Quote:
Originally Posted by Cod
Other third party sellers (Greenman Gaming, Humble Bundle, etc.) still give allow you to receive Steam keys on preorders. This sounds like an eSellerate issue more than Steam. I know Steam takes a share of any game sales, so that could be the real issue...that's just speculation.
I don't mind waiting, paying a little extra, and supporting this developer specifically; however, I'd like to know more about "Steams policy changes" that dictate this because like I said, other third party sites still allow this.
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Here's my honest response: There are two issues that led us to the decision (which was a hard one).
First, reviews written by Steam users who got the key for free no longer count towards the game's user score, Steam changed their policy on this in September. And we need a high number of reviews in order to be considered for Steam promotions etc. We are still way too small that we can ignore the effect of this policy change which they instituted in order to fight artificially inflated user scores for games. For more info on this, see here:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/9/13/129...s-abuse-ethics
Second, we thought about doing a regular Steam pre-order period with 20% off and beta access, however the guys at Steam strongly advised us to not do it, again the reason is that we're still too small and need all the launch-day excitement we can get (high number of sales on day 1) in order to get promoted by Steam and placed high in the charts.
Steam nowadays accounts for over 60% of our sales, and we need to do everything we can to get good visibility there. Unfortunately, this forces us to no longer give away free Steam keys this year. I am sorry.
