Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

IndieGameStand closed and then sold off the keys people gave them by Oh 12/15/2018, 2:53pm PST tl;dr: Developers, revoke the Steam keys you supplied to Indie Game Stand! I’m the developer of a game called Airships: Conquer the Skies. It can be bought through a bunch of platforms, including Steam, and, until it shut down earlier this year, Indie Game Stand. I supplied IGS with builds of the game and a set of 500 Steam keys to give to buyers with their purchase, which is pretty standard practice. I’ve done the same with itch.io and the Humble Store. On June 6 this year, the Indie Game Stand home page was replaced by a short message stating they were undergoing server migration and would be back soon. Instead, on July 25, the site went dark entirely. I didn’t receive any messages from IGS about any of this, nor did they send me the (admittedly small amount of) money they owed me for sales. I just kind of sighed and thought, “well, that’s a shame”. It did cross my mind that they had not sold the vast majority of the 500 keys I gave them, but with their site down, there was no way for me to reliably tell which of the keys they had sold. I could have revoked the keys through Steam’s systems, but I didn’t want to punish people who had bought my game! Over the past few weeks, I have noticed an uptick in the number of Steam key activations for Airships, without a corresponding increase in sales through itch.io or Humble Store. I had a look and found that Kinguin did indeed have keys for my game in stock. I don’t do large-scale giveaways, I don’t do bundles, I don’t do big sales, so where were those keys coming from? Of course, a regular buyer might decide that the download link they got was good enough for them, and that they could sell on the key, but why was this happening so much more now?

IndieGameStand closed and then sold off the keys people gave them by Oh 12/15/2018, 2:53pm PST