Free keys for games sounds like a great idea? Then maybe you should open a fake café!
Developers are quite eager for YouTubers, bloggers, or websites to report on their games. To this end, they have to send a few game keys to editors and bloggers. This increases the chances that the titles will be reported on, and subsequently, more people will buy the game.
Many fraudsters also take advantage of this circumstance, trying to obtain keys for personal use or reselling them to dubious key sellers.
Café Boroda Drink – the “Gamer Café”?
However, Jacob Janerka, the developer of the game Paradigm (Link to the Steam page of Paradigm), has experienced a rather strange story. Janerka also receives hundreds of fake emails daily from individuals pretending to be bloggers or major gaming magazines.
One email, however, made him suspicious and piqued his interest. A certain Dmitry Tseptsov claimed that he recently opened a café named Boroda Drink, focusing on gamers as customers. If customers can answer three gaming questions, they would receive a 10% discount on coffee and a free key for a random game.
To have enough keys for customers, Tseptsov wanted to obtain some free codes for Paradigm as well.
Janerka was taken with the idea but conducted some research. He found pictures of the coffee, along with supposed examples of keys already issued to customers and sponsored by other developers. It was suspicious that Tseptsov just held the keys up to the camera, making it possible to redeem them at any time. It was also strange that the given address on Google Maps did not point to any café.
A lot of work for few keys
In the end, his investigations revealed that Café Boroda Drink did not exist. The opening date mentioned in the email did not match the date of some images of the café.
All this effort just to get a few additional keys for games that then end up with dubious key sellers on the internet.
In the end of his “story”, Janerka comes to the conclusion:
“Honestly, screw the scammers. Especially those who want to exploit small developers just trying to get a little attention for their game and probably still have to work as baristas on the side to pay the rent.”
If you once again scored a particularly cheap game key on the internet, then there might be a café behind it that doesn’t even exist.
