The indie developer Fabrice Breton accuses many curators on Steam of using a nasty trick to get free keys. Through a small “experiment,” he tried to expose such fraudsters. In the end, Steam reportedly deleted almost a dozen curator pages.
The developer Fabrice Breton provided an interesting insight into his work. He illustrated how many requests one would receive when a new indie game goes online. Suddenly, everyone wanted a key for his new game “BROK the InvestiGator.”
It is a point & click adventure, although Breton prefers to refer to it as “punch & click” on Steam (via steam.com).
Many of the requests for a game key for testing referred to a curator page on Steam. Previously, Breton had learned that these curator pages are also frequently used to grab free keys and monetize them through key resellers (via reddit.com).
He looked at some curator pages and discovered suspicious clues – generic names, a similar number of followers repeatedly, or the same administrators caught his attention.
Breton didn’t want to fall for the fraudulent trick and devised a small experiment to distinguish the “good” from the “bad” curators. How well it worked, he probably did not expect himself.
The fact that developing an indie title is not so easy is shown in the following video:
Demo leads to negative reviews and banned curators
The developer sent out many keys, but only from a demo version and not from the full game.
His thought behind it: Real playtesters would get back in touch with him and ask for the full version. The corresponding email requests would not look like mass-produced – copy/paste, to grab keys quickly and easily.
Then the story took its course.
The first reactions were many positive reviews from the curators to whom he had sent keys. But then the picture changed and the first negative reviews appeared. There were even some cases where a positive review was changed to a negative one.
His game was the only one rated negatively on some curator pages. For example, on one page with over 200 reviews:
Here’s that particular curator who sent the email.
— BROK 🐊 OUT NOW! (@COWCATGames) August 28, 2022
BROK is the *only* game not recommended out of 204 games 🤣 pic.twitter.com/O9Njpfu0J3
For Breton, it was clear: this is clearly a scam. Behind the facade of the curator system, brazen fraudsters grab the keys and cash them out with key resellers for real money.
However, the customers of the resellers were probably not satisfied with their demo keys. They complained to the sellers, which in turn led to the negative reviews.
Breton reported several curator pages to Steam, and Reddit also became aware of the issue. The user “darklinkpower” recognized a pattern behind many curator pages and uncovered that often a certain admin was part of the pages (via reddit.com).
In the end, Steam banned at least 20 curator pages that turned out to be scams due to the “experiment.” According to darklinkpower, 9 of them gave a negative rating for BROK the InvestiGator, and 11 were connected to the admin whom the user accused of being a fraudster (via reddit.com).
At least that’s a small happy ending. Because the problem with key resellers continues.
Fabrice Breton then contacted Steam and requested a complete revision of the curator system (via twitter.com). For him, the current setup invites such a scam to operate.
Through “Curator Connect,” you can send a key directly to a maximum of 100 curators on Steam. However, the organization still has to run via email, as the curator system does not provide for contact initiation. Additionally, curators can rate a game on Steam without having it in their library.
In a final tweet, he asks all gamers not to buy cheap keys from key resellers (via twitter.com). Developers generally gain nothing from this, and especially for indie developers, every dollar, every euro is valuable.
Let us know your opinion on the topic in the comments. What do you think about key resellers? If you’d rather read a positive story about an indie developer, check this out: Indie developer breaks down in tears live when his game gets funded
