Another indie bundle is due to launch soon: the Indie Face Kick, which has been put together by the guys at Gaming: All The Time.  This bundle contains eight games: Booster Trooper, Dead Horde, Sol Survivor, Avencast, Runespell, Still Life 2, PAM and Greed Black Border.

I wouldn’t mind looking at the games.. but this bundle, or more specifically, the organisation of this bundle, feels far too unprofessional.. I’m unimpressed with the organisers’ attitude towards customers’ concerns and criticism.

Update: BacklogJourney has done a little more digging.. the organisers are, or were, more heavily involved with their Russian Steam Key advertiser than they were letting on, with this advertiser providing keys for their competitions, too.

Pricing is apparently $8 for pre-order and $10 on release for the games, with a second tier including OSTs at $15 for pre-order and $20 afterwards.  Proceeds are to be split with 60% to the devs and 20% to a “‘Clean Water’ charity”.. and the remaining 20% presumably going to GATT.

I found out the prices through a “he said” type post in the Steam Community, not through the website.  There are still no further details on the website.. I shouldn’t have to trawl through other companies’ forums or brave reddit to find out what I need to know.  I think this is a relatively expensive starting point for an indie bundle: Indie Gala‘s top tier started off just under $10.  I’m also not at all convinced by “”Clean Water” charity” – there are several charities that deal in supplying clean water, and without specifically naming one, I feel there is no direct commitment to any charity there.

The Indie Face Kick bundle is hosted by Gaming: All The Time, and their main site was seen to be running a paid advertisement for a website selling cheap Steam keys.  Purchasing cheap keys and using VPNs to bypass region locks is against Steam’s Terms of Service.. risking the loss of your Steam account.  Rightly so, people commented on this.

This advert was mentioned by a user on the GOG forum, then commented on in a post on BacklogJourney, complete with screenshots of the advert in-situ and screenshots from the Russian Steam key seller.

Now.. it seems both articles have been edited somewhat, so I’m going off comments and tweets here.. but the response by GATT was instant hostility, accusations of spreading rumours and libel.  By his own admission, the BacklogJourney editor had included some unsubstantiated rumours, which he’s since removed.. but this response was rather poor from a company who should be trying to win people over, in order to sell their bundle.  Maybe they’ve realised it: the post has now been edited again.. the version I saw is here.

Adverts could be context-sensitive, as mine are, and yes, you could easily end up with something unsuitable being served.  I’d hope somebody got in touch if my Google ad was offering something dodgy.. especially if they thought it was something illegal.  GATT have removed the advertiser, but their messaging indicates that they feel there was nothing wrong with the advert and are dismissive of customers’ concerns.  This attitude doesn’t fill me with confidence as to how they’d react to customer service problems down the line.

Going away from the Indie Face Kick bundle now.. the second issue that people have noted in regards to GATT is that it uses the Steam Login API on their contest page.

This isn’t GATT’s problem actually.  This is an internet-wide trust issue caused by the fact that fraudsters make a living by stealing details; be it Steam login details, phishing for WoW or PayPal details, or credit/debit card info through Verified by Visa scams.

The Steam Login should work just like Facebook Connect: the host site never gets a copy of your username and password.. just a number to identify you and allow for sharing of gaming progress from your profile.  However, we have been told time and time again not to share Steam details with third parties, and to be cautious where you log in.

How can I tell whether a site is transmitting my details straight to the Steam servers, without storing them or passing them along to somebody else?  Anyone can host Steam API images and text, and then set the code behind it to do whatever they want.  Note: I’m not saying that GATT are trying to grab Steam details, but pointing out that it isn’t easy to tell which sites are legitimate.

While I may be happy to gamble my Facebook details to connect to any old site, I am careful to the point of paranoia with my Steam account.. and I won’t log in anywhere else with it.  No website owner should be surprised that people are cautious when there are so many stories of people being scammed.

Tags: adverts, BacklogJourney, Facebook Connect, fraud, indie bundle, Indie Face Kick, indie games, pricing, scams, security, Steam keys, Steam Login API, unprofessional

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 at 5:03 pm by CoffeeScamp and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.