In the continuing movement against illegitimate curator groups on Steam, developer 11 Bit Studios has announced it will no longer be providing free keys for game access to curators on the platform as of September 2.
Even if you play games on Steam, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of curators. Essentially, Steam allows its users to create and join groups of like-minded gamers, with its website describing groups as "a great way to communicate with a large number of players at once." Officers of these groups are permitted to become curators, who have the special power to recommend or not recommend specific titles.
11 Bit Studios, which is known for titles like Frostpunk and The Alters, explained its decision via Twitter. The company expressed its belief that some people have been creating multiple accounts and requesting free keys to access games for the purpose of assuring their quality and recommending them to other gamers. However, instead of actually playing and analyzing the games, the company says these users then sell those keys for profit. "Based on our and other devs' experiences, most of the requests come from fake accounts used to gather and resell the keys and the published reviews don't seem to bring any value for the community anyway," the company's tweet states.
The announcement comes less than a week after Valve, Steam's parent company, banned a large number of newly created groups from the platform for apparent retaliatory acts against another game developer that would not grant them free access to a full game. On August 28, indie solo developer Cowcat (Fabrice Breton) posted a series of tweets accusing certain Steam users of making numerous "not recommend" determinations against its game Brok the InvestiGator because the company had given requesting curators free keys to a prologue version of the game rather than the full game. The thread chronicles Cowcat's reporting of the issue to Steam and, on August 31, of Cowcat's discovery that the accused curators had been removed from the platform. 11 Bit Studios' announcement on Twitter references a news article about the Brok the InvestiGator controversy.
The protective actions taken by 11 Bit Studios and Valve over the past several days are a reaction to a few bad faith parties abusing the curator system. 11 Bit is acting to preserve the ability of small and independent developers to continue to produce creative entertainment outside the mainstream. Only time will tell if other developers follow suit.