There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic.

https://www.greenmangaming.com

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SXX 4 days ago | parent [-]

Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands.

It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.

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ragazzina 4 days ago | parent [-]

Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.

	▲	the_pwner224 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform. If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.
	▲	SXX 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible. Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.
	▲	llbbdd 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.