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Earlier this week, a developer’s Twitter thread about shady Steam curators who may be lying to get free game codes went viral. in the thread, with a somewhat piercing operation To back up his suspicions, the developer theorized that these shady curators are taking game keys and selling them instead of using them to actually review the game they claim to be interested in. Now Valve has shut down some of the curators implicated in the alleged scams. And after all the developers behind the popular city builder survival game Frostpunk have announced that they will no longer provide keys to curators.
On August 28th, indie developer Cowcat, the developer behind newly released point-and-click game Beat ’em up broken—shared a now viral thread on Twitter explains how a specific type of curator, steam code, and review scam works.
The quick and basic explanation is that Cowcat and other indie developers have email inboxes flooded with code requests from various curators on Steam. Most of them are considered scammers. To see how many were shady, Cowcat sent all these curator codes, but not for the full game, only for the demo. The idea was that if the curators were legitimate, they would get to the end of the demo, then reach out and ask for the full code to do a proper review. Instead, many didn’t, and codes for the game still showed up on key sale sites Cowcat does not support these types of marketplaces. Shortly thereafter, some curators began posting negative reviews broken, although neither of them received the full game. While there are a few other possibilities, it seems highly likely that these curators were simply trying to scam Cowcat out of some free codes that could then be resold.
In response, Cowcat reached out to Valve and heard back from the company, who stated that she would review the curators concerned. It appears Valve has agreed to Cowcat and others on Reddit who believe that these particular curators didn’t play by the rules and may have used negative reviews as punishment for not providing keys. (Curators can leave reviews for games they don’t own.)
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At least 20 curators– many of which published negative reviews broken after getting keys for the demo – have now been banned from Steam. Clicking on a link to one of these curatorial groups will now take you to it a message from Valve stating, “This group has been removed for violating Steam Community Rules and Policies.”
Of course, since anyone can quickly create a free Steam account and group and become a curator, it’s likely that many of these shady users will return, create new lists, and continue cheating developers out of codes. But this sudden public exposure of this scam might make it harder for those looking for free codes to flip them. At least one game developer and publisher, 11 Bit Studios, publicly announced Due to this situation, it will no longer provide Steam keys to curators.
“Based on our experience and the experiences of other developers,” he tweeted Frostpunk Developers, “Most of the [Steam curator] Requests are coming from fake accounts used to collect and resell the keys and the published reviews don’t seem to bring any value to the community anyway.”
While it’s good to see Valve stepping in and trying to stop some of these scams, developers like Cowcat are still hoping the company does more to improve the curator system. Many want more verification methods and ways to filter real users and outlets from random scammers or shady users. Until then, it may always be a gamble to email curator codes.
