Money laundering on Steam, income from sales on Russian sites at a few cents a pop and boosting on SG. All of these sort of titles should be counted as zero cv from day 0. It has been going on for a long time. Fake games, asset flips and fake reviews etc. Infact, make them count as negative cv, that would be fun.
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I would say grey market sites or shady sites not necessarily Russian.
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Grey market keys are just that GREY.I mean I saw the vid of this guy and know that it was true that Ubisoft stopped selling Driver:San Francisco Keys(not available anywhere) and the only Legal(by legal I mean a way that cannot be regarded as %100 non-legit) way was to get a key from grey sites(not many had these keys).The Guy pays them using a Subway Card/Top-up.And thus,he semi-legally got the game.Now,Ubisoft is killing Driver:San Francisco,adding to the insult for the game.So,Grey Keys are bad but incase of Ubisoft games.....
P.S:Now,I hate Ubisoft for Killing Driver:SF,Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed 2.
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Wait...Money Laundering on steam??? I hope you are talking about steam wallet and keys deal gone bad.I don't know what this Steam Money Laundering is....
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Stolen Credit /debit cards info being used to buy these games.
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Oh right.Yup, I heard these sites store card details when you buy from them and then use those cards to get more of these keys.That's why I never buy from these sites.Steam is the only platform for which I've used my debit card(I only trust them).
P.S:I do sometimes find bundled games and keys.Hopefully,HumbleBundle and similar bundled games and keys are not bad..right??
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I believe they do more damage then benefit...Thanks for the clearification.
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HB and Fanatical (which is advertised here) are examples of above board bundle sites, the shady grey ones can be found with a simple search, just see what other people say about a site if you're not sure.
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Let's say you are a drug dealer and you have 100'000$
You can't really buy a fancy Porsche without your government asking where did you get that amount of money.
What if you sell the Tales of Cowabunga Bundle https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/8236/Mega_Bundle/ for 1000$ on steam?
Let's say that buying a 1000$ shit won't trigger an investigation and if you have 100 "friends", voilà, after taxes/expenses you have a legit activity that makes legit money
Does that really happen? Probably, while it's not the most efficient way, I guess it's pretty safe.
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... while it's not the most efficient way, I guess it's pretty safe.
Taking a 30% cut for laundering dirty money as Steam does is a decent fee. As a bonus this service is available for relatively small amounts while international banking institutions only show interest to offer their services for amounts in the seven figures range and above.
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In Heat (1995) they were loosing 40% on every dollar to laundry money.
Or maybe it was The Iceman (2012).
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30% isn't bad, pretty sure they are even happy to lose 50%, it's all stolen and not theirs in many cases (like the CCs) so it's a reasonable expense.
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Well,My country is on FATF's grey list cuz Money Laundering is our Politicians' Fav Hobby.I hear about it all the time on my local news.And Now,It's on Steam and SG,Great,Things just keep getting worse and worse.
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You can't transfer large amounts of money to a bank account without the bank asking you where you got the money, and you can't buy anything on Steam with physical money so how would that work?
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You can't buy large amounts of any physical good without raising suspicion otherwise money laundering would be easy. Also the notion of having 100 friends willing to do this for free is pretty idealistic. So while I'm certainly no expert your idea doesn't seem very feasible to me. No offense intended.
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I've seen Breaking Bad, their money laundering makes sense and is actually used in the real world. The example given here isn't very realistic or sustainable.
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You can buy Steam gift cards on grey market sites that don't give a shit where your money came from.
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The difficulty in money laundering lies in transferring real world money into money into your bank account without raising suspicion. The difficulty is not buying Steam gift cards, unless you're legally purchasing them. Using illegal money to buy other illegal things isn't money laundering.
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The steps are simple:
1) Put a shitty asset flip on Steam for a ridiculous price.
2) Use mules to buy physical Steam gift cards with cash, or anonymously buy gray market gift card codes in bulk.
3) Use dummy accounts to redeem the gift cards and buy the asset flip game.
4) Profit!
The money you're getting from Steam is Steam's own money since you're buying them with gift cards and not directly using the funds. That's clean money straight into your bank account.
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The highest value on a Steam Gift Card is a 100€, so you would need to buy a 1000 of them just to get 100.000€. You don't think people buying thousands of Steam Gift Cards (if using mules) all of the sudden isn't suspicious? Also I'm not in the criminal underworld but where are you going to find a gray market seller that can supply thousands of Steam Gift Cards? And on top of that you lose 30% of your value to Valve + even more if use mules which you'd also need to pay. And then you'd have to manually type in thousands of Steam Gift Card codes and redeem them.
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I'm not saying it's the best way to launder money, I'm saying it's a way to launder money. Most criminals aren't going to be making six digit figures anyway, so if you're trying to launder small amounts of money, you could certainly do worse.
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In the U.S. you would buy one card less than the amount that'd trigger notifications. Spread your purchases across multiple Targets/Walmarts/Best Buys, whatever. Pretty sure they have $100 cards. Same difference if they just have $50 cards, you buy twice as many.
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Even if you managed to stay under the amount to flag suspicion, multiple buys of a large amount of the same item of anything is still going to trigger a red flag. Unless you're going to driven all across the country to do this but that cuts into your profit even further. It also doesn't solve the other problems.
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You buy with cash. The FBI/DEA don't station investigators at Walmarts to watch who's buying too many gift cards.
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This is a much more likely reason than CV on SG, there's some gain in getting CV but it doesn't directly translate into real world money - so it's not worth doing that for. The CV thing is just a side effect.
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Can support do anything about it? It seems wrong that there are users that give away a lot of these type of inflated value games to cheat the CV system.
Edit: Maybe they can either change the value of these games to $1 or just mark them as free to not give any CV. I don't think anyone would have much to complain about because I doubt anyone is actually paying much if anything for these. The only ones that would be upset would be the ones who lose their fake CV, but they have nothing to complain about.
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They can. Games who have been given away for free have been placed on the "$0/0 cv list"
They can also put them on the "blundle list" which means the cv is a lot less.
If they will. I don't know.
But yeh, I agree. These are just fake games and shouldn't give cv and shouldn't even be on steam.
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It seems unfair on principle, I agree. Considering the number of GAs over level 6 though, I doubt they're gaining much from it besides some odd sense of... cheating the system I guess.
Still, the number of these GAs is increasing and it's not a good thing.
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The price on those games is ridiculous and the fact that people can purchase these for pennies does make it look like it's to exploit CV. Things like this have recently been brought up in other threads, two of them being the ones below. When it comes to things like this, the support team can reduce the CV to bundled or even 0. The price on some of the games listed were jacked up right before giveaways were created on SG.
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/FTDrx/its-getting-even-worse-with-asset-flips
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Recommend you ask cg to create a new ticket category to report such titles and one or two new staff members dedicated only to changing them to 0 or negative cv.
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I spot checked a few of the games that I've submitted tickets for and saw that they count as Reduced Value now. e.g. Dolphin Hustle, Reduced Value as of May 25, 2022. So it looks like some progress is finally being made! thanks MSKOTOR and others.
Ideally, I would've liked these to count as 0CV and be back-dated a bit further. For example, 6 users managed to sneak in GAs for Dolphin Hustle between May 23 - May 25, so they get to keep their Full CV even though it's obvious that they got their copies from the same heavily discounted source.
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That's the thing I don't understand. Why can't the mods agree on a policy to set these 'high base price' asset flips as reduced or zero CV with a starting date corresponding to the first GA on Steamgifts? Nobody ever bought a key of these at a normal price to give away here.
The arbitrary starting date of the reduced value has been an issue ever since these games have been around.
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Don't allow yourself to take on too much on your own. Also while another staff member may have reduced some cv, it is simply a waste of time if it is not back dated to the very first giveaway. The cycle will continue unless all of them are reduced to 0 cv from the very start.
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There is actually two things that they can do - mark it as bundled, or mark it as freebie. In first case user will get 15% of CV, in the last - no CV at all. But for this you (or some other user) need to find where those keys are sold cheap and report it to support via ticket.
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These games are sold on shady Russian grey market sites for $0.10 - $0.30 a pop. Sometimes they're even given away for free in large quantities (1000x). Farming CV on SG is probably one of the main reasons for their inflated prices, but there could be other reasons such as money laundering or self-promotion (creating the illusion of a "deal").
I've filed over 110 support tickets asking to change some of these "games" to Reduced or No Value. It's a drop in the bucket because there's a constant stream of new ones popping up each week. Staying on top of it is a full-time job that ideally one of the mods should handle, but most of the mods seems to have no appetite for clamping down on this rampant CV exploitation. My tickets are likely to remain pending for the rest of this year until a mod eventually sees them and maybe decides to change the games' categorizations.
Another concern is that, unlike deals that are tracked on barter.vg, we don't have definitive documentation of when the games first became available through these Russian stores, so any CV reduction, if it ever happens, will likely only be effective starting from the date of the ticket. Any users who gave away the games before that date get to retain their CV.
I've noticed a lot of high level users (7-10) who've acquired most of their CV (cheaply and quickly) by spamming these games in batches of 5. When I see someone shamelessly doing this, they earn a BL from me.
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Since it is clear that these games are being used to cheat the CV system here, I was thinking support could ignore the date that the game was available for a really cheap price and just reduce the value for all the giveaways. Nobody actually spent $50 or $40 to buy these junk games before they went on sale, so it shouldn't matter.
It could cause an issue if any of them were in a game bundle or had a more reasonable price in the past and people bought them on sale, but most of the ones I listed above were just released on Steam in the past 2 months.
Maybe instead of marking them as free, support could just manually drop the price of the games to $1. Then anyone that didn't get them for free and may have got them from a cheap bundle or a grey market site for 20 cents will still get some value for the pennies they spent. They will get 5 CV instead of the current 250 CV for each 5 copy giveaway they create. Currently if they give away 5 copies each of the first 11 games I listed, they will almost be level 9.
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If we want it to work like this, they need to add new category and manually add a lot of games there...but what if some games are real, just starting projects with that price?
Also: u can sometimes buy big games in cheap bundle on shady sites(from stolen cc for example) so following ur idea we need to add a lot if games to 0cv category
Also count price glitches on steam/any seller site
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None of the games I listed above are real games that would sell for $25-50. They are being created for some kind of fraud or scam and users here are taking advantage of the high prices to farm CV because the keys are available for pennies. There is no reason someone should be getting $50 CV for dozens of copies of games they bought for pennies. This is destroying the CV system here and something needed to be done.
Cheap bundles or price glitches are a different topic and I am not trying to solve that. People have always been able to cheat the CV system that way, but those are things that don't happen as often, very few people get to take advantage of it, and it doesn't give you anywhere near as much CV as what people are doing with the games listed in this thread.
I think setting the games to not give anyone CV is fine, but I also would have been happy with manually reducing them to $1 and then setting them to reduced value. I think that is a lot more work for support though. Either way, something is being done and that makes me happy. I'm sure it is a lot of work for support, but I'm not sure if there is a better solution right now.
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ur 100% right we need to get rid of this, as its not fair vs real donators
its a lot of manual work to add those to 0cv category, but if any admun or mod want to add the problem is solved :)
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$100 for putting a game on Steam in my region, not sure in others, is not a good way to farm SG's CV. I would agree that sb are laundering money through Steam.
Btw, I have so many games blocked now I don't see most of this shovelware stuff.
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I have over 21,000 games blocked, but some of these are new that I am just seeing for the first time. 20 of the games from the ones I listed were just released in the last 2 months.
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I think perhaps he meant ignored, semantics I suppose.
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I am just talking about hiding games that I am not interested in here on SG so I don't see more giveaways for that same game. You click the little eye symbol with the line through it that is next to the name of the game.
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Oh yeah I'm aware of that, thought you're talking about steam. thanks!
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it's a extremely "good" way of farming CV. 100$ is extremely cheap for the ability of easily having a unlimited number of accounts getting thousands upon thousands of dollars in CV value.
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You get those 100 USD back after you sold 1000 USD.
You probably know that already.
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nobody would buy those "games" except "the developers" themself, like everybody has already said, somebody is probably laudering money.
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I asked about it here because I saw a few accounts that were giving away multiple copies of a lot of the same games and I was wondering if it was being done specifically for this site and if anyone knew more about it. Would creating a post on Sentinels of the Store achieve much more than posting about it here?
I was going to flag the games on Steam for fake reviews, but it seems like Steam doesn't care because they don't have any options that pertain to that when I try to flag the games. After reading all the flagging reasons, I don't think I can flag these games for any of the reasons they allow.
I'm not sure how to file a support ticket on Steam, but would they even care if I did? The only thing I can think of to complain about is the fake reviews and I'm not sure how easy that would be to prove. I don't know the reason behind pricing the games so high, but I doubt Steam would have an issue with that unless they can prove they are doing it for something illegal or against their TOS. They certainly wouldn't care about cheating the CV system here if that is the real reason for the high prices.
I don't know what IG is.
I figured since this is an issue affecting SG that Steam will probably not fix, support could fix the issue by taking away the CV. It's not hard to identify the games because when you find a user giving away these games, you can just look at their other giveaways and find more. If you look up these games on Steam, you can see that they are all basic, quickly thrown together games with prices that are way too high, and they all have around 10 or 12 reviews that are all positive.
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Didn't know about that group. Sounds useful, thanks Veebs
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afaik only an SG admin can action this sort of ticket, not a mod
definitely not, regular mods also can add game to bundled/noCV lists just well.
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You know, calling someone a troll just because you don't like what they said is not a great idea. No, you did not answer what sort of tickets you are referring to. Only sort of tickets connected to this topic - is tickets to add games to bundlec/noCV lists, and those tickets can be easily handled by regular support members. I am not aware about any other sort of tickets that can be filed in this case, and unless you care to elaborate - I will consider that it's you are the one who trolling here.
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Well, I see now what lead to misunderstanding among us. You see, I don't consider this case any special. If I remember it right - price of game is never edited manually, and such cases are handled by adding game to bundle/noCV list, depending on the price (yes, games that are sold ridiculously cheaper than price in steam may end up in noCV list, even if they were not technically free - I think I remember such precedents). As for changing name - this would be indeed special case that regular moderators can't handle, but also, I believe, it won't be handled at all, since, as I said, I can't remember cases when price was overridden manually. So, even if cg will get to such ticket - most probably he will decline it and say to use existing regulation mechanisms. Of course I can be wrong about it, it's just the impression I've got here. If you know about cases of manual price adjustment - I would be thankful if you could provide a link for such cases, just to learn more.
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That was not my intent with the thread. I am just trying to figure out what is happening and if there is something support can do about it. We need a site wide solution, not just a few dozen people blacklisting a few dozen other people. These people will probably never know you blacklisted them and they will still have thousands of other giveaways to enter. According to the stats, there are about 15,000 public giveaways created every month.
Also, like I said, I don't think everyone that creates a giveaway for one of these games is necessarily bad. There are some accounts that are giving away a large number of these games in large quantities to abuse the CV system, but there are some others who have been here for many years giving away games normally and then just started to give a few of these away recently.
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but there are some others who have been here for many years giving away games normally and then just started to give a few of these away recently.
And why do you think they're creating giveaways for those games if not for the easy CV?
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That is definitely why they are doing it, but most other users do the same when they get the chance. When those game creating software bundles get released, lots of users buy multiple copies of them to create giveaways because they give tons of CV for very little cost. If games this cheap were widely available to everyone instead of just on shady Russian sites, a lot of other people would be buying them to gain CV. It's just not happening because most people do not know these exist or have access to buy them because the sites only allow certain regions to buy the games.
I feel like the users that have been here for may years giving away lots of games and then just grabbed a few of these because they saw how much CV they gave for such little cost are not as bad as the users where almost all their giveaways are of these seemingly fake games created to cheat the CV system. It would be hard to resist the temptation for anyone.
Basically, I would feel fine blacklisting the accounts that seem to only give these type of games, but I would not want to blacklist the ones who have normal accounts and just gave into the temptation for some easy CV. If you just pull up the archive and blacklist every user who ever gave one of these games, you may be blacklisting some decent users who just made a bad choice. We all make mistakes
I definitely think all of these games should be dropped to 0 CV or close to it though. And they need to be set to no CV for all the giveaways created for them no matter how long ago they were created. That would solve the problems with these type of games because the really bad accounts would drop back to almost no CV and the others would just drop back to their previous correct CV.
If they don't want to set some of the games to 0 CV for some reason, maybe they should manually change them to $1 and then set them as bundled so users only get 15% of $1. You would get almost nowhere giving away games that give 15 cents CV and it wouldn't be worth it because it would cost you more to give them away then regular bundled games.
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but I would not want to blacklist the ones who have normal accounts and just gave into the temptation for some easy CV. We all make mistakes.
Oh sure, I do agree with you on that point. However, about the regular folks doing regular giveaways but also creating gibs for that kind of trash, I will say this: I still think it's lame to farm cv that way. I guess I don't really get the temptation... personally, I'd feel bad giving away these games. But yeah, to each their own. And as you've said, we all make mistakes. I might not partake in cv farming with overpriced asset flips, but I did write some unsavory comments in the past while being tipsy. Don't drink and drive post on SG, people. ::facepalm::
Anyway... Let's hope those shitty titles will be added to the freebie list soon™. :3
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Wow that is an insanely useful tip. I checked for one particular game that goes for 50 P right now, and noticed one name popping up a lot there, and then checked their other GAs and at least the most recent ones all seem to be cheap entries with too high points values. To the point that quite a few of the 50P ones ended up with 0 winners. What the hell, lol.
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I also noticed following that link a certain nationality popping up quite a lot. Anyway, it's time to start blacklisting some people here.
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Any trustworthy way of reporting these games for the mods? Reporting in "other" with a good subject is good enough?
I have an open ticket there for more than a year about correcting a game's CV value, but still no action was taken...
4th game today that costs 30-40€ and looks cobbled together in a few hours max.
Same user giving away 5 copies of varied trash for 210 CV, that shouldn't worth more than 5.
Also there seem to be some heavy overlapping between some users, and these games. It may help tracking those games easier?
This is really getting out of hand.
edit: reported a few, and around 20 similarly problematic game got added to the noCV list :)
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If you search who has given away those games a few names will stick out like a sore thumb. For me blacklisting these bad apples is more efficient than waiting for an answer from support which will come months(or years) down the line with uncertain result.
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From my understanding, tickets in the "other" category are rarely, if ever, looked at and will just sit there for years.
This is controversial, and different mods have different opinions on it, but your best bet for receiving attention is to file under the "Add Game to List" category. Some mods insist that this category is only for adding new games to the ones available in the drop down menu when creating a GA. That's probably the original intent of the category, but there's no explicit category for adding games to the Redcued/No Value lists so it's our best option. At least, all of our requests of the same type would be gathered in a single category instead of being dispersed in the humongous undifferentiated mess that is "Other".
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I guess the post-Covid inflation found SG too.
Seriously though, this is getting ridiculous. The number of these GAs have increased ten-fold in the past few weeks.
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I guess the post-Covid inflation found SG too.
Who could have known that unexpected things would happen if you print money like crazy and keep interest rates at zero for a decade…?
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lol right? It's a new economic principle or something. Like economy twilight zone. Who knew?
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I REALLY want to know. I hope supports puts these asset flops as no value
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Just a quick glance at the last 5 users I have seen in the last 3 days with 40 points GA for games that look like old flash games and I can tell you that support is not putting anything on any list.
They all have multiple copies of similar high value GAs and tend to be level 7 or level 8 users with 50-70 GAs so there is really no incentive not to do it.
Which I guess means that support will probably set the max level at 20 when we are all level 10 from those scam GAs
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The more pressing issue with these titles is that as unbundled items they allow alt / bot / farm accounts to qualify for SG account value with nearly no investment. This is enabling botnet autojoiners.
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Exactly. I have seen SG users who had not a single playable game on their Steam account (apart from their wins here). Only a few asset flips from keyshops. Such an account is 99.9% sure to be not a main account but an alt and costs 1-2 USD to make. One of them was lvl7 in a month from giving away more of those asset flips and managed to get into several groups as many group owners don't care even about the most blatant cheaters.
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Funny that 3 games that i checked(i checked a total of 9 of these games) have prices of $15.99 each.Come on Man,Thats the price of RDR2 or CyberPunk on 50% off.Giving away RDR2 or CyberPunk($14.99 in SummerSale on Steam) would literally make Someone's day(out of 1 billion people who want to own them on Steam Specifically) including me,and this $15.99 game.........Lets hope we can keep the site and SG System fair,clean and healthy.Thanks to all the Mods and members who are playing their part in upkeeping and maintenance of this site.Gracias.
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yes but how many people pay even 1 or 2% of what these kind of games cost - i don't
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You mean CyberPunk and RDR2 or these $2 games? I bought Deathloop for 50% off on Steam,Best decision I ever made.Waiting for sale on CyberPunk again,I missed the last sale cause I bought MGS:Def Experience instead..
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yes but that was for yourself and although i hate cyberpunk type games not many people would pay £15 or £20 or more for a giveaway - most of these high priced games are bought for mere pence or in like a dig bundle for like a $ or 2 or maybe less
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Well,Hopefully When I get my Degree(which is quite far I feel) I will giveaway One of my faves or maybe a pre-order of one of my fav franchise....These times are tough and I am just a student(Jobless),So...Top Quality GAs will have to wait.
Also,Thank You for giving awesome games every now and then(and that one GA everyday).People like you are the Ones keeping The site happy.🙂
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thanks mate i know how bad the world is and every bit of money counts your super nice and i think any giveaway is a good giveaway that is why when i did (and i think will do again) my Christmas community train i said anything is very welcome from the unbundle £20+ games to something being given anyway for free - i do not judge people on their giveaways - now if people take and never give that is different.... (even worse since there are ways to get games without money) have a white list spot
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HEHE,We've been on each other's Whitelist for like 3 months,I believe.
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I'm a tad late to the party, but thanks for this thread. It was an eye-opener. I almost exclusively look at what's in the Wishlist tab when I check for giveaways... Oh of course, I do notice the featured gibs at the top of the page which always seem to be for the crappiest games out there, but don't bother to get a closer look. Now with the games listed in OP and the archive page, it's sad interesting to see who's abusing the CV system.
Those "games" should give 0 CV, if you ask me.
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2 more $25 Full CV "games". Can be bought for $0.25-$0.30
Russian Hunter
Breath of Ghosts
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Thanks, but it looks like support has already taken care of those. All 3 are marked as free and give 0 CV.
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I'd be embarrassed to give away any of these games. Even the puzzles seem like they maybe contain maybe a few shit puzzles, with the only real variety being how many pieces you get. I wouldn't be surprised if the puzzle games have stolen artwork, too. As if Google Images is royalty-free stock art. At the very least, they're multiple copies of the same damn template. At least 49 of them.
Fucking money-laundering garbage, shovelware crap.
And there's more! Ugh. That's obviously for money laundering.
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u are right, best we can do is block people who make those gas...
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That game is overpriced, but it doesn't seem like it was originally intended to be a fake game with a really high price and fake reviews like the others I linked. It looks like Formula X was just a really bad game that sold for $2 and then for some reason the dev keeps bouncing the price up and down. Users here have given it away a lot because over the past 4 years it has been on sale a bunch of times for 50 cents and has been in 5 bundles.
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The price jumping is ridiculous. If a game is selling barely any copies and the people that do actually buy it give it bad reviews at the low price of $1 to $5 why would you jump it up to $15+ then to $35? Don't get me wrong some games do raise prices but there's reasons for it.. more content, leaving early access etc. etc. The price raises for that are nuts and for what reason?
https://steamdb.info/app/842270/
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I have no idea why they would do it, but it doesn't seem planned because of how they are changing it. The game was $5 and people probably complained and said the game was junk and not worth 5, so it was lowered to 2 and stayed there for 6 months with regular sales to 1. That seems normal, but then the game was raised to $10. That only lasted for a short time and then went back down to 5 and stayed there for 9 months before going down to 3 for a while. Then it shot up to $15 and stayed there for almost a year. Then back down to 4 and then 1 where it stayed for another 9 months. Then it shot up to 16 and 35.
This one feels like a childish dev who created a junk game and got offended when people complained so he responded by raising the price even higher. Then he came to his senses and started lowering the price until he got offended again and raised the price. That is the only reason I can see unless these price hikes line up with when the game was released in bundles and they wanted to make the bundle look like it is worth more for some reason. The prices for this game are just all over the place.
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The main reason to change price is to "fake sales", so people buy it at 90% off for 2$ which was its original price.
This is why Valve implemented a cooldown from sales after price changes in recent months, but interestingly, even big publishers have used this tactic (make sure to check steamdb during seasonal events).
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I don't know the reason why it is being done. I originally thought it might be connected to this site because I saw a couple accounts here that were giving away many copies of almost all of these games, but I guess they could just be buying the games for extremely cheap and getting them all to farm CV and not be connected to the people creating the games for a different reason.
There is definitely something more going on than some kids that think their games are worth a lot though. These games do not look like they are real projects created with the intent to be played and I think it looks like every game I listed was created by the same person or group of people. They all follow the same pattern and all have the same number of fake positive reviews.
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Every now and then a $10 item will sell for thousands of dollars in an eBay auction. Price discrimination takes advantage of the gullible?
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That wouldn't make sense here though because nobody would buy these games at these prices after taking 2 seconds to look at the game preview. Even if people were that dumb, Steam allows refunds, so the dev wouldn't get any money.
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What you're saying makes sense except that it does not explain the number of overpriced crappy games that have existed on Steam for decades. This is not a completely new development. I believe that it is increasing but I don't actually know that for a fact. Steam has a history of overpriced (non)games that it has eventually removed in the 10's of thousands. In my 15 years on Steam, I don't believe that I have ever paid full price for a game, but that does not mean that others do not. We can take a vote and conclude that the purchasers should have returned them, but many did not. Also, you can't ask Steam for a refund for games bought at other locations. Yet, Steam prices are still used a guide/proxy for what these should sell for.
My comment was not meant to provide a definitive answer of all the reasons these exist. But it does provide some of the answer. It's not nonsensical.
General, unrelated FYI for others, price discrimination (or discriminatory pricing) is a marketing term for an approach that attempts to maximize dollar sales. It has nothing to do with human rights discrimination for those unfamiliar with the term.
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Have they all been added to the bundled list already or not?
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Some. But it's a waste of time if they are not backdated to 0 cv from day one, more will just replace them.
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All the games listed here are now set to free and backdated to before the first GA :)
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Most of them have been set to free so they no longer give CV, but I didn't go back and check the dates when the 0 CV takes affect compared to when people created the giveaways. Some of them have been been set to reduced value instead of free.
Edit: All games listed here are now set to free and will not give anyone CV no matter when the GA was created.
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Update: Every game listed in this thread is now set to not give any CV no matter how long ago the GA was created.
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That's very good news, even though i also dropped 0.01 point when i didnt give away those games. :x
Someone been eagerly putting games on the list.
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With over 2100 games sent, I'm not sure how you would you know what caused your CV to drop by 0.01. It doesn't have to be a game added to the reduced CV or free list, if any game you have given away drops it's full price on Steam, your CV will drop accordingly.
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Yeah i know, it just came right after already having already dropped a 0.1 point after they added monkey king to the list, i know it was cheap but atleast it wasn't one of these games you mentioned here in the op.
Yet you still see so many others slip through (from past giveaways) that do make it to high levels and keep them, it's a bit salty.
And there been many giveaways in the past like with gamehag (that kept a neat record on their facebook) and i even offered to help back then but it was ignored back, but still glad this was taken care of, it's a start right?
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In the end not really important why 0.1 dropped. None of us can change it and reduced/free games that get retroactively set to the correct date can hit you without that you got the game for free or bought bundle X that were active one year before bundle Y that you bought.
It hit me the same way, without that i exploited something but that mini hits are ok and will never change my level.
One mod goes berserk, in a positive way, with the free/reduced game tickets.
From me are still around 480 add game tickets open, so it will give the one or other hit for, mostly, the black sheeps.
User X (i can't use the real users name) was on $5.676 --> $5.530 --> $5.494 --> $5.141 --> $5.095 --> $4.972 --> $4.669
Till now he lost $1007 = dropped from lvl 10 to level 9.
I am soooo sorry^^ of course not, because he is one of my "special friends", because level 10 9 with nearly only freebies and using up to 77 accounts + bots on each freebie site.
User Y (i can't use the real users name) was on $1600 --> $195 (Level 7 --> 4)
Give the mod a few weeks to tackle the tickets and when you see it is down to a low number you can look around for the old games that still need to be reported and than do this :o)
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There are people saying who care about CV but actually i do mind especially being close to reaching level 10, and i think i always done it in an honest way, i never bothered (intentionally) with free games, not even any 1p or 2p games, even from dig bundles and such, i felt i had standards.
At level 9 it takes forever if you do it the honest way, 0.1 point is several bundled 30p giveaways, and yes a level 10 might not mean anything, but still.
When i offered to help, it was 2 years ago, and gamehag still had them up front on their facebook, not anymore, same thing with that site ending with .su. It should have been tackled then, now in alot of cases it's just too late.
And it feels like that user x dropping to level 9 isn't by far enough, if it's mostly freebies, he should be dropped all the way to level 2 or lesser.
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I know what you mean with the honest way and the extreme slow progress.
I am since 2 or 3 years on level 7 and it is very demotivating to see how easy other ones cheated their levels.
And yes, it isn't cool to loose cv, i think none like this but if i get a colateral damage when the black sheeps get fully hit with their 5 - 30 copies for the dif. games that were somewhere for free before i bought it in a bundle, then it is a small thing for me but a big hit for them, which makes me happy and i don't think about my own cv in such cases.
I report games too that i give away when they were for free somewhere or when i bought them in a bundle (fairplay).
Yes, User X should be far below level 9 and i hope that will happen before all tickets are handled. Around 700 "add game" tickets are from all users open, so i have high hopes.
In the end he lost now 20% of his cv in 4 days, thats much more as ever happened before. I think he was shocked when he seen his stats today :-D
I reported, in the past, "all" his games that i could find the source since he were level 9 and slowed his progress with it but couldn't stop or reverse it because mods only handled from time to time a ticket and in the end i gave up with creating new tickets (because 550 open and unhandled ones -right now the ammount is down to around 470 open ones, so it go in the right direction-).
Now i get motivation back, that let me do more autojoiner reports^^ -thats the part i work on lately ... till now around 25 catched ones on the list.. half of them perma suspended (80 more to go...).
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Level 7 you gonna start to think okay well this is hard, at level 9 you gonna think okay well this is gonna be impossible (it's that slow). :p But yeah it's very demotivating. and so easy to join the caravan of cheaters, but i refuse.
Well keep up the good work. ;)
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I think we might need some sort of community vote system. Like one with old threads.
So users could go over the games on Steam and vote if they deserve lower value. Treat every game equally be it these or next COD or whatever.
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Wow, thanks a lot. I'm sure there are other games that I didn't spot. When I originally noticed some of these games, I just looked them up in the archive and found a few users that were giving away tons of these type of games. I used their accounts to look through their previous GAs to find more games like this that they gave away, but I didn't spend too much time trying to find them all. I also clicked on some of the devs on Steam and saw that they had more fake overpriced games like this, but I didn't list them in the thread because there were no GAs created for them on SG.
I just checked all the games and I am happy to see that they have been set to give no CV from the date of the first GAs on SG, but I did notice issues with 2 games.
Hot Summer - The first GA on SG is 6/7/21, but the no CV date is set to 1 day later on 6/8/21 giving 1 user CV for 3 copies.
My Sweet Ants! - The no CV date is 1/24/22 and there are 3 giveaways created before that date. Maybe this was done intentionally because the previous GAs were quite a bit older, but they are still getting full CV at $25 (5 copies for 1 user) when the full price of the game on Steam back then was only $1.99. So, if they can't be set to no CV that far back, maybe they should at least be set to reduced CV. At reduced they will still be getting $3.75 CV for a game that was $1.99 and went on sale often.
Thank you and any other support members that have been helping :)
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If I find more games like this, how should I report them. I feel like I shouldn't message you directly about it here, so would it be better to submit a ticket? What would be the best category to submit these under, "Add Game To List"?
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I guess if you want to deal with it right away, I will just message you in this thread if I notice any. I didn't want to message you directly because I feel like it should just go to support and then you or whoever can deal with it when you have time and feel like it. Since support members volunteer their time and are free to do as much or little as they want when they feel like it, I feel like kind of a nuisance contacting you outside of a support ticket for things that would normally get a support ticket.
Honestly, if I was a support member, I would prefer to not have the support tag next to my name. It would get annoying if every time you posted a comment somewhere, people saw the support tag next to your name and started asking you support questions. I would definitely like to respond and help them, but life gets busy sometimes or you just aren't in the mood to respond to a lot of people.
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These 3 games are from the same dev. They were originally sold for $0.99 or $1.99 and recently had their prices increased a lot. There are multi copy GAs for all of them. Also, the first 2 games are template flips where the dev didn't really create anything.
Eagle Simulator
Police Hot Pursuit
Need for Spirit: Off-Road Edition
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Example:
Pestis
Listed as 20.99€ but record low on steam, with -75% was 0.39€, on the 4th Feb 2019
Same for this bundle: Pestis + OST , price now 15.24€, record low, with -77%, was 0.54€, on the 4th Feb 2019
Right now Pestis is listed as bundled and the OST as full value.
Both prices are of course, much, too high for the ammount that the people paid in the shady ru shops.
Mega Bundle
Please look into the attached picture.
Historic low: 0.76€ on IG 29.07.2013 (i don't cross checked to see if ITAD list something wrong -which can happen in a few cases-)
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=DIEDEMOR%20STUDIO%20GAMES
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Laush%20Studio
On my ignored list because of such overpriced fake/crap games and i am sure you will find there more as only Pestis that should be adjusted :o)
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Wow, that was a lot.
Thanks :o)
But one thing confuse me. In my steam store it says that 161 games are included in the bundle, you write now about 223.
Are their 18+ (NSFW) games in it ? That would, maybe, be filtered out from steam -yeah, thanks germany.... /sarcasm-.
Without that i can't think of a other reason for 62 games more in it.
- I vote for 50% of cg's income, from this site, as payment for Pete
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Thanks.
I not expected to miss something, when a dev/publisher is involved that i have on my ignore list :-D
But i would still prefer when steam gave me the control if i want to see and, maybe buy, adult games and not see in all germans "kids" because they are too lazy to implement a age verification system because our governement are some dumb mummies, that should be replaced with 40 years younger people, that think kids would buy NSFW games on steam for "the naughty stuff" but when they want they get with a internet search all that they want to see, for free (so it is a stupid reason).
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looks like they deleted their comment so I can't see what 161 game bundle this was referencing...
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great examples Mastafor though they pale in comparison to the Hede and co key spamming of late, I guess the problem is without having URLs to show evidence of the shady key sites selling them for pennies it's hard to prove to mods this is going on
I think at this point it becomes instinctive but maybe they're worried of reacting too hard and burying legit games which unfortunately sold cheaply in the past for exposure?
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Thank you very much, Pete and others! :)
And especially you, AllTracTurbo!
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Originally I was only looking at the very high priced games, but I did just notice the same pattern happening with lower priced games. I don't know if I should report the lower priced games that also look fake or just the ones at much higher values.
If you look at these 2 devs and 1 other game, they all follow the same pattern. Priced at $10.99 with 9 or 10 positive reviews (probably fake). There are multiple copy giveaways on SG for almost all of these games which means they are being sold for very cheap somewhere and users are using them to farm CV. Some of them have already been set to reduced value, but some are still giving full CV.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=REACTORJOY
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Duodli
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1995090/STEIIARIA/
Clearly, these lower priced games are also being used to farm CV, but I don't know if I should bother reporting them because I don't know where they get the keys from, so my report wouldn't be that helpful if that is needed to set them to reduced value. I can see just setting the very high priced games to 0 CV without caring where the keys are coming from, but these aren't as egregious and it might be better to set them to reduced value like what is normally done with other games.
Edit: Is there a known list of shady sites that sell these type of game keys for really cheap? I could check those sites when I see these games and then be able to file a proper report. Or is there a way to archive those sites every day? If you have a list of these sites and have something archive the sites every day, when you see games like this, you could just go back through your archive of those sites and know when the game was sold for cheap. I know you can do it with archive.org, but I'm not sure if it could be automated.
Or some kind of price watch could be setup like isthereanydeal.com or gg.deals does. It would just watch these sites and keep a record of the price history like those sites do. I don't know how stuff like that works though, so if it were to happen, someone else would have to volunteer there time and probably resources. That would be very useful for support because it would keep a price history of the shady sites instead of the legit ones. Then they wouldn't have to rely on users to report where the game is being sold or when the sale date started because the game itself could just be reported and then support could check the price history.
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How do you feel about the idea of negative CV for things that are clearly not intended as legitimate games and are used only for profit and exploitation both inside and outside of SG? Almost no one would give them away if they actively lowered CV. Or perhaps automatically disable the ability to create giveaways after a certain number of these giveaways are reached.
I also agree that steps need to be taken against all of the similar titles at much lower values from 1 to 25.
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Most important thing is that all of these kind of titles are reduced to at least 0 value and backdated to day one once they are noticed (thanks to you and others who have been doing this). I understand that people will rush to do 1 hour giveaways each time new garbage comes out, but any level boost would only be temporary.
The next step is discourage these kind of giveaways. The only way to effectively do so is to ensure it would eventually have a negative impact on the account. So negative CV and disabling a users ability to create any kind giveaway would be effective. Why would you continue to giveaway 50p trash when it will eventually make you go backwards and perhaps disable the account as well? No one can argue that they bought these things to give away because they are good games and thought it would be nice. Deletions should also not be allowed for these titles.
If SG was an MMO, some of these people would be banned for knowingly using exploits.
Another additional thought. Would including a certain code word in ticket titles help staff locate reports by search function? New trash gets given away. File a report ticket with Operation Trash Compactor in the title?
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negative CV sounds like an awesome idea to me, take my whitelist
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It give a lot of 16p, 18p, 19p, 20p, 30p games that i reported in the past. They are all reduced now.
In the end they were the same few games, over and over and over again with exchanged optical stuff. Like other backgrounds (one time in a desert, next time in woods, next time in a winter setting) but the rest completely the same. Or they were fake games (unplayable trash).
All of them were from the known shady ru shops and sold mostly for 6 - 16 cents.
After X months i gave up to report them because my lifetime is too much worth to do it daily (special because from the sg mods always only 1-2 done some work, which means the tickets needed often years till be handled).
And yes, always the same, around, 50 (nowadays they are more as 50) accounts that abused/exploited each of this games.
From my point of view it would be more effective to perma suspend people that base their complete GAs only on such exploiting/abusing Games. It would lower the workload drastical and maybe send the sign that absuing/exploiting is the wrong way.
A few sacrificed and the rest would know where the border is....
Besides that i have a question that you maybe could answer.
When a steam account reach the $100, that is needed for entering sg, and later the owned games get retroactively set to reduced or free, did this account loose the access to sg ?
Because a lot of accounts (and a good bunch of them are autojoiners and/or multiaccounts) gained access to sg with the fake games, for 30 cents that they spend in the end.
Killing that ones access would help a lot in the fight against the autojoiners and multiaccounters. And it would not hit normal users that don't exploited/abused something.
So a win:win:win situation.
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I think the problem is automatic access based on Steam's store. Giving steam accounts access should require manual approval where you can look at the actual games in their library (not sure if there's a way to arrange them by price) to see if they're legitimately high-value games or just inflated shovelware acquired for pennies.
This wouldn't be needed if Steam would cooperate in devaluing/delisting this stuff... but they haven't been.
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the more clever CV farms are picking realistic prices like 19.99 and doing 1.99 sales, they don't stand out as easily as these "my game is 300 dollars" monstrosities. Picking out those scams would be a lot trickier since their inflation is subtler.
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Found a new one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2090630/PLANETOIDS/
Thanks, PeteOzzy. 😎
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Here's another one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2092180/Underwater_battles/
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Spotted a new one:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2058130/Fortitude_invasion/
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Thanks, but that one has already been marked as free on SG and backdated to before the first GA. I'll add it to the list, but I'm not sure if I am going to update the list here with all the games, I was mainly just trying to figure out what was happening and get people's attention so something would get done about it. I also don't know if I should post new games I find here. It would probably be better to report them in a support ticket since I'm not sure if this thread will be monitored by support to add the games.
I did recently find these two that are still full CV:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2027370/Ball_Torture/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1995120/CHICKWEED/
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This will be a never-ending battle since more pop up every week.
You could try maintaining a dev/publisher list to check, since some of them continue to post their asset flips under one company. Of course, there are many one-off company / devs for these asset flips probably to attempt ban evasion if and when valve actually moves on them.
PS - now that a bunch were added to the list, does it mean any retroactive changes for accounts that successfully registered for steamgfits on nothing but these titles? See my account value post above.
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Then it will be a battle. We need to do something. We can't just let people farm dozens or possibly hundreds of copies of full CV $50 games that they are paying pennies for. Hopefully in the long run Steam will do something about it.
I don't know what will happen to accounts that used these games to register, but I'm guessing nothing. They will get banned if they have multiple accounts and support notices, but I'm not sure how they detect that.
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Set all Steam tagged 'Steam is Learning' or 'Features Limited' games as $0 CV? Similar to how bundled games are automatically 15% CV? If these ever become recognized by Steam as full games, then change the CV the way that other changes in CV are made? This would seem administratively easier for the few games that move from $0 to some value, than the current task of setting 100% CV to $0.
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It would certainly be easier for support if the Steam API reports that info so the site can do it automatically, but I don't know how those two categories work or what affect it would have to set all of those games to 0 CV. I don't know how many games fall into those categories and how it would affect people wanting to create giveaways for them.
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ESGST is also able to flag these. It would seem that people wouldn't want to make giveaways for these, but isn't that the point?
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But people do want to create giveaways for lots of legitimate games that are in those categories. Like I said, I don't know enough about how those categories work, how many games are in those categories, or how it would affect the rest of the site to mark all of them as 0CV, so I can not make an informed decision on whether it would be a good idea or not. With my current limited knowledge, I would not want to set them all to 0CV.
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You do realize that basically every new game is learning status, unless a big publisher whitelisted by valve. So there'd be no motivation to give away new games, new indies. Some games will never graduate the status since it requires a certain number of direct sales.
You're correct that the problematic games of this topic are all in this category, but you'd be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I admit I'm morbidly curious what it would do to SG, but I don't think it would be anything good.
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There would still be many new games that have CV. And we are only talking about CV. There is nothing that prevents users from giving away low CV games. I have given away hundreds for $0 CV.
On the issue of games with these tags graduating to full status, I have never seen it and I have looked and asked a number of times. The only path that I have seen goes "Steam is Learning > "Profile Limited Features" > "Removed from Steam". When I have looked at publishers with new games with this tag, their library does not include any games that have graduated to full status and I would suggest that the reason for that is because the games are not very good. I understand your baby and bathwater comment, but it seems to me that in practice this is not actually the case. In my humble opinion, they are lower quality games and a lower CV reflects that. Maybe limit them to $1 CV?
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feature-limited games being zeroed all the way around is a great idea to me
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/2015200/Grot_Slasher/ here is a new one, that was $9.99, on June 23 with no discount and now the price has been raised to $49.99 and look there is some giveaways for it now.
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It's the fifth one from the top on AllTracTurbo's list and has been marked as 0CV since Jun 24.
Even at 0CV, people continue to make GAs for it to boost their group stats.
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And keys are also being given away for free right now on a Russian site.
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Please read this part before linking a game: If you are going to link a game here, please check to make sure that it has not already had it's CV removed. Support has already removed the CV from a very large number of these type of games. People can still create giveaways for the games, they just won't get any credit for them. There are a few different ways you can check. If you see a giveaway, you can just click the magnifying glass icon to the right of the game name and it will bring you to a page that will show a date next to "No Value" if it has already been reduced to give 0 CV. You can also go to the bundle game list here and search the name of the game or it's Steam ID. It will show a date in the "No Value" column if it has already had it's CV removed. The last way you can check is to go to the page to create a giveaway here and type in the name of the game or the Steam ID. The game has already had it's CV removed if there are 2 red asterisks next to the name of the game.
A lot of games have been reported in this thread that have not had their value reduced. To make it easier to see if a full CV game has already been reported here in the past, PoeticKatana has taken the time to go through the entire thread and check all the reported games. He found a large number of games that have not been reduced and created a table with a list of all the games and other helpful info about them.
Gelweo has taken over and is updating the list of games that have already been reported.
List of reported games that have not had their CV removed yet
List of reported games that have already been reduced to 0 CV
Update: Thanks to the support members who are looking into this. I noticed that many of the games listed below have been set to reduced or no value. Dropping the games to no value is great, but letting them get reduced value on fake $50 games is still kind of crazy. They are still getting $7.50 real CV each for dozens of copies of $50 games. It would be nice if those could be reduced more, but at least something is being done. Thanks for helping :)
Update 2: Big thanks again to support. A comment has been posted to let us know that all the games listed here have been added to the free list so they don't give anyone CV at these crazy prices. I just checked the dates on all the games compared to the date of the first GA anyone created for them on SG and I am happy to report that every game listed here has been set so that nobody will get any CV from these games no matter when they created the GAs.
Update 3: I just want to point out that this thread is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all of these type of games. I stopped adding games to the list here a long time ago. I originally created the thread to try and figure out why these games are being priced so high and if there was something that could be done to prevent users from abusing them to cheat the CV system. There is a large number of these games being created and support has been working to remove the CV from them. There are probably hundreds of these games at this point and I have no intention of trying to keep track of them all.
I am not a support member, so I personally cannot modify the value of these games. If you want to report one of these games that has not had it's value reduced yet, support members may be watching this thread and posting about the game here may get their attention, but I am not positive. I believe the official way to report these games is to file a support ticket in the "Add game to list" category.
Also, if you notice that some of the games listed here are not expensive anymore, they were at one time and probably will be again. I do not know why they change the prices so drastically. The game may be $2 one day and $200 the next.
Original Thread
I just noticed users giving away multiple copies of games that are full CV with a value of $50 (a lot are $50, some are $25-45) and they look like they should cost $1 or $2. There is no way anyone would pay that much for these games and they all have around 10-12 review that are 100% or 90% positive.
Is someone creating these games for the purpose of cheating the CV system here or is there some other reason why they would be created and somehow users here got keys to give away?
I am not saying that everyone who gives away one of these games is bad since I can understand if a user normally creates giveaways for any free keys they get and happens to get one of these from somewhere, but I checked one user's account and they are creating multiple GAs of most of these games and another account that is giving away 5 copies each of a lot of them.
I'm not sure what can be done, but maybe support could manually set the value of games like these to $1 or just mark them as free so they don't give any CV. I don't think anyone would have much to complain about because I doubt anyone is actually paying much if anything for these. The only ones that would be upset would be the ones who lose their fake CV, but they have nothing to complain about.
I just want to point out that the majority of users, like myself, have been here for many years slowly working our way up through the levels. I am almost level 8 after 8 years, but if I knew where to buy these games on grey market sites for pennies, I could be level 10 tomorrow. I don't want to do that though because it is wrong and if everyone started doing it, it would hurt the site. If a new level 0 user gives away 5 copies each of 12 of the $50 games listed, they would be level 9. It would probably only cost them around $10 to do this where it would cost the average user giving away their spare Humble Monthly games around $1200 or someone who looks for decent sales or bundles that give about 4 times what they pay in CV around $750. (Edit: It is no longer just $50 games, there is now a very large number of these games giving $200 CV)
This is just a short list of examples from when I created the thread. There are hundreds more that follow the same pattern.
Aoihana
Art your brains
Ball Torture
BeachRun
Bots City
CHICKWEED
cookies СOOkies COOKIES
CowboysShowdown
Crazy Zoo
DOLPHIN HUSTLE
DonutCrabs
Dr. Science quest
DUCK Mission
Eagle Simulator
Fishy Business
Fortitude invasion
Grot Slasher
helicopter 2.0
Hot Summer
Ink World
The Last Metal Shooter
Limousine Parking Simulator
Magic War
Mechaguard
MOVERS IN THE WAREHOUSE
My Sweet Ants!
Need for Spirit: Off-Road Edition
Over City
Panda Run
Pixel Pirate
PLANETOIDS
Police Hot Pursuit
Puzzles with nature
Ragedanger Earth
Rich Taste of Ecchi
SCALEPLANET
SpearFrog
SPLAIT RAGE
Super Arkanoid
TOTO Quest
Underwater battles
Villwars
Voice Shooter "Pif Paf"
What do you hear?? Yanny vs Laurel
Yuonger Adventure
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