’ve only sold 5,000 copies on Steam; we can’t give you 25,000 keys.

Maybe they won’t do this, or they won’t do it soon. But one thing’s for sure: if they want to do it, their conscience certainly isn’t going to stop them. They don’t care about what’s good for customers or developers any more than any corporation does. The second they think they can get away with something like this, or that the gains will outweigh the negative PR, they won’t hesitate a moment to pull the trigger, and they’ll sleep like babies that night.

And people on here will still be insisting that these super-rich business moguls just love video games, and love developers, and are just the cuddliest most transparent most consumer-friendly bros a gamer could have. And everything is the fault of those bad evil asset flippers and card exploiters, even though they’re mostly random kids or poor dudes overseas trying to make a quick buck who have no actual power or influence, and Valve controls the entire system and holds all the cards. But Valve would never do anything anti-consumer! Poor beleaguered Valve just can’t seem to get rid of those card exploiter vermin! Valve has to start carefully controlling when and where developers get to sell their own games! Because of those wicked asset flipper! Praise Gaben!

But what about their association with chemtrails?

 

[TransTrender]

The people complaining about this do not even understand enough about the Steam ecosystem to realize why this is happening.

This is going to affect developers (and I use that term in it's most liberal interpretation) who request half a million keys and sell (or "sell") them on Russian sites you've never heard of for 3 cents a piece.

How does it work?

Suppose I'm a developer. I fire up the free version of Unity, browse the Unity asset store and download some free assets, package them together and put it up on Steam. It costs me $100 for the Steam Direct fee. These are the low quality, trash asset flips that bother everyone except Jim Sterling who loves to shine a spotlight on them. So, no one is going to buy my crap game. No way to earn money from sales. What do I do now?

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

This is the reason Steam is plagued with all these asset flip games. Nobody is buying them or playing them. It's the developers putting up anything on Steam so that they can earn money on the backend with card sales.

What Valve is trying to do here is to stop this trend. If they stop giving out keys in bulk then this sort of 'business practice' hopefully dies and that in turn will mean all these trash games stop getting onto Steam because it's not worth it to do this anymore.

But of course this won't stop some from crying out about how Valve is abusing their 'monopoly' and how terrible it is for consumers and developers and how evil they are. So, carry on with that I guess...

Thanks for explaining the mechanics of this. Jim Sterling mentioned the card economy a few times when talking about shitty developers with games on Steam but I never understood the entire scope. He even mentioned ways Steam was going to crack down on it when he had the face to face and this could possibly be the first step. Overall this is super gross.

 

[stan423321]

But you can not add cards to a game unless it pass some sort of criteria (units sold one of them)

This doesn't apply to old games, for instance.

I request 300,000 keys from Valve. Once I have them, I activate those 300,000 keys on 300,000 bot accounts that are used for only one purpose; card farming. Suppose I added 6 Steam trading cards to my game. That means each of the bots will idle 3 cards per key, which is 900,000 cards in total. I then go and sell them on the Steam market. It does not even matter what price they sell at. The absolute minimum price for a card is 3 cents and the developer gets 1 cent from every sale. There are people on Steam who are in love with their Steam profile level and will buy any badge to increase that level. These people will buy up all my 900,000 cards and even if I got 1 cent per card, that's $9000 earned. For a $100 investment.

Without attacking the core of this post, don't these people also need a copy of such a title on Steam to get their badge? I thought they do. Note that you would just sell some of those 300'000 copies to them instead of cards.

 

[JaseC]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

Not really. The official Steamworks documentation categorically states that keys can be used to sell one's game off-site and include it in indie bundles, and it's actually anywhere from nigh on to literally logistically impossible for a developer to always have a game on sale on Steam when it's on sale/bundled elsewhere as there's a two-month cooldown on self-discounting.

Again, the change -- which, to reiterate, is just smaller key requests and larger ones being reviewed with identical scrutiny -- isn't about walling off digital retail but preventing developers from shepherding customers away from Steam. Nobody in their right mind would buy, say, Indie Darling of the Moment for $9.99 on Steam when the developer is selling all of its unused keys on DIG for 10c a piece. That's the problem Valve's tackling.

 

[Abilidebob]

They used incredibly deep discounts to make huge gains in popularity and force everyone on PC to invest heavily in their storefront. Then when their position was secure, they eliminated their two-tier discounts (regular sale price vs. dailies and flash sales), and voila: sales are garbage now, and Valve makes more money.

I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't set those discounts, publishers do. And as shown again and again, dailies and flash sales while a big sale was going on is just a crap thing. I sure LOVED to wait until the final hour of the sale to start buying anything, or get anxious that I was busy/sleeping and couldn't buy a game at a certain discount. Instead of, you know, have 2 weeks to decide what I'm going to buy.

 

[llien]

So Valve should start dictating what publishers and devs can sell their games for?

There must be some incentive for developer to sell it elsewhere.
What, do you think, it is?

 

[MUnited83]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

There’s a problem with explaining this shit away with an idle “Oh, it’ll only affect asset flippers and card farmers.” The problem is that’s not what Sean J said. Let’s take a look at what he actually wrote:



So we are talking about Valve denying keys for normal size batches. Not ridiculous batches. Not huge batches. Normal size batches.



He said it right there: if Valve thinks “you’re offering cheaper options off Steam,” they don’t like that. They want to shut that down. They don’t want developers to have control of where and how their games are sold. Not if it means Valve isn’t nabbing as much revenue as they could be.



“”You want to sell copies of your game? Well, what have you done for me lately?” is a scary attitude for developers. Steam is a gatekeeper for developers of PC games. Unless you’re as big as EA or your only ambition is to sell 50 copies on itch.io, you have to sell your game on Steam, and Steam keys are where the vast majority of your sales are gonna come from. “Prove that you’re still valuable to me” is an ominous thing to hear from the guy who already happens to have a guillotine over your neck.



Sean’s example is “500K” keys, but he already said explicitly that Valve is perfectly willing to deny keys for normal size batches as well. But notice what else Sean said here: if Valve doesn’t like how and where you choose to sell your game, they’re going to take a deeper look at your “games.” Not “game.” “Games,” plural. The threat extends to your entire portfolio of PC games. And they’re going to take a deeper look at your “costs.” What business is it of Valve’s what a developer’s costs are? Why would Valve need to know a developer’s costs? Well, the more you know about a developer’s income statement, you more you know about how reliant they are on off-Steam sales of their game, and the more you know about how much they could afford to be herded back onto your storefront...

Sean J could easily have said “We’re only ever going to deny keys to developers who are exploiting trading cards and who have requested a thousand times more keys than copies they’ve sold.” If that were what he wanted to say, that’s what he would’ve said. He very specifically didn’t say that.

And besides, isn’t Valve supposed to be fixing these trading card exploits anyway? Why not just fix that problem directly and make it impossible for these exploits to happen? Why tackle the problem indirectly through case-by-case decisions about free key batches? Because this isn’t really about trading card exploiters, which is why Sean J didn’t even claim it was about trading card exploiters.

Here’s the thing: Valve is not your friend. They are not your friend if you’re a consumer. They are not your friend if you’re a developer. They are business men whose job is to make money, just as surely as the CEO of EA, or the CEO of Walmart for that matter. They are not your laid-back video game-loving bros. They are bloodless bureaucrats who care about what customers and developers want exactly to the degree that it helps them make money, and no further.

We’ve already seen Valve pursue what is basically a quasi-monopolistic strategy. They used incredibly deep discounts to make huge gains in popularity and force everyone on PC to invest heavily in their storefront. Then when their position was secure, they eliminated their two-tier discounts (regular sale price vs. dailies and flash sales), and voila: sales are garbage now, and Valve makes more money.

But developers can still sell their games off-Steam. So now Valve is eying those off-Steam sales. They don’t like Humble. They don’t like other key resellers. They want their 30% of those sales. So the next logical step is to start tightening the screws on developers who like the freedom to sell their games wherever they want.

Obviously it won’t happen all at once. They’re not gonna shut Humble down tomorrow. But slowly, starting with borderline-illegitimate developers and moving to unpopular and unknown developers, they could very well start turning up the pressure. You want to deeply discount your game off Steam? Sorry, can’t give you those keys. You want to put your game in the $1 tier of a Humble Bundle because you really want as many people to play it as possible? Ooh, sorry, you’ve only sold 5,000 copies on Steam; we can’t give you 25,000 keys.

Maybe they won’t do this, or they won’t do it soon. But one thing’s for sure: if they want to do it, their conscience certainly isn’t going to stop them. They don’t care about what’s good for customers or developers any more than any corporation does. The second they think they can get away with something like this, or that the gains will outweigh the negative PR, they won’t hesitate a moment to pull the trigger, and they’ll sleep like babies that night.

And people on here will still be insisting that these super-rich business moguls just love video games, and love developers, and are just the cuddliest most transparent most consumer-friendly bros a gamer could have. And everything is the fault of those bad evil asset flippers and card exploiters, even though they’re mostly random kids or poor dudes overseas trying to make a quick buck who have no actual power or influence, and Valve controls the entire system and holds all the cards. But Valve would never do anything anti-consumer! Poor beleaguered Valve just can’t seem to get rid of those card exploiter vermin! Valve has to start carefully controlling when and where developers get to sell their own games! Because of those wicked asset flipper! Praise Gaben!

They're denying normal batch requests from people that already abused the large.

I wonder how much this will affect youtube personalities, considering how much of those ask for keys instead of buying them

Not at all, I guarantee you that. The amount of keys sent to youtubers/reviewers is ridiculously small in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Maintenance]

 

 

[Diablohead]

I always thought they checked that anyway, it even said stuff like that when you go to ask for some.

Good move though, stops people selling batches of keys for a quick buck to a store that will then sell them for cheaper then the steam price, since it does not cost the developer/publisher anything to request keys.

 

[Robottiimu2000]

Does this mean we get the good sales back?

 

[Data West]

so is my wolf2 key from cdkeys.com ok or what

 

[KHarvey16]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

There’s a problem with explaining this shit away with an idle “Oh, it’ll only affect asset flippers and card farmers.” The problem is that’s not what Sean J said. Let’s take a look at what he actually wrote:



So we are talking about Valve denying keys for normal size batches. Not ridiculous batches. Not huge batches. Normal size batches.

Quantify normal. I think you're reading much too far into that word.

He said it right there: if Valve thinks “you’re offering cheaper options off Steam,” they don’t like that. They want to shut that down. They don’t want developers to have control of where and how their games are sold. Not if it means Valve isn’t nabbing as much revenue as they could be.

Uh, what? He doesn't say anything like that.

”You want to sell copies of your game? Well, what have you done for me lately?” is a scary attitude for developers. Steam is a gatekeeper for developers of PC games. Unless you’re as big as EA or your only ambition is to sell 50 copies on itch.io, you have to sell your game on Steam, and Steam keys are where the vast majority of your sales are gonna come from. “Prove that you’re still valuable to me” is an ominous thing to hear from the guy who already happens to have a guillotine over your neck.

The amount by which you're misunderstanding this is almost impressive.

 

[Abilidebob]

.

Also holy strawman at the rest of the post.
People aren't "le praising le gaben le master race ecksdee" or whatever shitshow you managed to conjure. The fact is that, aside from maybe GOG, no other platform, consoles included, give so much value to the developer and consumer for free. If you were to ask Microsoft or Sony or EA for them to generate thousands of keys for free so that you could sell them elsewhere and those buyers use their platform without paying a cent, they'd spit on your face.

As MUCH as Valve has done some questionable and anti-consumer stuff in recent years(Content creators getting shafted in DOTA 2 and TF2, paid mods debacle, support being crap for years etc) they are STILL the ones with the most consumer and developer-friendly features. If that's not enough for you, that's absolutely fine. But then by the same metrics, no other platform is fine.

 

[Armaros]

Eek, this is some scary stuff.

You spent a paragraph talking about the topic and then 5 more on the usual anti-steam soapboxing with more slippery slope arguments that still haven't applied while getting facts like how sales on steam works wromg in its entirety.

If you want people to take you seriously, stop with the absurd doomsaying.

 

[MUnited83]

This doesn't apply to old games, for instance.


Without attacking the core of this post, don't these people also need a copy of such a title on Steam to get their badge? I thought they do. Note that you would just sell some of those 300'000 copies to them instead of cards.

Nope, no need to own a game to craft a badge for it.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

So, how did this work before? Could a dev just set the steam price to 50 bucks, then order 100,000 dev keys to sell them for $3 each to humblestore or whatever and Steam then just eats the cost handling the download traffic, platform administration costs, cloudsave space etc. for Humble and Greenman and whoever?

Surely a steam key handed out to a dev must have cost enough to cover for that, right??

 

[TheRedSnifit]

There must be some incentive for developer to sell it elsewhere.
What, do you think, it is?

The fact that Valve takes a cut?

Developers want to use Valve's bandwidth, Valve's support resources, Valve's Steamworks features, etc., but they don't actually want to pay for it. So they markup their games on Steam to try and shepherd customers into an environment where they don't have to pay Valve, but can still take advantage of Valve's infrastructure.

Surely, you aren't saying that Valve should just not make any money?

 

[Hasney]

Goodbye CDKeys.com then..

No, they buy retail.