In a recent FAQ spotted by Automaton, Housenka responded to a hypothetical of “I’ll promote you, give me a Steam key” with a delightfully blunt: “Buy it, you piece of garbage.” Or, as Automaton translates it from the original Japanese, “Buy the game, you piece of sh*t.” I can’t decide which I like better, honestly. The full FAQ is worth a read, if only for Housenka’s sense of humour and an insight into the absurd questions independent devs get asked these days.
“Make this character’s ass and thighs thicker,” another frequent-question-asker demands, to which Housenka responds: “Accept her as she is.” When asked by a phantom answer if the game will add sex, Housenka also proceeds to provide a link to DLsite, an online store that sells doujinshi—self-published manga comics that are often (though not always) pornographic in nature. “No sex. Please visit DLsite for that.”
Valve should enable a feature to make Steam keys self destruct for these scams. Let them generate a key that is valid for a few hours and if it didn’t get redeemed in that time frame, it no longer works. A key only valid until 5pm of issue date will let reviewers redeem it in time, but resellers will most likely have a dud by the time they try to sell it.
devs can assign keys to specific promotions, and mass recall unactivated keys and activated games from people’s accounts, so yeah this is possible even though needs to be done manually, but most devs don’t do it
And make them a review sample.
And make them unique. All keys are starting or ending with an “R” in the code.
This prevents scammers from being able to sell it to informed users