In a recent FAQ spotted by Automaton, Housenka responded to a hypothetical of “I’ll promote you, give me a Steam key” with a delightfully blunt: “Buy it, you piece of garbage.” Or, as Automaton translates it from the original Japanese, “Buy the game, you piece of sh*t.” I can’t decide which I like better, honestly. The full FAQ is worth a read, if only for Housenka’s sense of humour and an insight into the absurd questions independent devs get asked these days.
“Make this character’s ass and thighs thicker,” another frequent-question-asker demands, to which Housenka responds: “Accept her as she is.” When asked by a phantom answer if the game will add sex, Housenka also proceeds to provide a link to DLsite, an online store that sells doujinshi—self-published manga comics that are often (though not always) pornographic in nature. “No sex. Please visit DLsite for that.”
to be fair, the free “review” keys often end up on websites like g2a and kinguin, so if I were to publish a game on Steam, I would’ve replied with the same thing to anyone asking me for 'em… the guy’s based af
Valve should enable a feature to make Steam keys self destruct for these scams. Let them generate a key that is valid for a few hours and if it didn’t get redeemed in that time frame, it no longer works. A key only valid until 5pm of issue date will let reviewers redeem it in time, but resellers will most likely have a dud by the time they try to sell it.
And make them a review sample.
And make them unique. All keys are starting or ending with an “R” in the code.
This prevents scammers from being able to sell it to informed users
devs can assign keys to specific promotions, and mass recall unactivated keys and activated games from people’s accounts, so yeah this is possible even though needs to be done manually, but most devs don’t do it
Oh I would gladly do this manually - just have a spreadsheet pulled up of donated keys on half the screen and the revoke page in the other. Just going line by line, cross-checking, and yanking if I need to.
Would totally do it for my Friday night. Especially if I knew they’d know what happened and why.
Why? It would be a cinch to just use a database, write a small script and automate it.
For sure. I meant that I’d enjoy it enough that I’d be willing to do it by hand, with a smile on my face. ☺️
But yeah just a few lines of python and a txt file could do it.
It’s been a few years since Valve introduced curators system. Curators don’t receive keys but legit copies. Not all curators act in a good faith but it’s impossible for them to put such copies on sale on platforms you mentioned.
“But its for a review!”
Ah so you’ll be monetizing that key. Buy it.