What is with these random indie games

[DeathCow]

I'm seeing a bunch of random indie games that you can't buy on Steam anymore suddenly having spikes in their concurrent players.

Village Story: 10,319 concurrent player peak today
Jumping Tank: 6,624 concurrent player peak today
Yelaxot: 12,974 concurrent player peak today
Western Adventure: 5,633 concurrent player peak today

EDIT: Add a couple more to the pile
Barclay: The Marrowdale Murder: 1,645 concurrent player peak today
Catacomb Explorers: 5,044 concurrent player peak and rising.


Very strange

[DeathCow]

cinedine の投稿を引用：

DeathSaves の投稿を引用：

They can't sell the cards if the game drops them........

They can. How do you think those level-up bots got their cards and why you mostly get sets from unknown low-effort games? It's just not on the market.

Ah, ok. Didn't think about that, going off-site to do it. Hope they all get their accounts hacked.

That is probably it as searching SteamDB, all of these games have trading cards.

Stupid. I can't imagine they're making a profit. The computing costs to run that many bots?? Unless they're using systems they hijacked through malware.

But then how did they get the keys for this many copies of the games? I wonder if these are maybe hijacked accounts and they're farming games nobody would notice if it got a big spike but not too big?

I highly doubt it's individuals because why would they now, years later decide to play games you can't get on Steam anymore just to farm the card drops to sell? Unless there is a site that tracks the value of these cards but the cards really can't be of too much value since all you have to do is convert gems to get the cards??? And 1,000 gems is like $0.35.

This is really strange but thank you for that insight.

[cinedine]

DeathSaves の投稿を引用：

But then how did they get the keys for this many copies of the games? I wonder if these are maybe hijacked accounts and they're farming games nobody would notice if it got a big spike but

The keys are either from give-aways which is why Valve changed it so that games which are free for a limited time now don't drop cards anymore
or they are acquired directly from the "developers". There are some which produce games explicitely for cards, which is why Valve changed their policy to limit key creation if your sales numbers don't hold up.
They can still have a lot of keys lying around to sell in batch.

These bots are mostly Russian according to the numbers some legitimate developers have given. The setup isn't that expensive. (You don't need full fledged gaming PCs. Look up idlemaster.) and costs of living are low enough to be affordable with a few dollars profit per day.

[DeathCow]

Forgot about idlemaster.

[Xaelath]

DeathSaves の投稿を引用：

Forgot about idlemaster.

Idlemaster is abandoned cmiiw.

That being said there's alot of suspicious game that used for farming card.

The game will likely removed in future due the abuse though.

It's like they're throwing bulk of keys and have bots running it.