Why are thousands of Chinese people asking for beta keys, but they don't play?

[Supraball]

So this is happening to us right now. 3000+ mostly chinese people are requesting beta keys for our game, and they seem to be legitimate people, no bots. They also have to fill out a captcha.
But none of them have played the game.

Does anyone have an idea why they could be doing this?
Do they maybe expect money from trading cards, steam rank ups or so?

Because I think they get neither from our game. The game is always free and will stay free when it goes public.
I'd like to know what's going on.

They are burning away our keys, and when we request big amounts of keys from Steam, they decline creating them for us.
So real beta testers maybe don't get keys anymore.

[RedEyeScottFry]

can i have a beta key please? i swear im not chinese or a bot lol

[eram]

Yeah we have no idea what your game is but give us all keys naow!

Oh wait free game? I'm out. Do not want a key to a free game. Charge people then give us free keys!

[Satoru]

They're chinese farmers. They dont need bots. Seriously. they just pay entire armies of people $5 a day to fill in captchas. Heck the great chinese firewall is powered by an entire literal army of people infamously called '5 cent-ers' from the 5 yuan they get per filtered post/url they find. Or the prison warden that had his prison population do WoW gold farming. Or companies that sell 'positive' reviews on the Apple App store, driven by people iterally just upvoting games on a billboard of 100s of phones

They just get the keys and then sell them to gullible people who don't know its free.

You might want to add an additional verification process like an email or such in order to get the keys.

[Supraball]

Thanks Satoru,

An email verification is useless. They use an email for the process of getting a key, and even if I email them, they reply with answers that make sense. So that wouldn't help at all.

Does anyone else have an idea?
Otherwise we need to shut down giving out keys, which would be sad.

[Satoru]

Are they using a particular email domain? You could blacklist it?

[Supraball]

PS: we gave out duplicate keys that don't work anymore. They immediately write back and say its a duplicate. So can we assume they activate them on their accounts, but still don't play?

Would they sell accounts?

[Supraball]

No, it's all kinds of emails. They really look totally legit.

[Satoru]

Maybe you should give out keys in stages?

Each stage have a special key word to put in the email subject.

Also how can you tell they're activated but not playing?

[Supraball]

We have only like 20-50 people online at a time at the moment, so we would notice if there were new guys. And especially chinese ones.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Then:

a) Don't give them out to to that region, saying that there were enough keys released there already.

b) Require a small amount (something like $1) for the key.

c) Open it up to everyone to ensure enough testers. Then you will not have to worry about the keys. You can still limit the server to X amount of people at a time.

d) Be selective on who you accept as a tester to give the key to.

I am user at least one of these should work in your favor.

[Supraball]

Our key dispenser only asks for an email at the moment.

Asking for money for a key would be against the rules of Steam I bet.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Supraball eredeti hozzászólása:

Our key dispenser only asks for an email at the moment.

Asking for money for a key would be against the rules of Steam I bet.

If the game is on Steam in something like Early Access, then you can.

There are two other options that I stated.

[Supraball]

Yeah, thank you for these.

But the spam key requests look so legit, that makes it hard.

Just spamming out keys is fine for us - but Valve declines it when we ask for 30000 beta keys. When we ask for 3500 it's ok. But we don't want to ask for new keys every day, because the process takes so long. They check each request manually.

[Spawn of Totoro]

I still don't see how some of the suggestions don't fix that. Nor do I understand exactly what you are asking to be done about it.

If you have an issue with the amount of keys, then you need to either put it up as an EA game or contact Valve directly. All you will get here is people who can't change or fix your issue.

[wuddih]

I wonder why this was posted in public forums and not in the steamdev one.