Publisher/Developer 11 Bit Studios announced on September 2 to stop sending game keys to Steam curators. The studio explains this reason to prevent resale.

Steam curator (curator) is an individual or group that tells us to find a game that is likely to be interested in Steam. If the community is on Steam, it is possible to be a curator. By following the curator, the user will display recommendations from the curator on the Steam homepage and activity feed.

11 Bit Studios, a Polish publisher and developer, has now expressed his intention to stop sending game keys to the curators. 11 Bit Studios is a studio that developed Frostpunk and This War of Mine. He has also been in charge of publishing such as Children of Morta by DEAD MAGE.

According to the statement, stopping the game key sending is based on the experience of the studio and other developers. The studio has shown that most of the requests of game keys from the curator are transmitted from the fake account for the purpose of collecting and resold keys.

In the first place, the studio seems to be skeptical of giving a key to the curator to post a review. In STEAM, the game development side may provide a free key to the curator and have a review posted in exchange. On the other hand, the studio states that the reviews posted by the curator will not be useful for the community. With that opinion, it may have been decided that the key transmission to all curators will be stopped uniformly.

The studio quotes articles on overseas media PC Gamer in the following tweets. He also mentioned that Valve, which runs Steam, has begun to pay attention to the existence of such a resale curator. The studio has commented that it will see improvements in curator functions in the near future.

According to PC Gamer, Valve’s recognition of resale curator was the Mysterious Plan of Studio Cowcat in France. On August 27, the studio released BROK THE INVESTIGATOR Detective Brok and Secret Request. Before the release, the curators sent a huge number of tons and tons’ requests. It is said that the studio sent these curators a free demo game key instead of the product version.

According to the studio, the sincere curator immediately replaced the game key and noticed an incident and contacted him. After that, they sent the product version key again. On the other hand, the curator for resale seems to have sold the key of this demo to customers as a product version. These curators would have been busy with complaints from customers. The studio’s mystery, which makes the curator for resale purposes, have been successful.

But the story does not end here. In response to this, the curator, which appears to have been resold, performed retaliation for the studio. The content of the retaliation was to post a negative curter review to BROK THE INVESTIGATOR Detective Broku and Secret Request. It would be a soul to show users a negative review and drop the sales of this work. However, this open-minded movement has attracted attention in overseas bulletin board Reddit. According to users’ surveys, nine curators who posted negative opinions in this work had many suspicious things, such as almost the same administrator, creation date, and followers.

It seems that some curators have withdrawn negative opinions after a fuss, but they are already late. Cowcat has reported suspicious curators to Valve, and those curator accounts will be deleted at a later date. COWCAT’s mystery broke the suspicious curator, and a hammer by Valve was given.

The presence of some malicious curators for the purpose of resale is a problem that has suffered developers/publishers (related articles). The curator who was found this time is probably just a corner of the iceberg. Originally, sending to the curator can be a way to let users know the work by reviewing the curator. The resale of the key sent free of charge in hopes of a sincere review would have been a bit of a boiler for developers/publishers. This time, it is considered that 11 Bit Studios did not send the game key to the curator.

Will Valve take some measures to the malicious curator, which seems to exist? I want to keep an eye on future trends.