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11 bit no longer giving out Steam curator keys

11 bit no longer giving out Steam curator keys

Frostpunk developer 11 bit studios will no longer be giving keys for its games out to Steam curators.

In a post on Twitter last week, the developer said that it was going to stop handing out codes to curators due to the fact that many of those requesting them are doing so fraudulently in order to sell them on. 11 bit also reckons that there is no real value to curator reviews.

"Starting today we won’t be granting game keys to Steam curators," the studio wrote.

"Based on our and other devs' experiences, most of the requests come from fake accounts used to gather and resell the keys and the published reviews don't seem to bring any value for the community anyway."

The CEO of Makea Game, Tomi Toikka, replied to 11 bit's post, saying that this was "the right decision." He added that "all" of the keys he had given out to curators had ended up being resold on G2A or activated without a review to show for it.

This comes in the wake of reporting from PC Gamer that Valve had banned 20 curator pages from Steam after indie studio Cowcat said that people were using them to get free codes.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.