Can I review derpspace plz?
Crap! I knew that!
I’d love to know the true number of keys they sent out. Did they send out 1k keys and 70% of them ended up on G2A or something? if so then well, if we assume that every key sold on G2A would have been purchased full price on steam (unlikely) then you missed out on $9.8k in revenue for a $20 game (after Steam’s 30% split). If that is a breaking point for your company then you have more issues than your keys being resold.
Then it’s a net zero and following up on fake reviewers still only would make it a net negative.
Did you know that a lot of companies will send you free stuff if you complain (constructively)?
Just google something like “complain get free stuff” and you will find lots of articles describing how easy it is. How it’s in the price already and how all customers subsidize the complaint handouts for both real and fake complaints.
Companies do it because criticism and feedback are valuable.
Is there a epidemic of exploding complaints to get free samples? Are you going to spend your future days finding the perfect system to scam free yogurts?
Are these yogurt scammers among the real complaint havers a blight on the industry that threaten the food industry?
Most indie games only sell a few thousand copies. You can easily get a few thousand fake key requests. So, your options are:
-Give keys to no one and lose what little chance you had to break out
-Give keys to everyone and lose the majority of the little sales you were probably going to get
-Spend a near full-time job’s worth of time for many days figuring out which of the requests are real
-Get a publisher/pay somebody else to do it (at the low end indie tier, 50/50 you just get screwed anyway)
Also, just verifying they really have a youtube channel doesn’t help either. There are hundreds of fake Youtube channels with copied videos and 50-100k fake subscribers. Sometimes even fake comments.
Given that coupon fraud is a multi-billion-dollar industry and the acquisition and resale of manufacturer-issued “apology” coupons play a not-insignificant part in that, I’d argue yes, it’s a very real issue. The reason these companies continue to issue “apology” coupons despite that is because unlike an indie game dev sending out free copies of their two-year labor, Proctor & Gamble isn’t really hurt by sending out a thousand extra $5 coupons for Tide that people then use for fraud.
It also helps that unlike Steam key resellers, who have access to a storefront that’s perfectly willing to enable them to profit off their fraud and who largely live in countries that make them relatively safe from repercussions, there are actual consequences for coupon fraudsters who get caught, ranging from getting banned from stores to massive fines and prison time.
There’s an opening for a middleman here. You simply open a website that authenticates against Steam, YouTube, and Twitch and allow developers to send out keys that can only be applied to the Steam account registered with the same YouTube or Twitch accounts.
Not sure how I would monetize that site, but it would be a useful service. I guess you could charge key receivers a couple bucks a year, but that’s such a tiny market that it hardly seems worth the trouble.
I think the way you’d monetize something like that is to turn it into a marketing tool. It isn’t just the authentication mechanism, it helps developers come up with people to target in the first place. That way you can charge everybody who is using it, streamers and developers alike.
I actually really like this idea! I doubt it’d be a money maker, given the target audience, but the implementation would make a nice FOSS project.
Developers could enter the key info, and the service would periodically check the YouTubers channel for the next week looking for a video with the games name. And if there’s no video in that time then it tells the developer to deauth that key.
People are using stolen CC info to buy a ton of keys then selling those on and through G2A, then the dev has to deal with chargebacks on the stolen card. The chargeback has nothing to do with G2A, they are just the fence for the stolen goods.
You’d monetize by selling your lists to the PR firms that actually handle key distribution. For anything bigger than small indie, companies just pay someone else to send out all the keys.
Keymailer is halfway there, but it looks like they email keys to YouTubers, rather than applying them to their Steam accounts directly. That’s the real trick here.
Honestly, at this point, I’m not convinced individual Steam keys themselves even need to be accessible, outside of the rare remaining physical releases. There’s no real reason Valve can’t set up an authentication system to immediately link external purchases or directly-gifted games to a specific Steam account, without ever giving malicious users the access they need to be able to resell stolen keys and keys purchased with stolen cards. They even had something like this with OAuth support, but discontinued that because, uh, reasons?
Of course, through years of ongoing inaction while this has continued to be a widely visible problem, Valve has made it crystal clear that they couldn’t care less about fraudulent purchases not made directly through Steam, so we’ll never see anything that attempts to fix this.
If valve could let devs specify some categories of keys as expiring within X days, then the problem would largely go away.
FWIW, at LEAST 90% of the emails I get from youtubers and influencers wanting review copies are people scamming. The latest trick is to register a gmail account a replaces an i with an l or a 1, and link to the real youtubers page as evidence that they the request is ‘legit’.
Strangely a lot of ‘reviewers’ seem to require multiple keys ‘for their review team’ or also generously offer to promote your game with a ‘giveaway to their community’.
its all bollocks. All the keys get sold to G2A immediately. I’m sure some other come from small indie bundles where the organisers just lie about how many keys were sold, and skim an extra few thousand to sell to G2A without compensating devs.
All very depressing.
I’ve learned the hard way only to deal with the big players. The only bundle people I’ll talk to is humble, the only stores steam,GoG,Humble and Kartridge.
Its very easy to tell indies its no big deal and to ignore it, but the market is REALLY tough right now, and working on 5 years for a game which gets ignored, and the only ‘influencers’ who care are actually scammers can really piss people off.
I would love to see the bottom drop out on the whole influencer scene.
I don’t “get” Twitch, but I do watch a bunch of YouTube channels and want them to survive. I think that’s possible without scamming developers.
G2A is basically a money laundering operation for stolen credit cards.
Why? Video game vloggers are bottom of the barrel news regurgitators and entitled gamer outrage reaction fodder. Except for some long form analysis channels, it’s all garbage too.