this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
153 points (98.7% liked)
PC Master Race
22104 readers
412 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: especially when new beginners have questions.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ok, it does say on steam, missed that.