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[Durante]

I don't think you're really understanding what's being done.

And neither was the person he was responding to.

Even though spindoctor actually explained it quite eloquently.

Edit: since this hit the top of the page, I'll quote it again. Many people probably aren't familiar with the mechanisms at play here:

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...

 

[Dinky Dino]

I hope this doesn't affect Cd Keys. It's one of the only ways I can actually afford most new games. I live in country where our wages are lower and our taxes are higher than the US, and yet our games are around $75 - $80 USD. It sucks.

Don't see how it would. They posted the developer making 500k keys to only selling a few thousand copies as an example. Typically the type of games made by regular publishers and not indies have a say on how many keys they want without issues as they bring in profit to valve. Only one's hit by this are likely indie devs making way too many keys compared to what they actually sell which maybe valve is looking into because it costs resources and bandwidth for people to obtain those games. At least that's my take on it.

In any case I hope this remains as is since valve is one of the few that lets others sell keys off their store without them taking a cut as sony, nintendo and ms won't start doing that any time soon.

 

[Paz]

I have no idea why Steam Spy guy is sharing a single completely out of context response post from a private Steam developers forum.

First of all I'm 99.9% sure this is not a new policy and has always been in place (non automatic approvals, that is), they might have recently adopted harsher restrictions in an attempt to solve some farming problems (They also adopted other changes to cards)

This was not an announcement, it was an explanation.

Second, this shouldn't impact the vast vast vast majority of legitimate large scale key requests, as the Steam rep himself would tell you except this is a private conversation on the developers boards so all you see is an out of context post.

They also allow you to contact them to review denied requests if you believe a legitimate one has been denied, this is one of the few areas REAL HUMANS are involved at Steam, it's fine.

This thread is full of people reacting to information they can't possibly understand (not really their fault tho) in ways that are completely not helpful.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

To everyone saying "RIP bundles", this is actually going to help bundles in the long run. It's going to produce much more quality bundles.

 

[Moral Panic]

Even though spindoctor actually explained it quite eloquently.

Edit: since this hit the top of the page, I'll quote it again. Many people probably aren't familiar with the mechanisms at play here:

Valve's own words are that they are doing this because "you're offering cheaper cheaper options off steam and yet we are bearing the costs". Nothing about tackling asset swaps or fake games - they clearly say that they dislike the fact that people are selling games without them getting a cut.

 

[Lakuza]

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...

oh wow, never even knew this was happening. 100% support valve's actions here to stop this.

 

[PanicFreak]

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...

Seems like a really crappy way to make money.

 

[Chris R]

Maybe require something like 20k verified purchases before enabling trading cards would work?

 

[firehawk12]

Doesn't Valve also get a cut of every card transaction? So doesn't it actually benefit them to have these guys farm out cards to the Steam level crazies since it's literally free money for them?

 

[SmokedMeat]

But companies that mass buy cheap products from poorer counties to sell to customers in richer countries above the poor countries retail price are not doing it for the money of course.

Humble Bundle's weekly and monthly bundles are much cheaper then CDkeys prices, and they probably sell more copies.

 

[NewGame]

People have realized that the games on steam are just licences. I haven't bought a full RRP game from steam since Orange Box

 

[CecilRousso]

Maybe require something like 20k verified purchases before enabling trading cards would work?

Or maybe just what they're doing here, since it doesn't really seem to affect anyone negatively except the ones actively trying to exploit it?

 

[SmokedMeat]

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...

This is going to hurt Indiegala. Most of their bundles and freebie games are trash.

 

[Neith]

Nah, but shady keys resellers will.

How exactly do you know who will be affected by this lol?

 

[Neith]

People have realized that the games on steam are just licences. I haven't bought a full RRP game from steam since Orange Box

Oh jesus dude, I assure you no one really cares. I have enough games from Humble Bundle alone to tide me over if my 800 strong library from Steam suddenly disappears.

 

[Starwolf_UK]

Didn't Valve have that period a while back where there were no steam keys. At least I remember on Humble Bundle linking my steam account and hitting a button to redeem games but this API had support dropped. Did that work differently to keys?

Seems like a really crappy way to make money.

As crazy as it sounds the literature world had it's equivalent of unity asset flips where these would be self published on kindle and amazon started clamping down by rejecting books if the text content was identical to already published ones (the analogy is there because there is a way to buy non-exclusive rights to some text with the idea being you use that as a template for your own ideas...excepts these people upload it verbatim and while these generic books would generate a few sales per month if you put hundreds of them in you accrued some passive income which is the same principle behind the card flipping games).

I guess the saying should be where there is an asset there is an asset flip

 

[Baleoce]

Can't say I blame them. A lot of people just use Steam as a showroom, and then buy the game for $20 less somewhere else.

That should probably tell them something else then.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Sometimes, I really have to wonder why people are willing to break NDA so freely.

1) This literally does not affect the consumer at all

2) The consumer literally does not need to know about the inner workings of Steamworks

3) It's not some sort of insight into how Valve operates

4) It's not some sort of "gamer activism"

5) It just causes a bunch of shit that Valve doesn't need to deal with because the user now has access to data that they cannot nor want to understand; the user is always going to interpret data in the only way they know how, which is as a consumer and not a developer

6) It further jeopardizes Valves willingness to communicate clearly and efficiently with devs

7) Nobody fucking cares who the leaker is

 

[OverturePT]

Makes absolute sense.

 

[MUnited83]

Doesn't Valve also get a cut of every card transaction? So doesn't it actually benefit them to have these guys farm out cards to the Steam level crazies since it's literally free money for them?

While they have a very liberal approach to what can be published on the store, I think they want to avoid incentivizing games that are literally made alone for taking advantage of Steam and nothing else. They're not even supposed to be played by anyone.

 

[Jawmuncher]

I can't really follow the proposed scam here.



I suspect this won't impact IndieGala / Groupees / other regular trash bundles. I suspect this is about truly shady situations like the bulk key buying sites and developer-initiated scams like review bombing, card manipulation, etc.

It might affect those turd giveaway groups that give away tens of thousands of keys with shady promises of reviews or whatever

Ahh ok. That's fine then. Gotta get my anime trash on the cheap lol.

 

[spindoctor]

Valve's own words are that they are doing this because "you're offering cheaper cheaper options off steam and yet we are bearing the costs". Nothing about tackling asset swaps or fake games - they clearly say that they dislike the fact that people are selling games without them getting a cut.

A couple of people have brought this up in the thread so it's worth looking at. JaseC posted the relevant bit from the Steamworks documentation a few pages back, but I'll post it again here...

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.

Valve lets developers generate Steam keys for free on the condition that Steam customers also get a fair deal. They obviously want this because they only make money when a customer buys the game from Steam. This does not mean they try to dictate the price a developer can charge or what kind of promotions or discounts they can do. Valve is okay with all of this.

However, there are developers who flagrantly disregard this guidance (an example is in InquisitorAles' post). The reason they are doing this is because they want to make money from cards, but the actual rule they are violating is the one where Valve asks them not to do this exact thing. This is not a discount or a timed promotion or anything like that... it's straight up selling tens of thousands of copies of the game at 3 cents a key for as long as it takes them to sell out. This is what is getting the developer's access to unlimited keys looked at more carefully. Valve isn't looking for their pennies that they get out of these transactions (at least I hope not).

Another general concern is how this will affect regular users, so let's talk about that.

• This will not affect AAA/retail developers and their key supply. Valve is not going to limit how many keys Activision can request for the next Call of Duty. This also means that this specific move will not affect sites like cdkeys, G2A and others who resell retail keys. Valve has taken steps to curb those kinds of grey market sites (at the request of publishers and developers), but this specific change will not affect them.
  
• This change will not affect your favorite indie developer. This is not going to affect Mike Bithell or Jonathan Blow or any developer who makes indie games you like. All those developers are in the game dev business and partnered with Steam in good faith. They understand that having hundreds of thousands of keys of their games out in the wild will actually hurt their own income.
  
• This will not affect alternative digital distribution sites like Humble Bundle or Gamersgate or GMG. You will be able to use their coupons or regional pricing or whatever benefits you get from buying whichever Steam keys you want.
  
• This will not affect your favorite streamers or Youtubers. The number of keys given out as marketing tools is a drop in the bucket compared to the amounts that are being blocked now.
  

The only people who will be affected by this are developers you have never heard of who make games you have never heard of that were being sold on sites you have never heard of and that you will never actually play because they are not even made to be played.

 

[OmegaDL50]

It would awesome if a Mod could put Spindoctor's posts in the OP.

Or if Tripon is reading this thread do it himself, because it really helps the discussion rather than some of the kneejerk reaction like posts

 

[CertifiedFP]

This is going to hurt Indiegala. Most of their bundles and freebie games are trash.

Y'know what, yeah.

Fuck IndieGala

They're the publisher who cut off support for Blockstorm after only a few months and refuse to let the devs do any further updates for bugfixes or proper mod support because they decided their money was better spent on supporting Early Access Survival Game No.79157 (63% positive, 7,400 sales compared to Blockstorm's 429,000 sales) - And now I find out their main business is shitty bundles of shitty games?

1% better than Konami is still bad.

 

[Pixieking]

Soooo... I didn't see this posted in the thread, but I may have missed it.

Valve says it's cracking down on big key requests to combat Steam skulduggery

"While our changes did impact the economics of trading card farming for new products coming to Steam, there are still a lot of games and game-shaped objects using Steam keys as a way to manipulate Steam systems. As a result, we're trying to look more closely at extreme examples of products on Steam that don't seem to be providing actual value as playable games-for instance, when a game has sold 100 units, has mostly negative reviews, but requests 500,000 Steam keys. We're not interested in supporting trading card farming or bot networks at the expense of being able to provide value and service for players.

It's completely OK for partners to sell their games on other sites via Steam keys, and run discounts or bundles on other stores, and we'll continue granting free keys to help partners do those things. But it's not OK to negatively impact our customers by manipulating our store and features."

 

[Head.spawn]

I have no idea why Steam Spy guy is sharing a single completely out of context response post from a private Steam developers forum.

First of all I'm 99.9% sure this is not a new policy and has always been in place (non automatic approvals, that is), they might have recently adopted harsher restrictions in an attempt to solve some farming problems (They also adopted other changes to cards)

This was not an announcement, it was an explanation.

Second, this shouldn't impact the vast vast vast majority of legitimate large scale key requests, as the Steam rep himself would tell you except this is a private conversation on the developers boards so all you see is an out of context post.

They also allow you to contact them to review denied requests if you believe a legitimate one has been denied, this is one of the few areas REAL HUMANS are involved at Steam, it's fine.

This thread is full of people reacting to information they can't possibly understand (not really their fault tho) in ways that are completely not helpful.

There ya go. Thanks.

Soooo... I didn't see this posted in the thread, but I may have missed it.

Valve says it's cracking down on big key requests to combat Steam skulduggery

Makes sense to me.

The odds of this affecting any typical users/developers seems to be unlikely.

 

[Estoc]

Doesn't Valve also get a cut of every card transaction? So doesn't it actually benefit them to have these guys farm out cards to the Steam level crazies since it's literally free money for them?

Well, Valve also gets a cut everytime someone is insane enough to buy an assets-flip, so should they keep them in? Of course not, because selling those hurt their image.

I'm well aware that, to date, they have done nothing worth mentioning against assets-flip, they do have plans though, so that's good for them.

However, if, as spindoctor said, stopping these assets-flip trading card abuse can reduce the number of assets-flip from flooding the market, thus improving their image in the long run, then they should do that instead of looking at the short term gain of trading card.

 

[Jedi2016]

Seems to me that if they just curated the store, they wouldn't have this problem. But, at the same time, I suppose they wouldn't be making their hundred bucks a pop, then, either.

 

[pezzie]

This sounds completely reasonable to me. Valve should be making money on games that utilize their storefront's infrastructure and bandwidth. They're not forbidding others from selling their game elsewhere, they just don't want to pay the support costs of someone buying that game without them getting their cut.

 

[Pixieking]

Seems to me that if they just curated the store, they wouldn't have this problem. But, at the same time, I suppose they wouldn't be making their hundred bucks a pop, then, either.

Not everything is about money.
Not everything is about gatekeeping where creators can sell their creations.

Curation would solve this problem, but would also severely decrease the number of titles and number of genres of games that are available on Steam, because there just aren't enough manhours in the day to do "proper" curation. Something will always get missed, or be dismissed.

 

[Gattsu25]

Soooo... I didn't see this posted in the thread, but I may have missed it.

Valve says it's cracking down on big key requests to combat Steam skulduggery

This should be added to the OP

 

[dr_rus]

Seems to me that if they just curated the store, they wouldn't have this problem. But, at the same time, I suppose they wouldn't be making their hundred bucks a pop, then, either.

They would have a lot more other problems if they've "curated" the store though.

 

[NoHeDidn't]

I honestly thought steam keys were always given based on your presence and sales numbers.I mean it makes sense to limit number of keys otherwise they end up on 3rd party markets for pennies yet they use Steam servers so its understandable to a point.

I guess what matters is how they institute this policy and if Steam will lower prices to combat those lost sales to 3rd party sites.

 

[SapphiCine]

Bundle Stars sweating?

 

[Pixieking]

I honestly thought steam keys were always given based on your presence and sales numbers.I mean it makes sense to limit number of keys otherwise they end up on 3rd party markets for pennies yet they use Steam servers so its understandable to a point.

I guess what matters is how they institute this policy and if Steam will lower prices to combat those lost sales to 3rd party sites.

Nothing to do with lost sales, nothing to do with 3rd party sites (in the context I think you mean) - it's simply "developers" (#notalldevelopers) trying to make a quick buck by gaming the card market.

 

[Paz]

Someone should update the OP and title to: Valve doing what they've always done, but denying more scam game key requests.

Maybe something about steamspy guy being a sub optimal person to leak random out of context dev forum posts to.

Extremely unlikely to affect legitimate games anyone on GAF cares about, if that changes I think you'll hear about it from developers very quickly.

 

[Armaros]

Oh look an out of context single post from a conversation between valve and developers is leaked and the internet has predicteble shit-fit from headlines without any real info.

 

[Random Human]

.

 

[coopolon]

The steam spy guy is saying he was given this info by a high profile dev with a big title who had his request for keys denied by Valve. his tweet.

 

[Pixieking]

The steam spy guy is saying he was given this info by a high profile dev with a big title who had his request for keys denied by Valve. his tweet.

I don't want to do faux investigative work, but I'm gonna question the veracity of that claim. He tweeted that roughly 5 hours after the Reddit thread about this, and that thread uses the same screencapped forum post. Maybe he just sat on it to check the claim out for a few hours, but given the pretty crappy hot-take of the tweet where he infers it's to "combat game sales outside of Steam", I'm going to go "Hmmmmm..." and be suspicious.

 

[madjoki]

The steam spy guy is saying he was given this info by a high profile dev with a big title who had his request for keys denied by Valve. his tweet.

Well, since that discussion is visible to all devs, it's not someone who I would describe as "high profile dev with a big title".

Those games that everyone complains about being on Steam and when Steam does changes to try kill their profitability, people complain about that too.

More like "Russian Developer with 6 negatively rated games all of which are sold at Russian shovelware seller sites for two cents a piece (several euros in Steam) for purposes of trading card farming".

And reason this was leaked was to "fearmonger" in hopes of getting angry mobs to alter this policy or maybe for internet fame who knows.

 

[Pixieking]

Dev of "Richard and Alice" and "Charnal House Trilogy". Hopefully she won't mind me posting this thread.

Olivia White‏ @owlcavedev

The Valve Steam key discourse is really silly, yo. Valve is not screwing over small developers. Not trying to.

They literally have to put some kind of limit on generated keys otherwise you could be using their platform at no profit to them.

They won't be rejecting keys that you mark as, say, IndieGala etc. Just keeping an eye on it.

If they wanted to come down hard and harsh, they'd be charging for keys, which they could do. They are not doing that.

They've simply been open with developers (on a private forum) that SOME restrictions have to be in place, which is bloody obvious.

They're simply being transparent about a process that they absolutely mandatorily have to consider for their own business interests.

Also worth noting that this policy largely involves pre-release keys, something they've openly stated in every key request mail for years.

Like honestly think about what Valve is *actually* doing here. They're asking developers to retain a meaningful biz relationship with them.

It's obvious that there would be policies in place to stop developers undercutting Valve and using their platform to host games for free.

But they're not gonna like, reject a key bundle request for a small, low-selling game 6 months later or something.

And again, it mostly comes into play with pre-release keys. If you request like 10,000 keys pre-release, they'll question it.

This has ALWAYS been the case, and anyone who's ever requested keys from Steam know this because it says in every single email.

Valve is extremely, ludicrously fair with providing free keys to developers en masse, always has been, and this hasn't changed.

Other platforms charge for keys. Valve provides them for free, usually without hesitation. It's obvious there's SOME guidelines.

The idea that Valve is somehow sabotaging developers with this is astonishingly disingenuous and incredibly unfair.

Dev of "Death Ray Manta". Long tweet-thread, but again, don't want to link to it, because it feels kinda like siccing people on devs. *shrugs*

Best Of Rob 2017‏ @retroremakes

Valve have been declining large key requests for a while now.

For those who don't know how it works - you don't generate keys in the backend, you request them and a human decides whether to honour that.

To save arseing around there's a big list of "what are they for" to pick from. It is always at Valve's discretion.

What's missing from what I've seen of the conversation - there has been an uptick of people asking for huge amounts of keys.

Like asking for half a million keys and stuff. That's fucking absurd, right? What could you need that many for?

Alongside that - there's been a slight shift in how some folk have been releasing games. As in bundle first or whatever.

As a tactic to get noticed this makes a great deal of sense - as a way to keep cordial relations with a storefront not so much.

So two things to add to this, I guess.

Most normal requests will likely still go.

A reminder that on Steam, these are Valve's customers.

Some numbers - a good (normal) bundle you're going to burn through 20-40k keys or thereabouts.

The largest I know of was that charity bundle last year where we burnt through around triple that.

This is quite exceptional though - so if someone is putting a request in for like four or five times that -- what's going on there?

What I'm strongly suggesting is that this is 100% business as usual. The only difference between this and the hundreds of others before it

Is that instead of just leaving the thread hanging with no response - someone from Valve has responded.

I'm sorry this isn't anywhere near as exciting as the Steam Spy version. What can you do though, eh?

Just to add because I dumped it in a separate thread - this has been policy as long as I've had access to the back end and is in the docs.

I can't and won't grab it out but it's to the effect of Valve provide keys so that folks can do normal business.

As in - bundles, retail and that. They don't want to be a CDN for you and everyone else - that costs *them* money.

This isn't really unreasonable, I don't think. The leeway Valve give with keys is pretty exceptional as videogame business goes.

They're also very clear in the docs on what they consider reasonable and what they don't - it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone partnered.

The new docs do provide a wee bit more clarity here but it's always been that if they don't think handing out x keys are in their interests

They won't authorise the batch. Obviously this is going to come into focus more now because Steam has further opened the floodgates.

Honestly, there's been some proper taking the piss going on which Valve have vaguely not clamped down on but clearly aren't impressed with.

A certain not-Humble bundle site which promotes itself by getting shitloads of keys off devs. That's one.

As I mentioned upthread - releasing bundle first or simultaneously in a bundle and more expensive on Steam.

Since Greenlight there's been so many threads of 'why will you not authorize my key request for a bajillion keys, Mr Valve?'

And fuck me, the numbers are obscene. I'd raise an eyebrow at anyone asking me for 500k keys without good reason, yeah?

Loads of these are games with sales in double figures.

But all that aside, it's worth remembering a point I brought up earlier. If you sell games on Steam, these are not *your* customers.

As far as Valve is concerned, they're Valve's customers. I'm not defending this because it is an uncomfortable issue.

But especially the past year or so - as the breadth of developers on Steam increases, there's more folk who don't treat it as partnership.

Who also see inventory as worthless because you just get Valve to generate keys! And there's a lot of stuff going on that's taken advantage.

Sometimes it's in full view and share this on Facebook for one ticket, tweet for another and whatever. Often it isn't.

There's entire ecosystems springing up that essentially leech from Valve and (often unwitting and/or inexperienced) developers.

 

[Ascheroth]

Dev of "Richard and Alice" and "Charnal House Trilogy". Hopefully she won't mind me posting this thread.



Dev of "Death Ray Manta". Long tweet-thread, but again, don't want to link to it, because it feels kinda like siccing people on devs. *shrugs*

And in a *shocking* turn of events, it turns out that doomsayers didn't know what they were talking about.

 

[Sad Affleck]

Well, after all the latest info this is pretty cut and dry, I think. Valve's policy has not changed, it is absolutely reasonable and it doesn't affect any proper developers, just scam artists. Case closed?

 

[Hamster Plugin]

Like asking for half a million keys and stuff. That's fucking absurd, right? What could you need that many for?

If you're planning on doing a retail release of your game, you'll need pre-release keys so you can print them in the boxes. But I guess that big AAA publishers are still going to get those big requests approved, they're the only ones that still do retail releases.

 

[Bluth54]

Sid Alpha put up a video about this, he shows some of the Russian sites that people use for this game asset flip/trading card scheme.

 

[Varg]

Didn't the whole card scam get fixed already though? Remember last week reading up on a discussion forum on steam where someone was asking why the promised cards on the steam page weren't implemented . The dev replied saying you have to now sell over a certain amount of units to actually allow cards to be inserted . You can't just make an asset flip now and get card money . That's why you are seeing these new shitty games releasing with hundreds of achievements as a new way to entice potential buyers .

 

[Spence]

Um so as a consumer how do you know where it's safe to buy from? Like someone already said humblebundle but also GMG etc. normally legit resellers, if I just read his statement that could also mean these stores.

Edit: And before people point out that "it's just certain developers" still as a consumer how do you know when it's safe? It seems rather ambiguous and subjective.

 

[Kaleinc]

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.

Account won't drop cards unless you made a $5 purchase on it. 5*300 000 = 1 500 000. That's quite a dedication for someone who has $1.5 kk to fuck around with 300 000 bots to make $9000. Not to mention each bot needs an authenticator etc.

 

[Hamster Plugin]

Account won't drop cards unless you made a $5 purchase on it. 5*300 000 = 1 500 000. That's quite a dedication for someone who has $1.5 kk to fuck around with 300 000 bots to make $9000. Not to mention each bot needs an authenticator etc.

There's incentive for real people to participate in this, because you can always have lots of cards - 10 cards in a game will produce 5 drops. You will always get at least 1 cent per card if someone buys them, so if you go on to that Russian key site and buy some card farm "games" for 2-3 cents, you will make slightly more money to your Steam wallet than you spent.