This is what you get for achieving the full badge in the Steam Holiday Sale 2012...

you know, spoilers, about what you get when you get the full badge?

read on. . .

So called 'coal farmers' made literally 100s of accounts for the free coal every other day and bought the HiB (4?) at the time for $0.01 as that was allowed then. They then used this to get loads of coal and traded it all in for games and Valve / Developers / Publishers lost millions to these coal farmers.
So many games were given out then in exchange for the coal that the player2player market for game trading has probably not got over the shock from last Christmas...

I doubt Valve are that naive, badges are easy to get. More likely they will limit it (if they ever do it again) to people who have over a certain value on their account and have played a set amount of time in none f2p games.

More so Companies suing them for losses of revenue, Pulling out of Steam and moving on to other means of distribution, Or other means. There's also the indie guys who had a loss too. It's a long shot but there was a whole lot of Christmas spirit in the underground that didn't make it public around the whole scandal. Obviously Valve didn't have anything to do with the Humble bundle but lost of developers came out to give aid to keep people from getting more screwed over by the schemers. Yes it is true that Valve had their asses covered but it's how you play with the big guys and how you handle their product that makes or breaks a company.

Gabe knows that no matter how big you become any type of vibration can make a big gun fall, which is why Steam has safeguards if Valve goes under. Make no mistake just because the videogame industry is strong right now doesn't mean a little friction, like the X-mas scandal, or even the more recent Russian Mob using Steam to launder money doesn't make the fine platform that we walk on that much more weaker.

With all that said If it weren't for the many people behind the scenes who gave up allot of their time to help handle the coal farming issue the outcome would have been very different. I know That I cannot speak for any of those people but there was allot of work put in, alot of finances to make it any less of an issue then it was. So anyone who makes too light of it may a plague be on their house. I mean the last thing most people want to do is be in the office for 16 hours during what should be their holiday season but, because some spoiled little shits decided to abuse a good thing, many people, who should have been relaxing after a long hard year, had to put in long shifts. These people know who they are, some of them frequent here( Some of them don't because they got sick and tired of the shit some of the users pull here) and my heart goes out to them.

Long story short: There's a really really good reason that Many of us are pissed that all we see is bitching that users aren't getting free shit and coupons this year. That's not to say anyone here caused it just to understand.

Edit: though you are right

Edit: It should also be noted I'm talking more about the damage control people. (PR and Programers, Mods)