Valve Is Limiting Bulk Requests for Steam Keys Due to Shady Developers

Megalith

Megalith

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There’s been a bit of back and forth on this since the original story, but from what I can understand, Valve is paying a lot more attention to bulk key requests these days due to manipulation of their store by “developers” who are uploading content just to make a quick buck: case in point is the farming of trading cards, where dishonest individuals are requesting tons of Steam keys, only to sell them on other sites to create bot accounts that can produce cards sold for lots of profit. This post explains how the $100 Steam Direct fee could result in $9000 earned.

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.
 
I read the post where $100 turns into at least $9000 and its all about vanity. Why earn something, hypothetically, when you can buy it and know that folks will only look at the appearance of earning it.

I just dont understand how someone can create 9000 bot accounts and get away with it. As a matter of fact, i dont understand how to make one bot account!

Interesting though about how some folks can figure out ways to make small profits turn into large ones.
 
Khahhblaab said:
I read the post where $100 turns into at least $9000 and its all about vanity. Why earn something, hypothetically, when you can buy it and know that folks will only look at the appearance of earning it.

I just dont understand how someone can create 9000 bot accounts and get away with it. As a matter of fact, i dont understand how to make one bot account!

Interesting though about how some folks can figure out ways to make small profits turn into large ones.
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Those with a 13" e-peen, that's who.

epeen.jpg
 
I've always ignored Steam trading cards. I have a crap load in my account. I read about people selling them - then I see them only going for a few cents. I guess I don't get it? Then again, if someone is turning $100 into $9000 - there is more to it than I'm giving credit.
 
This will hurt sites like Humble Bundle.
I read there's a different story to this. Namely, Valve is not getting any income from bulk keys and they are not very happy about it.
 
where dishonest individuals are requesting tons of Steam keys, only to sell them on other sites to create bot accounts that can produce cards sold for lots of profit.
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This makes absolutely no sense.

  1. How can an individual request tons of steam keys? From who? And for what purpose? Unless you're a long standing verified developer / reseller how can you get access to "tons of steam keys"?
  2. If they sell the keys on other sites, then how do they create bot accounts with them? You either use the keys or sell them, you can't do both!
  3. How does a bot account produce cards at all?
 
M76 said:
This makes absolutely no sense.

  1. How can an individual request tons of steam keys? From who? And for what purpose? Unless you're a long standing verified developer / reseller how can you get access to "tons of steam keys"?
  2. If they sell the keys on other sites, then how do they create bot accounts with them? You either use the keys or sell them, you can't do both!
  3. How does a bot account produce cards at all?
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What they were doing is buying an unreal asset pack for a few hundred dollars, releasing it as a incomplete game with a host of missing features, but had trading cards you could get in seconds. The developer would request 500,000 keys from steam and sell them for 10 cents each on a shady forum. As far as I know steam didn't have verification on requesting keys because you'd have to sell the game on steam to make money as a developer (they thought), and selling the free keys is against TOS. Farmers would buy a few thousand keys, take the cards and turn them into gems. They'd take the gems and turn them into booster packs and CS skins and sell them for cash on the account or on third party websites. With cash in the account they would buy games and sell them on shady websites. Meanwhile all the legitimate customers who bought the broken ass game would get banned in the steam forums for posting anything negative to keep this money train flowing for as long as possible.
 
-PK- said:
What they were doing is buying an unreal asset pack for a few hundred dollars, releasing it as a incomplete game with a host of missing features, but had trading cards you could get in seconds. The developer would request 500,000 keys from steam and sell them for 10 cents each on a shady forum. As far as I know steam didn't have verification on requesting keys because you'd have to sell the game on steam to make money as a developer (they thought), and selling the free keys is against TOS. Farmers would buy a few thousand keys, take the cards and turn them into gems. They'd take the gems and turn them into booster packs and CS skins and sell them for cash on the account or on third party websites. With cash in the account they would buy games and sell them on shady websites. Meanwhile all the legitimate customers who bought the broken ass game would get banned in the steam forums for posting anything negative to keep this money train flowing for as long as possible.
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It makes no sense that steam had no verification or even oversight for giving out free keys, and they would just generate hundreds of thousands at the request of first time developers. But I still don't get it, how do incomplete / broken games even make it to the marketplace, don't you have to go trough a vetting process? I thought that's what greenlight was about in the first place.
 
I buy & sell trading cards & skins and have ended up with 20-30 "free" games. I only do it when I'm drinking coffee in the morning. Less depressing & more useful than reading the news.

I've also given away ~ $50 of games to my friends son who spent all his money building a new pc from scratch. Works well for me. YMMV.
 
I haven't messed with those cards in a while, but when I did see them pop up, I put them up for sale for 50 cents or something, most sold and I had a few bucks over time for a game. It wasn't worth the trouble, but I did that for a few weeks, now I ignore them. They are quite useless.
 
Gavian said:
Valve is too greedy and want all the money for themselves.
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Yeah, right go ahead give us your "wisdom" without even reading or understanding that this is about stopping scammers. Scammers, who also generate profits for valve themselves.
 
This is what happens when you have millions of customers and thousands of vendors and only feeling like paying around 360 people to manage it.
 
Yeah I ignore my cards, I probably have hundreds by now. I looked at them and said WTF and promptly forgot all about it.
 
I use to sell the cards, but then they made it a bigger pain to sell. I've just ignored them.
 
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