A plan formed:
1. Set up an address that indies could forward key begging emails to.
2. Analyze the emails, spot patterns and note dodgy addresses.
3. Reply with a legit or scam verdict, including keys to a different game to send to the scammer if they wanted to.

Keys from a Drawkanoid variant.

The logic was that scammers, given 2 or 3 keys, won't waste one checking it. Then, when people buy on key reseller sites and get something completely different, they complain, downvote the scammer or get their money back.

I even ran the idea past Valve, who weren't immediately hostile to it.

Breaking words felt really good though! Was there a corpus of text so universally reviled, but also paradoxically so inconsequential that nobody would be victimized by smashing it up?

Did you know you can get every Steam review with two lines of code?

And that was it! A few weeks before Drawkanoid was set to launch, we had our joke game up on Steam, ready to go. We even set the price to $100! Who could be angry at having paid a couple dollars for something worth way more?

The only issue was Valve wouldn't give us any Steam keys for it.

Without keys, the whole plan was sunk! Our reps tried to help, but in the end Valve legal was concerned they might get sued by devs who owned the rights to the game titles and capsule art that we were showing. The rest of the plan didn't go over well either...

So they pulled game from sale.

After a long call on a Friday evening that went nowhere, I set the game to free on the Steam backend, hoping they'd reconsider the removal.

I woke up to 183 people owning the game! Awesome, we were back on! Except the game was still removed from sale. People were leaving reviews. What was going on?

It was Steam collectors. Constantly spamming Steam trying to get it to grant them games as they appear. Review Breaker would give itself to you if you asked, AND the system still thought it cost $100. So there was a $1.9M bubble in Steam wallet valuations.

Valve said they didn't owe me anything.

At this point you're probably going "Yeah, well what did you expect? Obviously Steam collectors want free games, not discounts!"

But even if the whole thing had worked, there's zero guarantee that angry gamers getting Review Breaker would translate to positive attention for Drawkanoid.