Key redemption changes with the Humble Bundle?

[CobraA1]

Well, the Humble Bundle announced some changes to key redemption[blog.humblebundle.com] with Steam.

Changes which seem rather odd, to be honest. By using OAuth, they were making one-click key redemption easy, and I really enjoyed the feature. It was a good quality of life improvement, and meant I didn't have to spend a lot of time redeeming keys manually at the Humble Bundle website.

But, for some odd reason, they're not doing it anymore? Was there something wrong with it? Had somebody found a way to abuse it? I thought OAuth was a pretty solid technology.

Any idea why Valve decided to drop support for this?

[Satoru]

Would that mean Indie Gala would have the same issue? I think a lot of sites are using that methodology

[Jerimis]

Originally posted by CobraA1:

But, for some odd reason, they're not doing it anymore? Was there something wrong with it?

Originally posted by Humble Bundle Blog:

However, Steam is removing support for OAuth, so we’ll be returning to the system we used before, which requires you to manually redeem your Steam keys.

[CobraA1]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Would that mean Indie Gala would have the same issue? I think a lot of sites are using that methodology

Any site that used the OAuth system would be affected.

Originally posted by Jerimis:

Originally posted by CobraA1:

But, for some odd reason, they're not doing it anymore? Was there something wrong with it?

Originally posted by Humble Bundle Blog:

However, Steam is removing support for OAuth, so we’ll be returning to the system we used before, which requires you to manually redeem your Steam keys.

I posted the question in Valve's forums because the question is aimed at Valve. I completely undestand why Humble Bundle had to make changes. I do not understand why Valve decided to drop OAuth support.

[Seiyria]

Where did you post about this, CobraA1? I can't seem to find a post anywhere about this.. maybe I just don't know where the Valve forums are.

[wuddih]

Originally posted by Seiyria:

Where did you post about this, CobraA1? I can't seem to find a post anywhere about this.. maybe I just don't know where the Valve forums are.

there are no valves forums. dunno in which forum he posted, maybe old SPUF.

[GodEmperorDune]

I too would like to know why Valve has dropped this. It is hugely annoying to redeem loads of steam keys by copy/paste, click click clicking in the steam client. This would not be as bad if there was some way of redeeming larger batches of steam keys. I'm ok with the daily/hourly activation cap staying intact, I just want to minimize the time I have to spend copy/pasting keys and clicking next.

[CobraA1]

Originally posted by Seiyria:

Where did you post about this, CobraA1? I can't seem to find a post anywhere about this.. maybe I just don't know where the Valve forums are.

I don't know what you are talking about. Most likely because I said "Valve's forums," not "Valve forums."

Please tell me they still teach what an apostrophe means in English class.

[imelman]

Now we have to use the old-flashioned way.

[Detruire]

Valve could have at least waited for a week or two after this announcement to turn OAuth off. That would have given the sites some time to make changes to their systems, and (more importantly) allowed people to redeem their games.

Now we're at the mercy of IG () and Humble to reveal our keys. I'm not too worried about Humble, but IG has a policy of providing zero support after a month of two.

[Surah]

I'm a bit annoyed at this, OAuth was so useful and really was a QoL improvement for redeeming keys. They could've added an extra step to it or turned OAuth support on every account to off automatically, requiring us to turn it on in our settings if we want to use it.

Killing it entirely is really just going to bring us back to the annoying days of copying and pasting keys in which really does get tedious after a while.

[Kargor]

Originally posted by GodEmperor:

I too would like to know why Valve has dropped this.

Seeing how Steam development works, I can imagine two possible reasons:

• They discovered a bug, and decided to just turn it off instead of fixing it
  
• They screwed it up accidentally

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Kargor:

Originally posted by GodEmperor:

I too would like to know why Valve has dropped this.

Seeing how Steam development works, I can imagine two possible reasons:

• They discovered a bug, and decided to just turn it off instead of fixing it
  
• They screwed it up accidentally

The only other possiblity is that the OAuth APi does actually bypass a critical part of Steam

The SSA

When you register a game on Steam you are presented with the SSA which you agree too.

IN THEORY because you use OAuth you do not agree to the SSA when registering the product. This may open legal issues? Dunno

[Drex]

I too am concerned about this. There aren't a lot that allow it, but there are a few websites allowing signin via Steam and now I have no idea how I'm even going to sign in to those.

Furthermore, and far more importantly for the moment, this is going to make the black market for indie game keys grow again, allowing crap game "shops" to buy tons of cheap keys and resell at 4x the price and still undercut Steam and the developers. This is not good for Steam, it's not good for the indie devs, it's not good for consumers not being able to signin with Steam, and it's not good the industry. There is not one pro consumer thing I see in this change, I can't even figure out what makes this better for Steam to be honest.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Drex:

I too am concerned about this. There aren't a lot that allow it, but there are a few websites allowing signin via Steam and now I have no idea how I'm even going to sign in to those.

NOte to be clear this is ONLY the OAuth feature. This was used to authorize keys onto your account.

It does not appear that they are disablign the entire OpenID infrastructure. Thus any sites that you use to "log into Steam" with, will function normally.

Furthermore, and far more importantly for the moment, this is going to make the black market for indie game keys grow again, allowing crap game "shops" to buy tons of cheap keys and resell at 4x the price and still undercut Steam and the developers

While I appreciate the concern, I'm not sure how removing OAuth makes that worse/better? I mean you could alreay gift URLs to people. even before you'd just be sending a Humble URL. Maybe I'm missing a nuance vs cdkeys?

[CobraA1]

Originally posted by Matthew Sobol's Daemon:

This... this isn't going to end up killing all of my old spare keys that I have, is it? Because now I'm pretty worried.

I doubt it. They're not disabling the keys, just a convenient way of redeeming them. Many websites allowed you to simply click a button to redeem a Steam key, now you'll have to use the old method of inputting them manually.