Sorry for the somewhat confusing title. I won a giveaway, and had an odd (but potentially non-) issue with it. I submitted a request for support, and received an answer that did not help. It is likely that I do not explain things well.

I would like to post a vague recap here, and maybe someone might know the answer, and that way I don’t have to keep bugging support about it.

I will provide more accurate details if that will help, but I’ll leave it vague to start in case that is more appropriate for this forum.

I won a giveaway. The giveaway was for Game A. When I tapped the button that takes you to the Steam Redeem page (and verified that the code automatically entered into there was the same as the code listed in the giveaway results page), it said I received “Game B for beta testing”.

I was not home at the time. I checked my Licenses and Product Key Activations page on my steam profile. My most recent activation was “Game B for beta testing”. Game A did not appear in my Licenses and Product Key Activations. I assumed I received an incorrect key, and did not mark it as received of course. I also commented on the giveaway that I received an incorrect key for Game B for beta testing. I have not received a reply on the giveaway page yet.

When I got home and booted up the deck, I saw in my Home Screen (which always puts newly added games front and center) that I DID IN FACT have Game A. I did not have Game B for beta testing.

Checking my Licenses and Product Key Activations page a second time, it still says I only have Game B for beta testing, and nowhere does it say I have Game A.

I assume that this was just a case of a game being named something differently at some point, and the “keyname” or some variable still reports it as that original name, instead of the name shown on the steam page.

The only reason I’m concerned about this is because scams are getting creative lately. I don’t see how this could be something dangerous, but thought I would ask here just in case.

I tried to use SteamDB to see if I could find the Game B for beta testing and see if it somehow linked back to Game A, but I was not successful.

Thank you for reading this far.

Two questions:

  1. Was this understandable how I wrote it? If not, what should I change to make this more understandable?
  2. Is this normal? Should I just mark this as received? (I have not yet installed the game)
11 hours ago

Comment has been collapsed.

might be easier if you tell us which game it is you won and what it says it activated so people can look into it better.

also just click the store link for the giveaway you won and see if that store page says you own it.

11 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Thank you for responding. I just replied in the main thread with the details.

11 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Kinda hard to tell without knowing which game you're talking about, but regardless, it sometimes happens that the name of the license is drastically different to the name of the game.
Sometimes because as you said the game got a completely different name at some point, in which case the license for already generated keys usually won't change its name, sometimes because devs/publishers name the packages in honestly baffling ways, and in some rare cases I've seen license names that are straight up wrong, like typos or just forgetting the name altogether and just saying something generic like "beta testing".
What matters is if you got access to the game listed in the giveaway itself, if you click on the store link on the GA and when the Steam store page says that you own that game, then everything should be alright.

11 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Ok, thank you for the response.

I did not want to make the post extra long, so I omitted some details that I did not think were important. After I checked my Licenses and Product Key Activations page (I’m still at work at this point), I did check the store page for the game after around 10 minutes. It did not say I owned the game. I searched the store for the game it said I received on the activation page, and it is a common name, so there were many results. I went to each store page individually, and it also said I did not own any of the games.

When I returned home (and saw that I did in fact have the correct game), I checked the store page for the giveaway game, and it did say I owned that game.

The details;

The giveaway that I won was for Wild Indigo Ranch.
When I entered the code, it said that I had redeemed Tumbleweed for Beta Testing (and that is what shows up on the product activation page).

Edit; To be clear, it does now say that I own Wild Indigo Ranch. I checked every Tumbleweed game I could find on steam (there were a few) and I don’t own any of them.

11 hours ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Game was originally tumbleweed, then dont die in the west, and now its wild indigo ranch.

Sounds shady af

10 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It's not necessarily shady, it might simply be the case that they failed to get the other names and had to switch it for something else for trademark reasons. It happens to a bunch of games with too common sounding names.

10 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The game changed from something, to a survival base building game, to life sim. Might have been them figuring out what they want, yeah.

10 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Thank you very much for your response. Can I ask how you found out this information? I’m not an expert at SteamDB or anything, but I clicked around the Wild Indigo Ranch page checking all around and could not find mention of either of these names.

Also, what would you do with this game? Just ignore it? Never install?

I realize PirateFi is hopefully a once-in-a-blue-moon moment, but my luck is terrible with these things and I always prefer to err on the side of caution.

9 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Change history, several loads to get through it for this game.

Idk, seems like it's a wholesome approved game, I try to play my wins, so I would play.

9 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Thank you very much again. I appreciate all of the info you gave me!

8 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I did some looking and couldn't find any confirmation that the game was called "Tumbleweed" at some point in the past, but I did find that it was originally announced under the name "Don't Die in the West" and the first demo also had that name.
So my guess is that "Tumbleweed" was just an internal codename for the project that somehow made into some obscure package not listed on Steam-DB and those keys still remain in circulation, it might even be the case that the devs themselves simply gave said keys to a store, but that's just speculation.

10 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

If you dig through the change history it was called Tumbleweed before Don't Die in the West.

10 hours ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sign in through Steam to add a comment.