No, you won’t be able to get 500,000 keys for your game T&A Adventures: An RPG Maker ASSet Flip.
Valve has probably one of the more lenient services for indie devs in Steamworks. All a dev has to do to get codes for friends or professionals is head to their Steamworks page and generate those codes, which they can do at will. Which is, in fact, the problem.
Many of those codes are getting generated and sold off on the cheap to bundle sites and the like. Which Valve isn’t nuts about; they’re left holding the bag for hosting the game and other service costs without getting a cut of the sale. Which is why Valve is making a change to that “at will” policy.
Now, if you want to generate some codes it has to be approved by the team, and it’d best be in proportion to your sales and related data. The news was announced on Steam’s developer-only board yesterday.
Valve will no longer automatically fullfill key requests from the developers to combat game sales outside of Steam. pic.twitter.com/Gp1TyivEeO
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) August 17, 2017
The point, ostensibly, is to cut down on Steam Key sales outside of Steam. Which isn’t exactly hard to do with this method; many unscrupulous devs will request an insane number of keys for their shovelware, intending to sell them off without giving Steam its 30% cut. It’s also a tactic favored by asset flippers, so it’ll combat that too.
But it’s not all upside. Some smaller devs need the ability to generate keys to draw attention to their game. This move has the potential to hurt the little guy too; particularly fledgling developers without a publisher. Though, presumably, Valve will take such things into account when fulfilling key requests.
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