Accounts refunded and closed. Sounds like the death knell for Gleam.
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Steam key gibs was only a small part of their whole business though
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YOu mean like DJMCmacMcLuvin' SaltyStrange SELLING OWNERSHIP OF STEAM GROUPS when NOBODY other than VALVE owns Steam and such groups/digital stuff related to Steam? xD weird "business" the groups have indeed....
Ppl gonna know the SaltyStrange refference :) someone with a lot of hate on reddit and even steamgifts topic about him lol,caz it's common info on the net :)
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This feels like a step in the right direction. While there's nothing inherently bad about groups working with devs to promote games, the groups that were doing a lot of these giveaways were really abusing the system.
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I told gleam directly already 8 months ago that they should have put limits on tasks & stuff to counter it, but they didn't listen.. and instead pull the plug only after Steam banned them..
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because its gleams problem that they didnt give shit about it.
in the group i work in u litterly dont wanna count how many posts about gleam we get every day,
it was way worse then gambling sites spam ( before steam asked them to cease activity )
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Steam needs to provide mods appropriate tools, like automatic (word) filters. Works fine over on Reddit. But Valve is solely half-assing everything like always..
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u cant really blame them because they are wayyy to short on staff. most of them handle the endless stream of support tickets.
thou now people cant complain if they get perm banned for bypassing steam filter or breaking the terms of use lol
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one of the most profitable game company short on staff? Sorry but no, that doesn't work as an excuse
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They are short on staff int he sense they only hire people they feel comfortable with. Valve is an incredibly small company with little "verticality" (there are no ranks amongst the people there, no bosses) this leads to valve not having rigid teams. they Should use the profits to expand but since they don't have shareholders to please they prefer to try and automate has much as possible and rely on the community to fill in the blanks.
according to wikipedia valve has 300 employees which is the same as arenaNet the creators of guild wars.
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yep I know that and think it's a shit approach and not excusing anything
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How do you think they stay so profitable ? Skimping out on staff is a very easy way to keep expenses low.
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Speaking about half-assed, I can't even organize my groups in any way. Looking up a user is a pain in the ass. Mobile app desn't include group chat - they worked so hard for Steam to have a social aspect and feel, then left it as clucky and unfinished as it is.
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I only recall Woobox off the top of my head. Don't know if there are any others, since 99.99% of the stuff is gleam abuse/spam.
ETA: Rafflecopter too after a bit of research, though I don't recall them having an instant-win kind of thing.
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uff Woobox.. mandatory Facebook and Twitter accounts, not fun..
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making your own system requires knowledge and time or time and money to hire someone to do it. Also money to maintain the system, to improve it, repair bugs and exploits etc. For most of these groups such an investment would not be profitable. It's one thing to spend few bucks on premium account it's totally different thing to spend hundreds to make something of your own, while it will still give you the same profit as few bucks investment did.
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REX started to __ss me off because they were doing giveaways saying they could be uncommon games ''or'' some other commonly given away games...I got sick of getting woodle tree adventures after liking a whole bunch of groups-good riddance
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Less freebies for my alts, but I'll gladly get less free cards if these groups stop their bs.
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This. I'm sad for not having extra shitty games to farm up but this was getting out of hand.
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Not necessarily. As the thing says, devs can still give away the games themselvea. Maybe they will? Might also make the devs look at other ways to give away stuff (here, indiegala, opiumpulses, other giveaway sites) or these groups to look at alternatives.
I'd imagine there'd be an impact short term as to how many free keys are available but not really in the long run.
Edit: I suppose one thing will change is that before this you might be able to get the same game twice from 2 different giveaway groups if you wanted. In the future the devs may just make one large giveaway for the same total amount of keys.
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Maybe they will?
Not on gleam though as it costs $40-150 for 10k-100k key GAs. Indie devs won't spend money.
other ways
that can very well happen
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Never knew that about the cost. I had assumed that the giveaway groups were handling these because the devs were either ignorant of the existance of gleam, or that they just couldn't be bothered doing the work themselves so were happy to let others do it at the cost of those doing it gaining self promotion for their groups at the same time.
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just couldn't be bothered doing the work themselves
yep, that's a major part. Small groups/single persons don't really have much time to spend on researching&executing that stuff
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This reminds me that I'm always fascinated at how many game devs don't know much about gamer culture.
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Almost everything that's been given over Gleam was garbage, anyway. Often the SAME garbage, over and over. In terms of the rare good stuff, fans of freebies probably won't even miss a beat.
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Yeah, that. I don't think this will affect my main account getting free stuff, it will only affect farming bots and I have two of those. Not that I really mind to be honest, most of those cards are sitting in my inventory waiting for me to decide what to do with them.
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Does this mean people will need to gasp BUY Woodle Tree Adventures from now on? :O
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Well, that fits in with my earlier theories on Steam blocking links to Gleam links as one venue to block abusive Steam Groups (the ones that rig reviews & greenlight voting, cause Steam servers to get overloaded by causing a storm of join group/leave group requests etc.)
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It seems like GrabTheGames is immune for now: not anymore
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/d5Rsz/free-forge-of-gods-rpg-dlc-winters-gasp-pack
(Could this be due to that they're more of a website than group? Or that they have games published on Steam? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
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it may also mean that gleam while blocking these groups did not close already running GAs. The link you posted is from yesterday and they refunded premium accounts today.
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oh, ok. In this case it will be intresting to see how it unfolds. Because changing the rules is one thing, but not so sure about the change affecting things in the past - afaik the moment these GAs got posted they were not against gleam rules.
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We will now actively start disabling Rewards that are used purely for this purpose. We will only allow developers themselves to giveaway their own keys, or approved marketing partners.
1) GrabTheGames does mostly raffles
2) Rewards they do are games they publish
Thus there is no problem.
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Nah. No mercy for these pathetic, parasitic digital vermin with their referal circlejerks and spam garbage buffets, I say :p
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Song of Joy
O Fortuna
Ride of the Valkyries
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Gleam shutting down the Steam group Mafias is a good thing. If only Valve itself realised that. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Valve did kick things off by blocking every link to Gleam posted on the Steam Community, so....
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That's Valve addressing the minor symptom of a much, much bigger disease imo. Gleam wasn't the problem, mass hoarding and extortion of Indie devs for Steam keys to use for giveaways and sell on the Black market for effectively no benefit to the Developer is. It's better than nothing I guess, but there'll just be some other service to replace it =s
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Thank god, I hate those nearly mafia like extorsioning steam gropus.
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Major groups affected with their accounts closed: REX, OGG, FreeGamesInfo, SuperGiveaways
Ironically looks like Digital Homicide will be allowed to stay.
mandatory GA following shortly edit: gib
Edit: official announcement
Proof pic:
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