This one would make your case even better:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1133830/Aery/

Don't know whether its something Valve would act on though. There's a long history of Mission Unpossibles and Game Of Thorns or whatever Asylum knockoffs, but doesn't really have to be actionable for Valve to say it's still flying to close to the sun.

Originally posted by NEX Mighty Maus:

No? They're not even the same developers.

Originally posted by Hibachi:

Originally posted by Valko:

Let me guess...Otaku scam bundle?

Nice try, but apparently it's Fanatical this time.
As for which side is scamming which one, it's too early to know.

It's 100% the developer at fault based on the specifics we know at this point.

That said, it's actually ALWAYS the developer at fault when keys get revoked from bundles, because they are the party fundamentally abusing a safeguard against genuine theft in order to resolve internal business disputes far beyond the realm of customer knowledge and responsibility. Whether they were paid or not, they engaged in a contract allowing those keys to be bundled to customers in their own contracts that those customers would and could only know was authorized by them, yet now they seek to destroy that property due to difficulties recovering their agreed upon accounts receivable from the distributor.

People like to pretend its stolen property (though even that has an official process for recovery), but the intended contractual sale outright renders it an absurd analogy, and means we're talking the same contract law applicable across the rest of the economy. No other aspect of society operates in a way holding end-users accountable for supplier/distributor non-payment issues. Customers aren't even privy to those inner-workings in the first place, and thus impossible of genuinely making an informed decision in the first place. Meanwhile that's an obscene burden of responsibility to end customers for negligible transactions while principle parties are absolved responsibility for material business decisions entirely at their own discretion. It's the same level of accountability faced by everyone else in traditional enterprises, who lack that magic "destroy" button even in cases of genuine theft which represent actual physical lost value. Yet the very existence of that technological ability to shift the burden is somehow enough to convince people its acceptable for those digital enterprises to deploy the "because I say so" button at the expense of those weakest parties in lieu of ever having to enforce their original contracts via the same exact means as everyone else.

It's an absurd practice that's only persists because its happening on such a small level in a niche market over matters of little concern, and we haven't seen the high-water mark yet before the wave rolls back with vengeance. We're going to start seeing that as we shift from issues of "was/wasn't paid" to "was paid, but what can you do about it chumps", however, even if could magically apply an absolute pure-strain version (only occurring where accounts promised paid genuinely don't end up getting paid) of this shifted-burden with any real uniformity across widespread industry then you still end up with widespread economic destabilization. We cease to own anything when someone else holds that much control past the point of sale and transfer of rights however many times over. The acquisition of any given object isn't a known legal point of sale, but requires knowing every legal point of sale existing beforehand and ensuring that there's no possible accounts receivable (among other contentious issues) which could be used to rationalize why someone 10 transactions earlier might get to hit a button rendering you absolutely nothing and with no means of recover or compensation.

Originally posted by Hibachi:

I'm betting :
"Dev wrongly revocked Fanatical bundle keys when wanting to revoke Otakubundle's ones."

BTW, the game doubled its price tag between jan 3 and feb 12 for no apparent reason.
https://steamdb.info/app/752500/

These links were posted on steamgifts and might shed some light on it
https://www.perfectly-nintendo.com/ghoulboy-retro-action-platformer-releasing-this-week-on-nintendo-switch/
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2019/02/11/ghoulboy-ps-vita-ps4-physical-release-announced/
https://gematsu.com/2019/02/ghoulboy-for-ps4-ps-vita-limited-run-physical-edition-announced

Originally posted by BlackSpawn:

Originally posted by ReptilianWorldOrder:

The speculation doesn't make much sense to me. What does a private forum offer in the way of censorship that isn't already within their grasp here?

Early Access games are a bit different because the ability to provide feedback is part of the sold package. I've seen Valve intervene when EAG customers get spuriously permabanned.

They don't need to respond to Valve or care about best practices in community moderation on their private forum. Theyd have nobody to answer to and could clean the slate and pretty much do whatever they wanted unimpeded and without Valve having a record of it (or the resulting community moderation message evidencing the ban of the player.)

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation

I suddenly remembered seeing you post this a few weeks ago. I had not actually been familiar with these specific guidelines and I think this will prove incredibly helpful to me both now and in the near future.

I've recently been trying to take developers to task for the growing trend scamming bundle purchasers by revoking unused keys after a few months. Just moments ago I was perma-banned from the "TREASURES OF A BLIZZARD" forum for "spam," upon linking my review critical of the game as a source of additional information in a topic specifically wondering why their key wasn't working. Incredibly un-ironically, the post I was banned for also warned that the dev was conducting an active censorship campaign and their thread would soon be deleted too as part of their active censorship campaign (which, of course it was).


Thank you so much for the information and the link.

The speculation doesn't make much sense to me. What does a private forum offer in the way of censorship that isn't already within their grasp here?

Plenty of developers already play tin-pot dictator on their Stean community pages without the slighest oversight or concern from Valve. They can delete individual posts or entire threads, ban users temporarily or permanently, enforce whatever rules they decide, empower their own moderators, and (as far as I know) all appeals go directly to them for their own decisions.

Valve seemingly provides the bare minimum support and only as a check against posts in violation of their own community standards (ie making sure you aren't linking pirated material or whatever), but that seems about it. I've never heard of them caring at all about even blatant censorship or providing any help with the things you might be concerned about.

I'm wondering if the private level-zero account that popped out of nowhere to start posting pitchforks aimed at more popular and reputable publishers (just after their suggestion "ignore-and-let-ignore" fell on deaf ears) could, in fact, be some sort of sock-puppet-account from a notorious sock-puppet-publisher?

Is this some sort of attempt at like "chess-master manipulator" levels of subterfuge? You slap on a fake mustache and infiltrate the group to push this proposal for publisher-ignore (which also, coincidentally, implies carte blanche for shit-pushers like Zonitron), because it's "hey can always ignore 'em" made easier.

But no one cared enough to even entertain the notion, so the mission got real: you're deep cover now. It's all about long-term infiltration to apply not-so-subtle misdirection and manipulation. You can redirect and deflect; sow seeds of discontent within the group; and widen the agenda with false equivalency to start a witchhunt. All that's done while hoping to create and inflame some sort of opposition by intentionally targeting--perhaps even eliminating--other more popular publishers that are merely borderline repetitive at worst, if even at all. Y'know, bring it down from the inside.

I mean, cause, I've narrowed down all the alternatives here.... and it's either got to be that, or both of us are, like, MEGA stupid.

Me, for thinking someone would be so batshit crazy and do something that comically ridiculous.

You, for NOT being that batshit crazy, and just genuinely believing publishers like Artifax and KISS are even remotely similar to the Zonitron scamsquad.

Originally posted by Hibachi:

... wat.

Okay, first off, Death Penalty doesn't have the steam cards enabled yet.

Second, what would be the point in revoking the keys even be ?
The more owners to idle that shit, the more cards generated...

Right, thats part of what he's saying.

Disregarding my own thoughts on the likelihood--and that I think the game came out way before the card changes---the logic is that:

Following the Steam change which requires games reach a certain volume of activity (I'm uncertain of the specifics whether sales, activations, players etc) before a dev can enable cards (additionally I'm uncertain whether its per game or just per developer), this scenario could hypothetically be a developer sidestepping that limitation by artificially inflating the numbers with freebies until hitting whatever automated standard necessary.

Then, they could either profit from the cards as you suggest, or potentially--as implied by the current situation--revoke all those keys in an attempt to reverse the devaluation..... like reloading a save before the giveaways ever happened. The logic presumes that whatever new purchases (and available bundle inclusions + future card sales) created will exceed the forgone card profits from those who would otherwise own it.

If we'e accepting all the prior assumptions, then *that* much is probably true considering the de-facto minimum price of 3 cents a card. He'll essentially earn the exact same card revenue doing those giveaways in two years.... less the time value of money, but thats countered by interest earned on whatever restored income anyway... so it works theoretically.

But, like i said, that's when accepting all the other stuff, which IMO, isn't exactly likely (especially given the reaction). But who knows--the whole assumption presuming rational actors when contemplating econ stuff always struck me as an in-joke or something.