Rumours of Valve looking into developer's key generation

Seems like something long over due to be done ....

Right now steam store is a joke.... Even with whatever the new greenlight was called there are still over a hundred games a week flooding the place .

Not calling out all of them but there is portion of the which will just be sold for about the price of a used piece of toilet paper just so ppl idle them for cards and the dev get those sweet sweet cents dripping from the sales .

Other option is just put minimal price for the key to be sold at .... That may kill some bundles .... But I rather get 5-6 okay games for 4.9o rather then 30 for a doll that I will never touch

I personally wouldn't mind moving on to other platforms and having some competition (assuming key distribution dies and brings bundle sites like HB along with it), except for things I'd miss like:

• My friends list, which only contains IRL friends, many of whom I have no other contact
• Dozens of Steam exclusives, only a real issue if we see Steam fall entirely
• Automatic updates, which would be a massive pain in the backside for updating a 250+ game library
• Suggested games algorithms that actually are pretty useful for me
• Being able to see what my friends want while still being anti-social
• Access to games that are no longer supported/no longer exist
• The hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars that I would have wasted and no longer have access to

I am against a monopoly as much as the next person, but in this day and age, all form factors are moving to monopolies or groups of 2-5 companies controlling a given area. Personally, Steam fits my needs, and losing it because they can't spare some money out of their millions would suck. I don't mind penny bundle sites falling, but legitimate sites like HB and developers that do not have the overhead to host their own servers for websites, FTP, support, publicity, etc. would be hurt the most.

Basically, indie gaming would die, and it would be back to AAA development and a few lucky souls with deep pockets.

Getting keys is not an automated process, they have always been reviewed by Valve to make sure people don't do dumb stuff like ask for 50k Beta Override keys for their platformer that releases next week. Only now have they started to get more selective with the amounts of keys they'll authorize.

Though we can't know their exact reasoning, Valve is most likely not targeting major bundle sites. Instead, they're trying to deal with underground sites that promote idlers and games that immediately get bundled on release. Games that are sold on those platforms are almost always too low of quality to sell on Steam itself, so they won't be able to generate the real sales required to request keys.

We can't know for sure since Valve is super hands-off and almost never publishes data about their back-end (which is good and bad). Still, legitimate developers are unlikely to be affected by this unless they join a major bundle shortly after release.

Worthy change. Kill G2A please. Or some other RU sites that sell keys for like 0.03 apiece.

As I see it this might end up hurting my ability to buy games on cheap bundles in the future... and that's actually kinda great for me.
I know I'm being selfish right now but reducing the growth of my backlog from hundreds of games per year that god knows when I'll get around to play to just, let's say a couple dozen per year or less, would be a massive improvement for me. As it is now I have already stocked up on enough games for the next decade or two so outside of the stuff currently on my wishlist I can live with not buying more games for some time.

Well, for no one is a secret that in the last years the steam store was filled with a massive number of poor development games, the most of them only made for gather money using the steam card market or like the last games using a massive number of achievements for catch buyers, but no one with a minimal common sense will buy this games because they are bad and their "devs" know that, so for them is more easy to abuse of the key system and use it for give away or sell for nothing their games, anyway they will have more profit with market and there is the other problem.

Some people believes that for Valve these games don't carries higher costs but for any key activated in Steam, Valve must pay for the storage for profile, inventory, 20gb for screenshots, etc and now Steam is full of bots farming cards from these games and have the community market very damage.

And who is the responsible, well is Valve itself, greenlight (now Steamdirect) could be a great idea if will were more strict in the contents that arrive to the store, not only accept any thing that pay the fee.

Personally I'm happy with this decision and don't believe that this could significate the end of the mayor bundles sites like Humble Bundle that sell games makes in the right way. I hope that the next step will be close all these bot accounts, maybe with the time Steam like plataform and store recovery the greatness that had in the past.

Sorry for any misspelled, I'm forgetting the english

I love how there are people that will praise this move by Valve, criticize SteamDirect, and like the idea of it being harder for shit "devs" to prosper, but then they proceed to gobble up the shovelware toxic waste and knowingly support the very people that are blatantly polluting the damn system. Got to love hypocrites.

Anyway, if this info is legitimate, I'm glad that Valve is finally doing something that may actually help deter the asset flippers/system abusers, and hopefully reduce the trash that we must wade through in order to find the good stuff. I really hope they make more decisions akin to this one.

I was wondering what Valve would pull next, after getting rid of inventory gifting. I've only spent a couple dollars in the steam store since they started pulling this crap; most of my purchases have been Steam keys through Humble and other stores.

Unfortunately, we put all our eggs in one basket...time to start a new basket. Who's going to start GOGGifts.com ?

An update from Valve: http://gamasutra.com/view/news/304003/Valve_engineer_comments_on_restrictions_to_highvolume_Steam_key_requests.php

It's completely OK for partners to sell their games on other sites via Steam keys, and run discounts or bundles on other stores, and we'll continue granting free keys to help partners do those things. But it's not OK to negatively impact our customers by manipulating our store and features.

Madjoki has already posted this, but it's a link to SteamWork group, not everyone has access to it.
So, fret not, bundle sites will be safe, just fewer free cards from trash indie games.

Easy way to address this is for Steam to take a flat fee (as admin fee) for any key generated. Kind of surprised they don't do this already. Though if Steam booted certain developers, it would probably clean up the store a bit.

EDIT: Oh, just saw the clarification. That's good.