this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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"Just buy the game on Steam": Indie publisher behind a recent banger that sold 300k copies in its first week warns against key resellers after canceling hundreds of scalped keys (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 day ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
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[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Buying games on steam doesn't give you steam keys though, so this doesn't really explain why sales on steam stopped being awesome.

[–] Abyssian@lemmy.world -1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, it does. Any time you buy a game you have the choice of buying it for the account you're logged in as or having a key sent to an email address. Resellers do that second one, many times.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Are you sure about that? Because that's not my experience. If you're buying for a friend it asks you for their account and adds it to their library directly. I'm pretty sure the behaviour you describe was phased out a long time ago. Granted, there's a possibility this is regional.

[–] Abyssian@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Looks like they did update that, which is definitely a step in the right direction. I had an option to email a key about a month ago buying from the website, so I'm not sure if it was a gradual roll out or if it's different depending on account or connection type.

It doesn't seem like it can be a universal thing, since the article says the way this happened was a regional pricing error that resellers took advantage of and bought a lot of keys to resell at the incorrect price.

Honestly they should get rid of keys altogether and just make it so if a dev wants to give a copy away they need to manually select the account in the same way.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The article doesn't say that they were bought on steam in the first place. Given the pricing error, more likely they were bought on another storefront that issues steam keys with purchases. That would explain the error.

[–] Abyssian@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

For what happened here, Nichiporchik explains that scalpers bought copies on Steam priced cheaper in certain regions. If you release a game on Valve's store and don't set the price in each region individually, universal pricing creates discrepancies where this can happen. These were then being sold on less regulated marketplaces.

Regional pricing error caused the game to be much cheaper than it should be in some region. Resellers bought a lot of keys at that incorrect price to sell on shitty key sale storefronts at a profit.

Those keys are invalid by the Steam ToS.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 hours ago

Ok, it does say on steam, missed that.