Indie dev gives game away, hackers steal 30,000 Steam keys overnight
Husband and wife duo Wadjet Eye Games started a giveaway yesterday, offering up Steam codes for Blackwell Deception to celebrate Halloween. The indie developer opted to cancel the adventure game giveaway today after discovering that 30,000 Steam keys were stolen by hackers.
The problem was even bigger at first as founder Dave Gilbert discovered that, after issuing a press release to the media about the giveaway earlier this week, the generated keys unlocked Wadjet Eye Games' entire catalog. After sorting that issue out, Gilbert discovered that buyers were "ordering multiple copies of the game – hundreds at a time. And collecting Steam keys for reselling later," he told Red Door Blue Key. Gilbert asked his sales provider, BMT, to create an IP-detecting Steam code generator page, though it didn't stop resellers from masking their IPs to continue their thieving efforts.
After removing the link to the Steam key generator, Gilbert returned today to find that because the generator itself still existed, some 30,000 keys had been stolen. He announced via Twitter that Steam has disabled the keys generated after midnight and that, per his request, no bans will be issued to those that redeemed the Steam codes.
Blackwell Deception is the fourth game in the Blackwell adventure series, and was first made available on Steam in January 2012. The game can be purchased for $10, though Wadjet Eye Games is also offering a four-game bundle of the series to date for $20.
