How 'fake streamers' steal your Steam keys - and why!

Also: some good numbers from Hooded Horse, and a whole heap of discovery news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Happy new week, GDCo readers, and as we fly (‘bat!’) toward Halloween, we’re going to be ramping up (vamping up?) the spooky news here. And we start with a doozy - the urban legend of creepy, amorphous beings who steal your soul via the Internet.

But wait, they don’t steal your soul - it just feels like it. They whisper sweet nothings in your ear so that you give them a prized possession - one of your Steam keys. And then they don’t use it themselves - they just sell it to make money. Those rotters!

[PSA: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to our paid GDCo Plus tier. You get to read both of our weekly newsletters, hang on a Discord server with peers, access a complex Steam data suite with lots of useful real-time info on hit games, & lots more.]

How & why 'fake streamers' steal your Steam keys

Photo by Silas Köhler on Unsplash

It’s funny timing - we were just reading a blog post by Dylan Collins (Demonware, SuperAwesome) recommending Dan Davies’ book Lying For Money, when conversation in our GameDiscoverCo Plus Discord turned to Steam key scammers. Anyone who is a direct contact for a Steam game knows about them. But for those who don’t:

• Steam provides free ‘keys’ to devs to send to influencers & press: these alphanumeric keys, giving access to a copy of your game, let sources of discovery play the game easily & for free. (You want big outlets or streamers to try your game and then tell others about it!)

• ‘Gray-market’ third-party Steam key sites let people profit from keyselling: sites like G2A and Kinguin essentially have eBay-style seller setups, where anyone can run an account and load Steam keys into it, getting 80-85% of the sale price if sold.

• Scammers try to get free ‘press keys’ from devs & then resell them for $: there’s an obvious ‘money for nothing’ possibility here. What if you send a bunch of emails asking for keys under a pretence of creating publicity, but then sell the key instead of redeeming it? Insta-profit!

Some of these Steam key scams are age-old, and obvious - if tiresome - to filter. For the avoidance of doubt, here’s some top sources of scam emails we’re aware of:

• The ‘I’m a Steam Curator’ multi-key scam: though Steam Curators are a relatively minor part of discovery, and Valve coded Curator Connect to stop keys being sent via email, a request for multiple keys for a curator group still gets tried a lot. (Some people we know email filter to insta-delete ‘Steam Curator’ around launch!)

• The ‘I’m a semi-famous streamer’ email address lie: since email address verification has to be done by hand, scammers impersonate real streamers, and either make up an email address, or do a slight variant on the ‘real’ Gmail contact for that person. They’re banking that the dev is too busy to do homework.

Not all scammers are that sophisticated - apparently some people are still using these scam email templates from 2016, too. How tiring! So there just ends up being a volume of requests to sort through, a few of which are legit, and some of which… definitely aren’t.

Obviously, paid services like Keymailer, Lurkit, Woovit and others try to manage the madness by connecting devs and influencers demanding some kind of verification. (Which is also scammable, of course, but requires some more heavy lifting.) And the obvious other fix here is more proactive ‘emailing the keys to the people you want’.

But there’s still value in these inbound email interactions - real, relevant influencers may ping you direct and ask for a key, especially around launch. So devs and marketers have got good at adding verification steps, such as posting a YouTube comment on an influencer’s video and getting them to reply as the official channel.

And this is where the really good scammers come in. Dan Davies’ book talks about Malcolm Sparrow’s work on how “one third of [U.S. health system] Medicare expenditures in the 1990s were fraudulent, and… the ‘shotgun, then rifle’ strategy by which the fraudsters achieved this feat.”

The idea - you blast a bunch of scam approaches, shotgun-style, and then iterate to find the right combo and then repeat it over and over, ‘rifle’-style. If you do that, you can pass a lot of devs’ internal checks, including the above one. An example? We’re looking at you, YouTube channels Dude, What A Heck?! and Savage. (And more.)

Whoever is running these YouTube channels has gone to a lot of trouble. Specifically:

• They’ve paid for both fake subscribers and page views: the channels look like they have 10-15k YT subs & 5-15k views on each video - decent mid-sized fare.

• They’ve made custom thumbnails and custom narration for each video: there’s a real person (speaking English, though they sound Eastern European?) narrating every video on the channel with plausible scripts.

• They’ve also got sensible, semi-relevant comments on each video: if you just scroll through this Conscript video review, there’s real, relevant comments too. (They’re copy-pasted from another YT comments page for the same game?)

If I had a lot of Steam key requests to check through, this channel would probably pass muster. The red flags? Not many: a channel overview says the creator is British, and he is not, and the YouTube video comments are a) all created at the same time b) created by accounts with similar Asian names. Besides that… it’s pretty, pretty good.

The person who brought this to our attention in the GDCo Plus Discord wondered why it was worth all this effort to get Steam keys. (It seems crazy, right?) I guess the answer is: a) you can be under the radar for a long time with such a sophisticated operation, and b) it’s scalable to multiple channels to triple, quadruple your income…

And that’s when Ishtar’s marketing director Bruno Laverny pointed out he had talked about the same scammer group back in 2021, identifying at least 5 other channels they operate, even some with different ‘voice actors’. Boy, that’s some rifle marksmanship.

One final scary thought: this is all (mainly?) without using artificial intelligence - though the scammers’ output perhaps fits into the definition of ‘slop’ discussed by Max Read’s article on the Internet’s ‘proliferation of garbage’ problem.

But, as shown by Totally Human Media’s Ichiro Lambe - who is emphatically not using it for evil, btw - you can create plausible AI influencers from scratch in a handful of hours. So where is this problem going in the future? Not away, that’s for sure…

Hooded Horse: how do they do what they do, huh?

Strategy-focused PC game publisher Hooded Horse (Manor Lords, Against The Storm) has only been around for a handful of years, which is why CEO Tim Bender’s announcement this week stands out: “In the last 12 months, our games have sold over 4.5 million copies across all stores and been added to Steam wishlists over 9.5 million times.”

The post also (transparently!) lists lifetime sales milestones from the catalog: Manor Lords - 2.5m; Against The Storm - 1.2m; Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic - 600k; Empires of the Undergrowth - 450k; Old World - 350k; Norland - 300k; Terra Invicta - 250k; Cataclismo, Nebulous: Fleet Command, and Clanfolk - 150k.

Also notable - upcoming game Steam wishlist numbers: Falling Frontier - 600k wishlists; Nova Roma - 350k; Super Fantasy Kingdom & Menace: 250k; Espiocracy, Blacksmith Master, and Fata Deum: 200k; Fragile Existence:150k; Beyond These Stars, Mars Tactics, Capital Command, and Whiskerwood: 100k. (Uh, wow.)

To say this is counter-cyclical would probably be an understatement. Hooded Horse is a data client of GDCo and they’ve given us Manor Lords stats for our postmortem, so we’ve been fairly close to their rise. Three key reasons for it, in our view:

• The company has strategy game mega-experts running, uh, strategy: you need a lot of deep subgenre knowledge to make the right signing & nurturing decisions. Between the CEO, marketing director and others at Hooded Horse, they ‘get’ the market like most people don’t. (And don’t necessarily know other genres that well!)

• Hooded Horse is happy to sign games at radically varying stages of release: we’re seeing more of this elsewhere now, but lest ye forget - Manor Lords was signed at >500k wishlists, and Workers & Resources 4+ years after it came out. Others were unannounced, but flexibility and good terms have swelled the catalog.

• Prioritizing expertise and deal terms above funding has paid off: Bender told Stephen Totilo: “There's just a lot of room to experiment and be innovative for smaller teams compared to larger projects.” Even given the complexity of the games, budget sizes seem generally not skyhigh - so you can build a big catalog swiftly.

Of course, even Hooded Horse isn’t immune from the ‘one big game generates a lot of your profit’ issue, in this increasingly hit-driven industry. (It’s Manor Lords, duh.) But they’ve charted a rare, more balanced profitability path on their other games too.

Besides the excellent execution, Hooded Horse’s surprising rise is aided by a fundamental hole in the market: game publishing decision-makers who truly understand and enjoy niche strategy genres. It’s a world away from trad action games or platformers, but has become a vital PC market, and you have to ‘live it’ to get it?

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

That was a few things, but we have a few things more, game discovery & platform news-wise. And prithy, we will beam them at ye in paragraphical form, forthwith:

• We looked at GDCo’s ‘trending unreleased Steam game data’ again (above) - reminder this sortable Plus-exclusive chart is by new Steam followers in the last 7 days. And new to Steam, Red Dead Redemption (#1) comes in like a wreckin' ball ahead of its Oct. 29th release date.

• Also notable on that chart: brand-new announcements for 'cozy animal RPG in a Skyrim stylee' Hawthorn (#4) and time-traveling cult sequel Pathologic 3 (#7), alongside 5 vs. 5 hero shooter FragPunk (#3), iDreamSky's shooter Strinova (#10), and intriguing ‘hero shooter meets MOBA-perspective’ game Supervive.

• If there’s a swift-dev ‘hypercasual x PlayWay’ equivalent for the VR scene, it’s New Folder Games, and RoadToVR has interviewed them about their nine VR game releases in 8 months (!), including big hit I Am Cat and medium-sized hit I Am Security - super interesting.

• GSD says September 2024’s select European game software sales were up 20%, with EA Sports FC 25 off just 2% year on year, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 now 2024’s third-best selling new game, and Astro Bot doing decently compared to other mascot platformers. (Game console sales were off 18%, year on year.)

• The Steam Next Fest demo showcase for October 2024 is live, and as the dust is settling, we’re seeing a whopping 2,700 playable demos. (That’s at least 50% up on previous Fests!) Early impressions: interest is diffused, due to # of games, and Steam’s egalitarian ‘show random demos’ approach. We’ll have more next Tuesday.

• Xbox has a streaming ‘partner preview’ coming up on Thursday 17th, featuring “a mix of new and upcoming games for you from incredible partners like Remedy [Alan Wake 2: The Lake House] Sega [Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii], 505 Games [Wuchang: Fallen Feathers], and many more.”

• Room 8 Group has produced a (free reg. to download) report on recent game remakes and why some hit the discovery jackpoint, going in-depth on games like Resident Evil 4 and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth to point out gameplay or art direction shifts that worked. (We feel like remakes & remasters will continue!)

• Xbox stuff: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 - the big holiday CoD release - MWIII and Warzone are “coming to the cloud with Game Pass on October 25th”; the next wave of Game Pass titles includes South Park: The Fractured but Whole, MechWarrior 5: Clans, and StarCraft 1 & 2 (on PC); Xbox Cloud Gaming will reportedly let you stream your own purchased games - not just Game Pass ones - in November.

• Some neat Circana survey data on U.S. crossplatform gamers: “65% of US consumers play video games on Mobile, 36% play on PC, 35% play Console, 13% play Other device types, including VR… Only 32% of US video game players play exclusively on one device… while 66% of players play across both Mobile and either PC or Console.”

• Looks like the store page for Junk Store - an upcoming standalone Steam paid app allowing Epic Games Store and GOG games to be played on Steam Deck in Game mode - has been pulled (by Valve?) from Steam, although the free version still exists. (Perhaps it broke the ‘no promoting non-Steam stores in Steam apps’ rule?)

Finally, we’ve previously established that Valve boss Gabe Newell has trouble with the number 3 in a 2018 DOTA2 announcer video. And The Chalkeaters did a memorable music video riffing on his ‘non-appearance of Half-Life 3’ -related health condition.

So when the Steam Deck got announced for official Australian release at PAX Australia last week, imagine our ‘surprise’ when Newell turned up in the on-site announce video, and the countdown to the reveal didn’t go… quite to numerical plan:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]