I'm not sure that is entirely defensible from the standpoint of a multi-billion dollar business partner like Steam. In your case if they investigate - they could hypothetically now trace these bad keys back to you.ĪKA you are giving out bad keys for your game.ĭoes that sound like the position you want to be in? Even with the excuse your giving them to 'bad guys'? In most cases steam probably knows these are attempts at hacking/stealing your game keys but if the percentage on your game is abnormally high they could conceivably decide to take some sort of action. As such their overall database is unlikely to get poisoned.Īnother side-effect is steam could hypothetically notice a lot of attempts at entering false keys on your game. In your case this is only coming from you at the moment. If you were to introduce thousands of bad emails to this list in such a way as the person selling the list can't easily sort the good from the bad it becomes a poisoned list and is no longer useable for them. they expect the emails (or a large percentage of them ) to be GOOD email address (not bounce etc). There's a concept called 'poisoning' a database.įor instance in an email spammer list when people who buy those lists. If gamedevs did this en masse you could probably put a good dent in a site that supports reselling scammer keys, or encourage them to discourage scamming so their name doesn't get run through the mud. They buyer will then go to r/games etc and post 'This Party Website is a scam, but then the Developer delivered', it'll get thousands of upvotes as everyone jerks it to how good indie developers should behave, and everyone will agree that buying keys from scammers is wrong! You can repeat this process about once a month, the reddit post will hit the frontpage and your game sales will skyrocket (as much as they can from reddit popularity). Here is a real key for our game, thank you for the interest in our game, we hope you enjoy it.' We've heard of this before, that website you purchased the key from is a sham, next time try using our website or GOG or Steam. If the buyer then goes to the developer, which is probably unlikely due to the fact the buyer wanted to short the dev in the first place, the developer has the option to say something like 'I'm sorry to hear that happened.

Of course, the scammer isn't going to refund their money, so the buyer will contact the website they bought it from, who will say 'too bad so sad' and 'we're a marketplace, we don't guarantee anything, we just let sellers meet with buyers'. If someone purchases a key from a scammer from a third party site, and the key doesn't work, they are going to call the scammer a scammer, and flip the shits. This is a great idea, for so many reasons.

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