The developer of Frostpunk 2 has announced that there will be no more keys for Steam curators. This is due to the fact that many of these keys are now simply being sold and not used for their intended purpose. Normally, developers and publishers give out such keys so that curators can test the game in advance and give initial feedback and write initial reviews.
But 11 Bit Studios is not alone in this decision. The decision was made in consultation with many other developers. Many accounts are only created for the purpose of obtaining such a key. The developer sees Valve as primarily responsible for improving the curator system.
The developer also mentioned the possibility of using the Steam function "Curator Connect". In his opinion, this is not yet optimal, only the limit of 100 game copies was mentioned here.
The Cowcat Incident
Most recently, developer Cowcat went public with a similar issue. The game developer recently sent demo keys of his game to various curators. But these were not for the full version of the game, but only for a kind of demo. This should prevent the keys from being resold. Apparently this worked, because after a short time some of the previously positive reviews were changed to negative. And these reviews were written by curators who had such demo keys.
