I bought my own game from a reseller – Here's what happened. [video]

youtube.com

9 pointsmbirth5 comments

Summary: game developer gives out a handful of keys to game review sites. Many game review sites are selling the keys to game "resellers".

I guess steam could fix this by having accounts tagged as reviewers and allow generation of keys that are permanently locked for use by only reviewer accounts?

Steam does have Curator Connect, which kind of does that - https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/curators - granted, it comes with a couple of drawbacks, the main one being that the reviewers need to have a Curator group set up

Allegedly in the early days press would get special steam accounts that let them download everything from the store free of charge.

Definitely true back in 2008

So multiple game reviewers are the same person/group asking for multiple keys then selling them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com