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

2 years ago*

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It's quite sad as some of these look like they could be fun games to play for a couple of bucks if legit

9 months ago
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I think almost all of them are complete junk though. They look decent because I think a lot of them are created from those developer kit demo things that give you a base game to build off of and that is what you see in the trailer. The people releasing these fake games just change a few skins and keep releasing the same thing under new names. I have also seen some that are actual mobile games and they are just stolen and re-uploaded to Steam under a different name.

They always have 10 fake positive reviews when they are listed and then once any real reviews come in, you can read about how horrible the games are. They are often just shells of a game with no content.

9 months ago
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Thanks for the report but all are 0 CV already.
You can tell by going to https://www.steamgifts.com/app/<app id> and checking if there's a date next to "No Value".

9 months ago
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/2756860/3D_PUZZLE__Factory/

Part of a series of "3D Puzzle" and "Hidden" games, and one of those sold at $200 or so.

Currently it figures as giving full CV so it's another to add to the garbage bin.

9 months ago
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Sucubella Games seems to be an alias of Gamesfromgames :

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/24309/GamesForGames_Bundle/

even if their prices seems "ok" for now, beware !

8 months ago
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Not all "Bside Studio" games on the list, but seems all overpriced:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Bside%20Studio

8 months ago
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8 months ago
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Some of them were already on my list as full CV under a different publisher name. I'll add the rest.

Looks like support has updated a few of them but they didn't give all games the same treatment. No idea why.

Alone and Dangerous Full -> 0 CV
Angry Choice Full -> Reduced CV

8 months ago
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Few questions:

  • Why not update all 0 CV GA's to 0 points? It is a simple solution to fix all group ratio problems.
  • In private groups if group admin wants to delete these kind of GA's why need to agree with creator? If creator wants to delete these GA's why need "agree" from all winners? In some cases winner/and creator is not a group member so can't comment into GA. In other case user is deleted/banned from SG. How should delete GA's created by deleted user?
8 months ago
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Since those are questions/suggestions for the site admin and this thread is driven by users, it's probably best to make your own thread in the Bugs/Suggestions forum.

8 months ago
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I have never ran a group and I am only in 1 where I need to maintain a ratio, so I have never had to deal with these issues or really put any thought into it.

I think all the values you see when you view the list of users in a group should be changed to show real CV instead of the retail values. I think this would probably fix most issues. It seems like it would be an easy change since the site already calculates real CV on user profiles, but I don't know anything about programming or creating websites, so I could be wrong about it being an easy change.

8 months ago
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real CV not work!

"
Examples:
Idle: Multipliers - DIG Bundle 1409
https://barter.vg/bundle/7214/

Gravewood High - Chapter 1
Free on alienwarearena

Lilly's Flower Shop
givee.club free game
....
"

There are hundreds more games what value should refresh on this page.

This problem still exists, even if groups try their best to fix it. Can't delete GA if all winner not says "I agree". But some users are very angry because they kicked out from group earlier and not corporate. As you see new overpriced games comes day by day...

8 months ago
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I just made a similar response in the other thread here, but I feel like I should respond here as well for some reason.

I don't know what can be done, but it seems like all these issues come down to the CV system on this site being broken and needing something to fix it. The volunteer support is overworked cannot keep up with the never ending supply of these type of fake or extremely cheap games. They need some sort of automation to help identify these types of games to allow them to fix the real CV values more efficiently.

Unfortunately, people have been talking about this for years and I don't think anything has been done. I don't know if they tried something and it didn't work or if they just haven't tried anything. Trying to tackle it manually clearly is a losing battle. There is too much to try and stay on top of and support just gets overwhelmed.

8 months ago
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8 months ago
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Doubly notable for being blatant ripoffs of actually decent games in the genre by Devcats. Not even just "inspired" like Laush Studios claims, but they're very nearly 1 to 1 duplicates with worse art. If Devcats had the money, I imagine they'd sue over it.

8 months ago
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8 months ago
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Just came across this. Only one giveaway for it so far, but wow it looks like a hot mess of a "game". Nowhere near 25 and definitely shouldn't give Full CV

https://www.steamgifts.com/game/acZ4x/chaosmetaverse

8 months ago
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That probably won't get reduced because I think it is just an overpriced bad game. It seems like the person that made it doesn't really know much about making games and they are trying to sell it for way too much money. If cheap keys aren't available, people cannot use it to abuse the CV system here. From reading the comments on the giveaway, it sounds like the giveaway creator might be giving away a beta key that probably won't even work.

The type of games that get reduced here are the ones that are actually fake and people are using to abuse the CV system. They are not made to be played, they are made for some kind of fraud. The dev/publisher usually pumps out a lot of games in a short time that are all just reskinned versions of the same thing or stolen mobile games. They originally release them at a low price with 10 fake positive reviews and make keys available for pennies on shady sites. Then they bump the price up really high to something like $50 or $200 and people here grab the almost free keys to get tons of CV. These games have their CV removed to try and prevent people from cheating the CV system.

8 months ago
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Definitely overpriced: True Spring Love
https://www.steamgifts.com/game/EZh5g/true-spring-love

Edit: CV already reduced to zero

8 months ago
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I just took a look at the first 10 games in your list of examples at the start of the thread. One just went to the front page of Steam because it isn't available in my country, the rest were marked as "Profile Features Limited" on their steam page. That is something Valve put into place to combat trading card mills, achievement spam games and possibly other techniques that some devs did to make money from terrible, cheap, games.

Maybe SteamGifts could use that for automation. If a game is marked as "profile features limited", then giveaways of that game do not earn CV.

If a game manages to get the profile features unlocked, then it automatically starts earning CV here. Maybe retroactively apply that CV to previous giveaways of that game.

8 months ago
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doing that would hit way to many innocent games in the goal of hitting a small amount of abuse cases.
not a good solution

8 months ago
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I wouldn't want to take away CV from all features limited games, but it would be useful if they created some kind of automated flagging system that looked for games that meet a certain criteria and then flagged them for support to look at. Anytime a game shows up in the Steam API that is features limited and over a certain price, it could flag that for manual review from support.

They could also flag any game that has a price increase of more than 50 or 100% since a lot of these fake games will start at like $2 and then later increase their price to something around $20-200. That type of massive price increase is a clear indicator of something wrong and should immediately throw up red flags for SG support to look at the game. Most games on Steam go down in price over time, not up, and if they do go up, it would not be by such a massive amount, so that should be a clear indicator and help support identify the games much quicker.

8 months ago*
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8 months ago
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Beat me to it. That first one was $0.99 until last month. Definitely qualifies

8 months ago
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It's only 5 bucks but this garbage wouldn't be worth getting paid to play it and frankly, I saw better looking flash games in the late 90s.
https://www.steamgifts.com/game/jVGyN/carprogram

8 months ago
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Games won't have their CV reduced just because they are bad. The ones in this thread are being reduced because they are priced very high and keys are made available almost for free, which allows users here to abuse the CV system. The games talked about in this thread are very poor quality because whoever is creating them is not creating them to be played, it is for some kind of fraud, but that is not the main reason for having their CV removed.

8 months ago
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Raven's Cry - base game and DLC both reduced to zero but combined package only partially reduced
https://steamdb.info/app/281130/subs/

8 months ago
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https://www.steamgifts.com/game/bK6w2/rabbit-riot

Already reduced but should be 0CV after the price hike.

8 months ago
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Deleted

This comment was deleted 8 months ago.

8 months ago
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I'm not sure what's going on with that game. Maybe they had their account hacked. It's no longer for sale though.

8 months ago
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Thanks. I just got up and haven't checked the new threads here yet.

This could end up being a good thing in the end. These high profile games having issues like this will force Steam to do something to prevent it. There is a slight chance that whatever they do to resolve this issue could possibly also affect the games talked about in this thread. It probably won't happen, but there is a chance.

8 months ago
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It seems we finally have an answer why those overpriced games are created: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmIwBIs6FVk

7 months ago
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Valve really needs to close down the Pandora's Box and actually start to review games before publishing.

7 months ago
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That definitely sound like it could be why they are created. It's not to do what happened recently, to list fake games and then change their names to popular games because these overpriced fake games have existed for years without that happening. But maybe it is for the other reason he mentioned, to put fake positive reviews on the games and raise the prices so that they can sell them in packs of Steam keys and claim they are selling highly rated games with a certain value. People don't realize they are buying fake junk until it is too late and will have a hard time getting a refund because the key packs are probably sold on shady sites.

I am happy this recent high profile scam happened because it looks like it kicked Steam into gear to look into the issue and maybe they will do something to identify all of these type of games and not just the ones that pretend to be popular games. Maybe they will identify and wipe out all of the games talked about in this thread and put some kind of protection in place to stop new ones from being listed on Steam and we can finally be done with this issue on SG.

7 months ago
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But maybe it is for the other reason he mentioned, to put fake positive reviews on the games and raise the prices so that they can sell them in packs of Steam keys and claim they are selling highly rated games with a certain value.

This is what I meant. I had never thought about that. Seems like I don't have enough criminal energy inside of me.

7 months ago
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Interesting, I'd never thought of that, but makes sense. Also registering "GTA 6", "Elden Ring 2" is future-proofing for a scam in the next 3-5 years. These scammers look ahead more than Valve ever did. Valve needs to change "we have a contract and can trust our partners" attitude to "these certain fields need approval to change" mentality.

7 months ago
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https://www.steamgifts.com/game/qUyF8/the-iceman (40P)
https://www.steamgifts.com/game/oOWd6/tunnel-adventure (40P)

Atomic Fabrik as usual. I think SG needs to give suspensions (and eventually permanent if they continue) who create a giveaway from these obvious scammers.

7 months ago*
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You can add from the same editor and same price :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2709230/Planes_Combat/

7 months ago
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they told me on Steam it is similar to Golf with Friends

7 months ago
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Same here. Steam is saying it's similar to that and Escape Simulator 😂

With all the garbage shovelware Steam removed the other day, I'm sad they didn't sweep all the Atomic Fabrik garbage into the trash with it

7 months ago
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I raise you by one Dave the Diver. It's absolutely ridiculous.

7 months ago
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A true chameleon of genres! lmao

7 months ago
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No idea what the logic is on the recommendation algorithm.

View attached image.
7 months ago
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/2387830/People_Jumping_Tower/
Another brilliant example for CV exploit. Don't know if "game" was mentioned already.

7 months ago
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This has zero CV since Oct 4, 2023.

7 months ago
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