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[Uykered]

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LeszekLisowski/20141001/226840/How_to_get_every_game_on_STEAM_for_free.php

tldr: When you put a game on steam you get a billion emails asking for keys, claiming they're a youtuber/site and lots of devs give them away without thinking.

[rj]

do people just not pay attention anymore

anyway what a shitty thing to do

anyway also please dear god why do people just stop paying attention after paying so much attention to actually make the thing

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

ya this dev sounds dumb. i *always* verify if a person is legit when giving away free copies of my game. typically this takes 15 seconds: you google their name or site and see whether it actually does review games or not, and its traffic etc., i doubt this trick would work on devs who do this type of checking, i just wonder how common it is to do what i do vs doing what this guy does

it's worth reminding people to check for fakes though, especially if the fakes can mimic the real ones so closely

[clockwrk_routine]

We got a couple emails like this, they can be pretty clever, impersonating a popular persona from another country, using email addresses that are just slightly off from their public ones.  You can check it against their public email, but if they don't have one then it's just best to use your own judgement.  The two emails felt like forms and didn't actually say anything about our game, they talked about themselves, how they'd like to stream it and how they'd like to give out steam keys on their channel.  The thing that was off was that our game was only just greenlit and if they wanted they could stream the public alpha so yea red signs.

[caiys]

We got a couple emails like this, they can be pretty clever, impersonating a popular persona from another country, using email addresses that are just slightly off from their public ones.

Yeah I got one email from some dude who set up a seemingly proper news site, but if you looked a bit deeper you could tell it was just aggregating news.

I tend not to send Steam keys any more anyway, I send them itch.io keys which I revoke if they don't even bother downloading the game.

[Sik]

ya this dev sounds dumb. i *always* verify if a person is legit when giving away free copies of my game. typically this takes 15 seconds: you google their name or site and see whether it actually does review games or not, and its traffic etc., i doubt this trick would work on devs who do this type of checking, i just wonder how common it is to do what i do vs doing what this guy does

Even better: don't send codes to people asking them, instead go look yourself who's worth giving the keys and contact them yourself. No way to end up talking to a scammer that way.

[TeeGee]

ya this dev sounds dumb. i *always* verify if a person is legit when giving away free copies of my game. typically this takes 15 seconds: you google their name or site and see whether it actually does review games or not, and its traffic etc.,

The point is that the scammers link to actual youtube accounts with actual audience and there's no way of telling if it's a legit message from them unless you ask for verification. We get several emails like that per day too.

Still, there are a couple "tells" you can look for:
- They always ask for several keys. Usually on the pretense of a giveaway.
- They use public email providers such as gmail or yahoo.
- Scammy emails usually follow a similar structure and wording. It becomes apparent once you get dozens of them.
- They seem like if the author didn't even know what game they are asking about and just pasted its title into an existing template (which is exactly what happened).
- The youtuber they impersonate doesn't really do games in your genre. Or indie games at all.

Nowadays I simply don't reply to emails that tick a few of the above checkboxes. Also, most actual youtubers, even small ones, phrase their emails in a way that makes it immediately apparent that they know who you are and are genuinely interested in your game.

[Sik]

I suppose that a youtuber would show contact information somewhere, right? If it mismatches with the e-mail address you can safely assume it's a scam. (if they don't have contact information, either they expect contact through YouTube messages or through the gmail account tied to their YouTube account)

[qwurp]

do people just not pay attention anymore

anyway what a shitty thing to do

anyway also please dear god why do people just stop paying attention after paying so much attention to actually make the thing

It's not quite that simple. Leading up to launch you're probably working near-insane hours, you've got 20-things going on at once between final fixes, QA testing, managing tickets, tweaking your Steam storefront, sending out your own press releases and press copies etc etc etc. Meanwhile, you're getting inundated with key requests and taking time to research each of the 100 emails you've received today starts sliding down your priority list... And yeah it may only take 30 seconds to validate, but multiple that by 100 times and thats an hour I could be spending somewhere else...

It's easy to throw a dev under the bus for not paying attention, but if you haven't walked in their shoes, hard to understand how much is going on as you approach release.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

math fail, 30 seconds times 100 isn't half an hour, it's 50 minutes

but think of it this way. every 30 seconds you save *saves* you from 3 copies of your game being sold that you don't profit off of (these emails ask for 3 keys or more). those sales would have gone to you, but instead they go to the person you gave the keys to

if your game is 10$, that's 30$ that you wouldn't have had

30 seconds for 30$? i'll take it, it's a dollar a second

[qwurp]

math fail, 30 seconds times 100 isn't half an hour, it's 50 minutes

but think of it this way. every 30 seconds you save *saves* you from 3 copies of your game being sold that you don't profit off of (these emails ask for 3 keys or more). those sales would have gone to you, but instead they go to the person you gave the keys to

if your game is 10$, that's 30$ that you wouldn't have had

30 seconds for 30$? i'll take it, it's a dollar a second

Response fail. I didn't say "half an hour".

But good lord you totally missed the whole point. If you want to get really technical about the math then you will know that properly screening and then taking the time to coordinate a response, copy/paste draft letter and pull and mark key codes (in the case of a "passing screen") would take longer than 30 seconds per email received. Multiplied by any relatively large number of emails in a day and you can see how devs mistakenly send keys out to pirates, especially ones who link to other YouTubers in other countries that appear totally legit. I was pretty clearly throwing basic numbers around to prove a point.

My point remains when you're buried under mountains of work and deadlines and mix in a hundred (or two hundred) key code requests to screen through... It's more complicated than saying "the devs aren't paying attention" which was the original post I was responding to.

[rj]

you didn't say 50 minutes either, if we're having a pedantry contest

and it's not more complicated than that. you have factors that make it -easier- to not pay attention, sure. but you're still not paying attention.

you should have the same verve and care releasing the game that you do making it; otherwise, why release it?

so yes: take the time to screen all those code requests. fuck, you don't even need to do much work. a simple blanket copy-and-paste email saying "please provide verification that you are who you say you are" would weed out all of them.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i've done it in less than 30 seconds, i think taking 30 seconds to verify each email is reasonable, particularly because it takes more than that to get a set of keys, paste them in an email, and hit send anyway. even if you are getting thousands of key requests (which no indie actually gets -- it's maybe a few hundred max) it's not a huge time investment to make sure they are real

also, but teegee's guidelines could be followed even if you don't want to take the time to investigate each request; basically if they are asking for more than one key, and if they are using a public email like gmail or yahoo rather than a site email, *then* investigate them, otherwise send away

[One-bit Punch]

Before my game was on Steam I was pretty relaxed about giving out keys. But I've been getting way too many of those dodgy emails so I simply don't bother anymore. I'd say TeeGee's aforementioned guidelines are pretty spot-on. If its sent from a public email provider, and it starts off impersonal like "dear [insert company name]" or my all-time favourite "dear sir/madam" (seriously there are people who still write like that these days), and they don't provide a quick & easy way for me to look them up, then the email gets nuked into oblivion.

[Sik]

math fail, 30 seconds times 100 isn't half an hour, it's 50 minutes

but think of it this way. every 30 seconds you save *saves* you from 3 copies of your game being sold that you don't profit off of (these emails ask for 3 keys or more). those sales would have gone to you, but instead they go to the person you gave the keys to

if your game is 10$, that's 30$ that you wouldn't have had

30 seconds for 30$? i'll take it, it's a dollar a second

Er, they usually sell the keys for less than the game's normal price so people go to them instead.

But yeah, still. This isn't like people pirating the games for free (who are already unlikely to pay anyway), this is about people commercially exploiting the game and possibly luring people who would have bought the game legitimately otherwise. So this is a problem.

Also seriously, yes, you're under pressure, but if you can't keep stuff like this under control then you're asking to be screwed over. There are some things you simply can't afford to not pay attention to.

[Mittens]

I bet I've been scammed heaps

[Müsta Klaki]

I bet I've been scammed heaps

THE WHOLE WORLD IS AGAINST ME *puts on tin-foil hat*