Valve to stop allotting / accepting CD keys? End of steam keys?

I hate Steam and all they do. But a bit of regulation to prevent the tsunami of shitware? Yes we need a bit of that.

I can only hope for this to be true.

It really sucks but there are so many devs abusing the key generation. It has always been weird to see Steam accepting to generate free unlimited keys on their platform because for Valve it's not free, they need to pay their employees, the bandwith, the marketing fees and so on.

That's too bad because as many other people I enjoy free games, we've been collecting some very good free games or some other super cheap ones, but we know the problem doesn't come from good games.

"Steam keys have always been available for free to our partners to help them sell PC games at physical retail and on other digital stores. In return, we've asked that partners offer Steam customers a fair deal, similar to what they're offering on other stores. None of that is changing.

But over the last few years, new features and additions to Steam have changed the way Steam keys were being used, for instance as a means for game-shaped objects to monetize on Steam through methods other than actually selling fun games to customers. Most notably, this meant farming Steam Trading Cards. We shared a lot of info about that issue, and our response to it, here.

While our changes did impact the economics of trading card farming for new products coming to Steam, there are still a lot of games and game-shaped objects using Steam keys as a way to manipulate Steam systems. As a result, we're trying to look more closely at extreme examples of products on Steam that don't seem to be providing actual value as playable games-for instance, when a game has sold 100 units, has mostly negative reviews, but requests 500,000 Steam keys. We're not interested in supporting trading card farming or bot networks at the expense of being able to provide value and service for players.

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."

source